SaveArtSpace 10th Anniversary Public Art Exhibition & Gallery Show <\/em>
\u2013 Opens May 30, 2025<\/em><\/h2>\nSaveArtSpace marks its 10th anniversary with The People\u2019s Art<\/em>, a sweeping public art initiative and gallery exhibition that brings together some of the most urgent and incisive voices in contemporary art. Curated by an influential panel of curators and cultural leaders grounded in the study of graffiti, street art, and public art \u2014 Anne-Laure Lemaitre, RJ Rushmore, Zahra Sherzad, Steven P. Harrington and Jaime Rojo, and Travis Rix \u2014 this year\u2019s exhibition takes the streets of New York City as its canvas and its airwaves as amplifier. Selected from a competitive open call that drew nearly 500 artists from across the country, the final group includes over 50 creators whose work explores money, power, and the poetic disruptions of public space.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.brooklynstreetart.com\/theblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/05\/UTF-810th-billboards-announcement-web.jpg\")
<\/a><\/figure>\nOpening May 30, 2025, The People\u2019s Art<\/em> debuts with billboard takeovers throughout New York City, featuring works by Walter Cruz & Lamar Robillard, Tod Seelie, Anastasios Poneros, Jonathan Yubi, Itzel Basualdo, Matthew Morrocco, Kip Henke, Tariq AlObaid, Wen Liu, and Gordon Hull. The works will occupy advertising real estate typically reserved for commercial persuasion, instead offering pointed, personal, and public reflections on inequality, representation, and collective memory. Complementing these installations, Satellite Gallery on Broome Street will host a one-night-only opening reception, showcasing work by more than 40 artists selected for the gallery component of the exhibition.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.brooklynstreetart.com\/theblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/05\/brooklyn-street-art-Raft_Manhattan_MG_8420-2025-Tod_Seelie-SVA-05-25-web.jpg\")
<\/a>Tod Seelie. Raft Manhattan<\/em>. Selected billboard artist. SaveArtSpace: 10th Anniversary \u2013 The People\u2019s Art.<\/em> (photo courtesy of the artist)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\nThe event will also include a live public performance by Autumn Breon, who will pull a mobile billboard truck through the Lower East Side while animated censorship incidents flash across its screens \u2014 a confrontation between voice and silencing in the most physical sense. Breon\u2019s body becomes a vessel of resistance, and her performance, animated by Brindha Kumar, anchors the evening\u2019s commitment to calling attention to what we too often try not to see.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.brooklynstreetart.com\/theblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/05\/brooklyn-street-art-Anastasios-poneros-SVA-05-25-web.jpg\")
<\/a>Anastasios Poneros. Selected billboard artist. SaveArtSpace: 10th Anniversary \u2013 The People\u2019s Art.<\/em> (photo courtesy of the artist)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\nThis year\u2019s featured essay by cultural critic Carlo McCormick sets the tone for the project, articulating a vision of art that rejects the insularity of luxury culture in favor of a raw, public vernacular. \u201cThis is the art of the commons,\u201d McCormick writes, \u201cthat shared space between the tyranny of privatization and the compromise of collectivity.\u201d His essay, presented in full below, will frame a series of images from the exhibition \u2014 an offering not just to the art world, but to the street, the sidewalk, and the people who walk them.<\/em><\/p>\nThe People\u2019s Art<\/strong><\/p>\nThe People\u2019s Art<\/em> is an art of, and for, the people. In a town like New York City, we\u2019ve got plenty of established spaces \u2013 galleries, museums, lobbies and the like \u2013 to showcase the art that exists as trophies and baubles in the marketplace of luxury products, or to serve the glut of cultural production like sewer drains in a deluge. This is a project, in however many billboards it takes to get a gesture out there that can dance in the public imagination without becoming a brand, that is all about the space between polemics and poetics, how we communicate in this crowded place without screaming, like the way we somehow know how to walk the busiest of sidewalks without running into one another. It\u2019s a folkloric choreography of lover\u2019s leaps and slapstick pratfalls, talking out loud because you think your phone gives you permission to occupy the bandwidth of everyone around you, or because you\u2019re just fucking crazy. It\u2019s a way of looking as well as representing, the terms of engagement where we try not to stare but aren\u2019t afraid to wink.<\/p>\nSigns of the times, the veritable zits of our zeitgeist, we\u2019ve demeaned and damned billboards at least since Lady Bird talked her hubby President Lyndon Johnson into enacting the Highway Beautification Act (HBA) back in 1965 \u2013 the idea being that beauty would make America a better place to live. No doubt the time is nigh for some new assault on this ongoing ugliness (the equivalent of late night TV ads on the cultural landscape), maybe we can call it MABA, but until then let us celebrate billboards as the old-fashioned eye-sores they truly are \u2013 neglected vestiges from an early outbreak of a visual rash \u2013 the residual old scar tissue of corporate co-option and commercial coercion that has since all but subsumed the society of the spectacle.<\/p>\n
An art of the people needs to speak a lingua franca and there can be no more common language than the come-on. We don\u2019t shoot the shit in Latin or iambic pentameter; we communicate in the vulgar vernacular of persuasion. Wherever the artist\u2019s billboards of SaveArtSpace appear like deranged interventions in the quotidian, they do not so much bust out of the normalcy as weave their idiosyncrasies into it, joining the din of optical overload like an odd harmony in an ancient Greek chorus, queries and quandaries in the surface of surety, alternatives to the obvious not afraid of eschewing subtlety for the sake of commanding attention. This is the art of the commons, that shared space between the tyranny of privatization and the compromise of collectivity. In a medium dedicated to telling the people what they want, SaveArtSpace allows us to occupy public space as a personal place where we can imagine what we need. <\/p>\n
\u2013 Carlo McCormick<\/em><\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.brooklynstreetart.com\/theblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/05\/brooklyn-street-art-ITZEL-BASUALDO-Fourthofjuly003-family_reducedsize-SVA-05-25-web-1.jpg\")
<\/a>Itzel Basualdo. Fourth of July in Chicago<\/em>. Selected billboard artist. SaveArtSpace: 10th Anniversary \u2013 The People\u2019s Art.<\/em> (photo courtesy of the artist)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.brooklynstreetart.com\/theblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/05\/brooklyn-street-art-Walter-Cruz_Mask-Shot-SVA-05-25-web.jpg\")
<\/a>Walter Cruz, in collaboration with Lamar Robillard. For Las Mina\u2019s Sake<\/em>. Selected billboard artist. SaveArtSpace: 10th Anniversary \u2013 The People\u2019s Art.<\/em> (photo courtesy of the artist)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\nTo see all the artists\u2019 work selected for the billboards and the gallery exhibition, learn about the artists, curators, and SaveArtSpace click HERE<\/a>.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.brooklynstreetart.com\/theblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/05\/UTF-810th-gallery-announcement-v4-web.jpg\")
<\/a><\/figure>\n<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n\nOther Articles You May Like from BSA:<\/h3>\n
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Labor Day in the US and around the world draws our attention to the rights of workers. A compounding topic is the fact that 265 million children are working around the world, according to the Interna…<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
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Our weekly focus is on the moving image and art in the streets. And other oddities.<\/p>\n
Now screening:1. Narcelio Grud. Escultura Sonora Cinetica<\/p>\n
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\nWe\u2019re counting down the last 12 days of 2012 with Street Art photos chosen by BSA readers. Each one was nominated because it has special meaning to a reader or is simply a great photograph from 20…<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
<\/a><\/figure>\nOpening May 30, 2025, The People\u2019s Art<\/em> debuts with billboard takeovers throughout New York City, featuring works by Walter Cruz & Lamar Robillard, Tod Seelie, Anastasios Poneros, Jonathan Yubi, Itzel Basualdo, Matthew Morrocco, Kip Henke, Tariq AlObaid, Wen Liu, and Gordon Hull. The works will occupy advertising real estate typically reserved for commercial persuasion, instead offering pointed, personal, and public reflections on inequality, representation, and collective memory. Complementing these installations, Satellite Gallery on Broome Street will host a one-night-only opening reception, showcasing work by more than 40 artists selected for the gallery component of the exhibition.<\/p>\n The event will also include a live public performance by Autumn Breon, who will pull a mobile billboard truck through the Lower East Side while animated censorship incidents flash across its screens \u2014 a confrontation between voice and silencing in the most physical sense. Breon\u2019s body becomes a vessel of resistance, and her performance, animated by Brindha Kumar, anchors the evening\u2019s commitment to calling attention to what we too often try not to see.<\/p>\n This year\u2019s featured essay by cultural critic Carlo McCormick sets the tone for the project, articulating a vision of art that rejects the insularity of luxury culture in favor of a raw, public vernacular. \u201cThis is the art of the commons,\u201d McCormick writes, \u201cthat shared space between the tyranny of privatization and the compromise of collectivity.\u201d His essay, presented in full below, will frame a series of images from the exhibition \u2014 an offering not just to the art world, but to the street, the sidewalk, and the people who walk them.<\/em><\/p>\n The People\u2019s Art<\/strong><\/p>\n The People\u2019s Art<\/em> is an art of, and for, the people. In a town like New York City, we\u2019ve got plenty of established spaces \u2013 galleries, museums, lobbies and the like \u2013 to showcase the art that exists as trophies and baubles in the marketplace of luxury products, or to serve the glut of cultural production like sewer drains in a deluge. This is a project, in however many billboards it takes to get a gesture out there that can dance in the public imagination without becoming a brand, that is all about the space between polemics and poetics, how we communicate in this crowded place without screaming, like the way we somehow know how to walk the busiest of sidewalks without running into one another. It\u2019s a folkloric choreography of lover\u2019s leaps and slapstick pratfalls, talking out loud because you think your phone gives you permission to occupy the bandwidth of everyone around you, or because you\u2019re just fucking crazy. It\u2019s a way of looking as well as representing, the terms of engagement where we try not to stare but aren\u2019t afraid to wink.<\/p>\n Signs of the times, the veritable zits of our zeitgeist, we\u2019ve demeaned and damned billboards at least since Lady Bird talked her hubby President Lyndon Johnson into enacting the Highway Beautification Act (HBA) back in 1965 \u2013 the idea being that beauty would make America a better place to live. No doubt the time is nigh for some new assault on this ongoing ugliness (the equivalent of late night TV ads on the cultural landscape), maybe we can call it MABA, but until then let us celebrate billboards as the old-fashioned eye-sores they truly are \u2013 neglected vestiges from an early outbreak of a visual rash \u2013 the residual old scar tissue of corporate co-option and commercial coercion that has since all but subsumed the society of the spectacle.<\/p>\n An art of the people needs to speak a lingua franca and there can be no more common language than the come-on. We don\u2019t shoot the shit in Latin or iambic pentameter; we communicate in the vulgar vernacular of persuasion. Wherever the artist\u2019s billboards of SaveArtSpace appear like deranged interventions in the quotidian, they do not so much bust out of the normalcy as weave their idiosyncrasies into it, joining the din of optical overload like an odd harmony in an ancient Greek chorus, queries and quandaries in the surface of surety, alternatives to the obvious not afraid of eschewing subtlety for the sake of commanding attention. This is the art of the commons, that shared space between the tyranny of privatization and the compromise of collectivity. In a medium dedicated to telling the people what they want, SaveArtSpace allows us to occupy public space as a personal place where we can imagine what we need. <\/p>\n \u2013 Carlo McCormick<\/em><\/p>\n To see all the artists\u2019 work selected for the billboards and the gallery exhibition, learn about the artists, curators, and SaveArtSpace click HERE<\/a>.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n Street Art, Labor Day & Child Labor<\/b> <\/a><\/p>\n BSA Film Friday: 06.23.23<\/b> Now screening:1. Narcelio Grud. Escultura Sonora Cinetica<\/p>\n 2. Faith XLVII – Calgary <\/p>\n 3. NEW WAVE BY Pe…<\/p>\n<\/div>\n <\/a><\/p>\n Apexer Photographed by Jim Prigoff<\/b><\/a><\/a>
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Labor Day in the US and around the world draws our attention to the rights of workers. A compounding topic is the fact that 265 million children are working around the world, according to the Interna…<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
Our weekly focus is on the moving image and art in the streets. And other oddities.<\/p>\n
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\nWe\u2019re counting down the last 12 days of 2012 with Street Art photos chosen by BSA readers. Each one was nominated because it has special meaning to a reader or is simply a great photograph from 20…<\/p>\n<\/div>\n