Tag Archives: Kenny Scharf

Watch legendary artists create OUTSIDEIN: The Ascendance of Street Art in Visual Culture

ArtCenter’s OUTSIDEIN exhibition, on display at both campuses through January 10, 2016, was inspired in part by the mural Keith Haring painted at the College’s Hillside Campus in 1989, commemorating the World Health Organization’s second annual AIDS Awareness Day. That piece, which took two days to paint, was Haring’s last completed work. Three months later he died of AIDS.

To commemorate Haring’s legacy as well today’s celebration of the 28th anniversary of AIDS Awareness Day, the above video traces the origins of ArtCenter’s longstanding relationship to street art and the insurgent role graffiti-based street murals have played in embedding social and political messages in an emerging, evolving and now mainstream form of creative expression. Combining in-depth artist interviews and time-lapse footage of their creative process, this piece provides a rare glimpse inside the creative process, connecting the dots between the legacy of this subversive art form to its current role as an arbiter of pop culture aesthetics and an access point for popular engagement with the arts.

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OUTSIDEIN exhibition assembles a pantheon of street artists to create mural-sized works illustrating public art’s expanding sphere of influence

RISK's OutsideIn installation on the north face of ArtCenter's Wind Tunnel building at 950 South Raymond Avenue. Photo by Chuck Spangler

RISK’s OUTSIDEIN installation on the north face of ArtCenter’s Wind Tunnel building at 950 South Raymond Avenue. Photo by Chuck Spangler

“Street art has exploded as an anti-authoritarian form of art making and an important global movement happening in the visual arts today,” said OUTSIDEIN curator and author G. James Daichendt in a recent TEDx speech, “The Streets As Canvas.” “Even if you’ve never stepped foot into a museum or gallery, you’ve been impacted by street art since it lives in the corners of our communities.”

In recognition of this phenomenon, ArtCenter College of Design has organized OUTSIDEIN, an expansive indoor and outdoor exhibition opening, with a public reception on October 8, 2015, and continuing through January 10, 2016, at multiple venues in Pasadena. Initiated by ArtCenter’s Illustration Department Chair Ann Field, the exhibition’s curatorial team also includes Daichendt and Alyce de Roulet Williamson Gallery Director Stephen Nowlin.

“Like many artistic insurgencies, street art has had to navigate around the pitfalls of its own commercial success to remain possessed of raw and vital meanings,” said Nowlin. “That tension, along with the breadth of street art’s current influence in contemporary design and visual culture, is what we set out to explore in OUTSIDEIN.”

Featured in the show are artists Olivia Bevilacqua, David Flores, CHASE, Robbie Conal, Cryptik, Jeanne Detallante, Shepard Fairey, James Jean, Geoff McFetridge, RISK, Kenny Scharf and Jeff Soto, who is an ArtCenter alumnus.

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