Category: Street Art
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Album Spotlight: RenRok’s “Sixty Studies”
I think the most interesting developments in Hip Hop are taking place off the commercial radio dial and buried deep in the underground. Let’s go mining. I sat down with the reclusive underground producer/artist RenRok in his L.A. studio. We talked about the state of hip hop, musical influences, and his most recent project called…
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JR x NYC Ballet
The New York City Ballet has teamed up with French artist JR to present a collaborative performance/large-scale art installation on January 23, February 7, and February 13. JR is a well-known underground street artist who has taken his message globally via large-scale installations featuring the voices and untold stories of people via their wheat pasted photographic…
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2013 “Rewind”
Whew! Before I look forward to 2014 (and I must say, it cannot come soon enough), I thought I’d take a quick look back on my digital footprints and share my favorite CultureShockArt moments of 2013. So I picked 5 posts from Twitter, Instagram, WordPress and Pinterest that were either popular, or made me squeal, “Eep…
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Better Late Than Never…Last Minute Gift Ideas
You know you’re a procrastinator when you procrastinate on your “Last Minute Gifts” post… I cleaned my house, washed my dogs, cooked, worked out and generally engaged in nonsense instead of writing today. I’ll tell you what though, these gifts are so good, I wouldn’t mind getting them after Christmas (and right about now I…
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Sat. Sounds: The Abstract and the Dragon
We have Busta Rhymes and Q-Tip for bringing us an early Christmas present this week. Busta and Tip are giving fans a taste of something new to whet our appetite in anticipation of new albums expected by both artists in 2014. On Thursday when the rest of the world was fawning over Beyoncé’s release, the…
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DesignerCon 2013
I am forever on the lookout for new graphic artists and animators to follow, so we headed to DesigerCon at the Pasadena Convention Center on Sunday. DCON has been around for 8 years, and is a convention that fuses urban, underground, pop art with animation, vinyl collectible toys, and clothing. The result was a mass…
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The Sphinx and the Cronut: Why We Love Being Haters
In music, fashion, food and art there’s pop cultural phenomena so ubiquitous and so pervasive that I feel duty bound to write about them. Or hate on ’em.. Like roaches and bad heartburn these things just keep on returning eliciting both our collective ire and fascination. Really, they’re train wrecks and we can’t look away.…
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Paris Photo LA
It’s not every day that you can celebrate Paris in New York and LA at the same time, but thanks to the Paramount Studios NY backlot, you can! Paris Photo Los Angeles made its debut this weekend. For 17 years Paris Photo has cemented a strong presence in the photographic art fair market and it…
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2013 Inauguration/MLK Day Reflections
I have been thinking about this phrase for a long time. This 1988 piece by Glenn Ligon was an adaptation of a legendary photo taken in 1968 by Ernest Withers. The original photograph is from the ’68 Sanitation Worker’s Strike in Memphis, TN which was initiated in response to the egregiously deplorable working conditions workers…
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Candy Chang x Ted: Blight Turned Into Might
One of the most memorable moments of my trip to New Orleans last year was stumbling upon Candy Chang’s “Before I Die” wall during a bike tour. Last week Ted featured a speech by the NOLA artist recorded this summer. It is a touching self portrait of the artist sharing the sentiment behind an introspective…
Colony Little, Culture Shock Art 