We need sharks in the world, and they're disappearing at an alarming rate. Just for example, tiger sharks and scalloped hammerheads may have declined more than 97% since the mid-1980s, while numbers of smooth hammerheads and bull sharks are believed to have fallen by 99% off the east coast of the US. The rapid decline of great sharks in the world's oceans is disrupting the marine ecosystem by allowing more lowly fish to thrive, scientists warn today.
This coming Friday, September 23rd, Japan-based non-profit PangeaSeed in collaboration with San Francisco's Spoke Art Gallery is pleased to announce the inaugural transcontinental art exhibition, Sink or Swim, featuring original works from 30 internationally renowned artists such as Dave Kinsey, Josh Keyes, Dan May, Jim Phillips, Skinner and many more. This gathering of widely acclaimed artists from around the globe will address one of the biggest threats facing the health of the world's oceans today - the rapid and mass depletion of sharks.
PangeaSeed Presents: Sink or Swim ~ San Francisco
A Benefit for Sharks and Oceans
In the spirit of ocean conservation the Japan-based non-profit organization, PangeaSeed, in collaboration with Spoke Art, is pleased to announce our inaugural transcontinental art exhibition, Sink or Swim, featuring original works from 30 internationally renowned artists such as Dave Kinsey, Josh Keyes, Dan May, Jim Phillips, Jeff Soto and many more. This gathering of widely acclaimed artists from around the globe will address one the biggest threats facing the health of world’s oceans today – the rapid and mass depletion of sharks.
Did you know that scientists estimate global fish stocks will be in full collapse by 2048 if current consumption and destructive fishing practices continue? But what’s even more shocking is that the majority of the ocean’s shark species could be extinct within the next 10-20 years.
With each minute that passes close to 200 sharks are killed, adding up to around 80 million deaths each year. A majority of these sharks are killed only for their fins to satisfy an unsustainable appetite for shark fin soup. In the cruel practice known as “finning,” the shark is hooked and brought aboard the boat where its fins are then cut off and the still alive but limbless animal is tossed back into the sea. With no instruments to move, the helpless shark sinks to the ocean floor and eventually drowns.
Love them or fear them, sharks are essential if we are going to keep the oceans the sustainable resource that they should be. Older than the dinosaurs, for over 400 million years sharks have shaped and balanced the oceans. Since sharks are at the top of the food chain as an “apex predator” they play a vital role in ways average fish do not.
In virtually every part of the ocean sharks keep fish populations healthy and in proper balance. Already in areas where sharks have been over- fished we are seeing a change for the worse. Many species of sharks are now endangered, imagine the consequences for the oceans, and the people who depend on them for survival, if such an important animal is eliminated forever.
PangeaSeed is a Tokyo-based grassroots organization dedicated to educating and raising international awareness on the plight of sharks. Through volunteer activism and various mediums including art, music, film, and photography, PangeaSeed aims to create an open dialog with the global community to develop an understanding of the need to preserve and protect sharks and their habitat.
Sink or Swim is not only a reference to the cruel practice of finning but also a reference to our relationship with the oceans as a whole. As human activity is causing sea levels to rise and coral reefs to die, we see fish stocks rapidly disappearing. The global population must change course if we want future generations to experience the sea as we have. We are living at a crucial time in terms of sustaining the oceans. We may sink and fail, or we may find a way to succeed and swim.
In short, Sink or Swim is an SOS to the world that these issues facing the oceans need attention now more than ever. Following the success of Sink or Swim in Tokyo this past July, San Francisco is next in line to host this unique exhibition. Sink or Swim pays homage to the shark, this most important and beautiful of creatures, while critiquing their demise and offering hope for their future.
Sink or Swim will run in San Francisco from 23 ~ 25 September 2011. In support of proposed bill (AB376) to ban shark fin in California State, Sink or Swim offers the community new perspectives on this widely misunderstood and demonized animal. Also, in addition to raising funds to keep sharks afloat both in Japan and around the world PangeaSeed will donate a percentage of the proceeds from Sink or Swim to organizations aiding animals affected by the March 2011 earthquake and tsunami in Japan.
Last Friday we were pleased to open up Dave Kinsey's first solo show in San Francisco since before 2000 when Dave was doing a lot of work in streets with his then work partner Shepard Fairey. A lot of the smaller works are homage to that era, i.e., the titles are San Francisco street names. Love his new direction.
After our Dave Kinsey opening last Friday, we made our way down Market Street for Luggage Store's opening of STREETOPIA. Ran into a lot of friends and was amazed at how transformed the gallery was. Multiple rooms built out to include a Free Cafe, a theater, a gallery/studio, and a library. Streetopia will host free performances, teachings, and talks in the city every day for the show's month-long run and, thus, will provide a temporary space that offers opportunities for participation, agency, critical thinking, learning, sharing of ideas, and tools for community building that will reverberate in the real city after the city we build in the gallery is long gone.
From Matt Moore: A new series of (entirely spraypaint) canvas painting created during a 1-month residency in Paris. A true evolution from the purely geometric abstractions I have explored in my past few exhibitions : Sun Ray Ricochet (Moscow 2011) + XYZ Axis (Cincinnati 2011) + Crystals & Lasers (Paris 2010) + Parallel Universe (Sao Paulo 2009) + 20/20 (Barcelona 2008). An exciting new chapter.
The Further Collective: Mario Martinez (Mars-1), Damon Soule & Oliver Vernon were in Flagstaff last week collaborating on an outdoor mural at The Flagstaff Brewing Company located in the historical district of downtown Flagstaff, AZ.
Director of the documentary film DRAGONSLAYER --> DRAGONSLAYER is a documentary about the skateboarder Josh "Skreech" Sandoval. He's a character and the film follows his many ups and downs dealing with young parenthood, competing, and relationships. However, rather then try and make some type of statement about him, it just presents him objectively in the way that he is through wonderful cinematography.
Got two new zines from Mildred and Pacolli for us to share with you. Pacolli's The Last Chance Kids is published through Volcom's Artist Series and is 40 pages and sells for only $7 printed on thick quality heavy stock.
Logan Crable emailed us the other day with an offer to view his Blow Job series. Normally we don't get offers to view someone's porn project, but we quickly learned that the blowing is more in the literal sense as opposed to the pleasuring form.
Thanks to Michelle Ramin for emailing us some her recent paintings. Michelle will be displaying her work as part of SFAI's MFA graduate show running this weekend and opening Friday, May 11th at the Pheonix Hotel here in San Francisco.
Whether conceptually motivated or intuitively created, the process of painting has been a main attribute in art for sometime now. Controlling the surface of a canvas is at the root of most contemporary painting. Vancouver native Jeff Depner's work creates avenues for visual discovery through a process based aesthetic. Layers upon layers of paint each relating to the next. Masking some, if not all, of the past creates a visual history within. The work ebbs and flows between graphic qualities and thick painterly styles with muted but contemporary feeling colors. The constant process of 'improvised moves' allows some of the work to be based in grid like structures. It allows some of the smaller paintings a chance for inquiry in constructive qualities and aspects of painting, inserting his work into the long history of painting.
On the way home from Fecal Face a couple Fridays back we swung through Fifty24SF to catch the two day show with the LA based hip-hop photographer Michael Miller in celebration of his new book. West coast hip-hop iconic early 1990's hip-hop photographs, including numerous photos of 2pac, Ice Cube, Eazy-E, Snoop Dogg, Warren G... the bonus: Eazy-E touting a skateboard and a gun?!
Marissa Textor and Ryan Travis Christian are currently showing together at Cooper Cole Gallery in Toronto. Gerald interviews the LA based Marissa Textor. Check out her detailed graphite drawings.
A couple weeks back Jeff Soto flew out to Richmond, VA for their street art festival to do some mural action. Artists included the likes of Hense, Richard Colman, Dalek, Hamilton Glass, and many more.
Mark your calendar: Dave Kinsey opens Lost For Words @FFDG in San Francisco on Friday, May 18th (6-9pm).
New mixed media paintings and installation. This will be his first show in San Francisco in 12 years and his first on the West Coast since 2007... We're very excited. Below is a lil' taste of what's to come.
Hamishi emailed over some photos from his current show Nothing Special running at Melbourne's Paradise Hills through this Saturday, May 5th. If you're in Melbourne, view it in person as we're sure it looks even better in person.
Hamishi participated in last November's group show 11.11.11 @FFDG back in November with Mario Martinez showing a solo show... Man, that's was a nutty opening before the cops showed up.
Spoke Art here in SF opens the group show Synergy curated by LA's Thinkspace this Thursday, May 3rd (6-10pm) featuring works by a slew of artists that Thinkspace works with. Spoke Art sent us a taste for you to sample.
We had the pleasure of meeting Flavio Samelo when we were in Sao Paulo last summer (blog). He's a skateboarder/ photographer and talented artist. Here are some photos from some of his recent mural done in Rio de Janeiro, also in his words.
Evan Hecox (check our studio visit) opens an exhibition of new mixed-media works with the solo show Dark Island at NYC's Joshua Liner on Thurs, (6-9pm).
Evan Hecox in his studio. Photo by Andrew Paynter for Fecal Face.
Wanna do a commissioned mural/ multi-media project/ public artwork on a massive silo here in San Francisco? Live in the Western United States? The commission pays $190,000, and the mural will be up for 5 years. Awesome opportunity and if you think you have the right stuff, READ THE DETAILS AND APPLY.
$190,000 to put your art on this massive silo in San Francisco.
Artwork opportunities may include a mural or kinetic artwork on the exterior wall of the northern grain silo or a lighting or multi-media project that illuminates or projects on the cranes or silos in the day or at night. Pier 92 is located at the entrance to the Bayview community and the artwork should make a strong visual statement in keeping with the gateway experience and industrial setting. ~read on
Our buddy Jeremy Fish has a brand new print The Golden Hills out through Upper Playground. The print is made in an edition of 100, signed and numbered by the artist, and printed at the fantastic Bloom Press in Oakland, California. 18" x 24" $100
This drawing was inspired by that looming feeling that San Francisco is an isolated island from the rest of the country. As SF becomes more and more expensive, and the lower income creative folks that make this city pulse get squeezed off the island, "the city that knows how" will slowly transform into a sterile west coast Manhattan full of tech chads and internet gurus. —Jeremy Fish
Congrats to some of our friends who've just graduated from SFAI this past weekend. Henry Gunderson (below), Alex Ziv, Quinn Arneson and our intern Alex Uhrich among many more not only at SFAI but those at CCA and other schools across the country. May you all work hard and prosper in your future arting endeavors.
Henry Gunderson all grown up, college graduated and bow-tied.
Marc Jacobs vs. The Graffiti Artist, Round 2: When Jacobs Turns Vandalized Store Into $680 Shirt <-- Earlier this week, on the night of the Met Ball, the Marc Jacobs boutique in SoHo was hit by French graffiti artist Kidult, who has famously vandalized Supreme, Hermes, and Louis Vuitton, among others. The hit? Kidult took a fire extinguisher filled with pink paint, and sprayed the word ART over the front of the store (seen below). ~continue reading
Thanks to Arrested Motion who posted some info on Dave Kinsey's solo show Lost For Words which opens at FFDG in San Francisco on Friday, May 18th (6-9pm). This will be his first show in San Francisco in 12 years. RSVP.
Founder of BLK/MRKT w/ Shepard Fairey in '97 (becoming sole owner in '03), lengedary street artist with his Unlearn campaign, and highly accomplished painter, it's with great honor that we welcome him back to San Francisco. New paintings, mixed media and installation, it should be one of our best shows to date and a lot of fun. -Complete Show Details
Dave Kinsey opens Lost For Words at FFDG on Fri, May 18th.
We went to the press preview yesterday and should have some photos to share, but time constraints due to preparations for our show w/ Dave Kinsey opening Friday and the lack of a mayor Ed Lee which all were waiting for... Well, we had to bail before they let us preview the show... What we've seen online looks great and tonight should be a blast. See you there.
Some of the artists participating in PHANTOMS OF ASIA under Korean artist Choi Jeong Hwa's 24-foot-tall "Breathing Flower" in the Civic Center.
The Asian Art Museum here in San Francisco opens its first large-scale contemporary art exhibition Phantoms of Asia: Contemporary Awakens the Past with a big old preview party on Thursday, May 17th complete w/ DJs VIN SOL and KING MOST. ~details
Curated by Mami Kataoka, chief curator of Tokyo's Mori Art Museum, in collaboration with Allison Harding, assistant curator of contemporary art at the Asian Art Museum, Phantoms of Asia features artworks by contemporary artists hailing from Canada, China, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Iran, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, Pakistan, the Philippines, Singapore, Tibet, and the U.S. Going to be a great show.
Last Friday we were pleased to open up Dave Kinsey's first solo show in San Francisco since before 2000 when Dave was doing a lot of work in streets with his then work partner Shepard Fairey. A lot of the smaller works are homage to that era, i.e., the titles are San Francisco street names. Love his new direction.
After our Dave Kinsey opening last Friday, we made our way down Market Street for Luggage Store's opening of STREETOPIA. Ran into a lot of friends and was amazed at how transformed the gallery was. Multiple rooms built out to include a Free Cafe, a theater, a gallery/studio, and a library. Streetopia will host free performances, teachings, and talks in the city every day for the show's month-long run and, thus, will provide a temporary space that offers opportunities for participation, agency, critical thinking, learning, sharing of ideas, and tools for community building that will reverberate in the real city after the city we build in the gallery is long gone.
From Matt Moore: A new series of (entirely spraypaint) canvas painting created during a 1-month residency in Paris. A true evolution from the purely geometric abstractions I have explored in my past few exhibitions : Sun Ray Ricochet (Moscow 2011) + XYZ Axis (Cincinnati 2011) + Crystals & Lasers (Paris 2010) + Parallel Universe (Sao Paulo 2009) + 20/20 (Barcelona 2008). An exciting new chapter.
The Further Collective: Mario Martinez (Mars-1), Damon Soule & Oliver Vernon were in Flagstaff last week collaborating on an outdoor mural at The Flagstaff Brewing Company located in the historical district of downtown Flagstaff, AZ.
Director of the documentary film DRAGONSLAYER --> DRAGONSLAYER is a documentary about the skateboarder Josh "Skreech" Sandoval. He's a character and the film follows his many ups and downs dealing with young parenthood, competing, and relationships. However, rather then try and make some type of statement about him, it just presents him objectively in the way that he is through wonderful cinematography.
Got two new zines from Mildred and Pacolli for us to share with you. Pacolli's The Last Chance Kids is published through Volcom's Artist Series and is 40 pages and sells for only $7 printed on thick quality heavy stock.
Logan Crable emailed us the other day with an offer to view his Blow Job series. Normally we don't get offers to view someone's porn project, but we quickly learned that the blowing is more in the literal sense as opposed to the pleasuring form.
Thanks to Michelle Ramin for emailing us some her recent paintings. Michelle will be displaying her work as part of SFAI's MFA graduate show running this weekend and opening Friday, May 11th at the Pheonix Hotel here in San Francisco.
Whether conceptually motivated or intuitively created, the process of painting has been a main attribute in art for sometime now. Controlling the surface of a canvas is at the root of most contemporary painting. Vancouver native Jeff Depner's work creates avenues for visual discovery through a process based aesthetic. Layers upon layers of paint each relating to the next. Masking some, if not all, of the past creates a visual history within. The work ebbs and flows between graphic qualities and thick painterly styles with muted but contemporary feeling colors. The constant process of 'improvised moves' allows some of the work to be based in grid like structures. It allows some of the smaller paintings a chance for inquiry in constructive qualities and aspects of painting, inserting his work into the long history of painting.
On the way home from Fecal Face a couple Fridays back we swung through Fifty24SF to catch the two day show with the LA based hip-hop photographer Michael Miller in celebration of his new book. West coast hip-hop iconic early 1990's hip-hop photographs, including numerous photos of 2pac, Ice Cube, Eazy-E, Snoop Dogg, Warren G... the bonus: Eazy-E touting a skateboard and a gun?!
Marissa Textor and Ryan Travis Christian are currently showing together at Cooper Cole Gallery in Toronto. Gerald interviews the LA based Marissa Textor. Check out her detailed graphite drawings.
A couple weeks back Jeff Soto flew out to Richmond, VA for their street art festival to do some mural action. Artists included the likes of Hense, Richard Colman, Dalek, Hamilton Glass, and many more.
Mark your calendar: Dave Kinsey opens Lost For Words @FFDG in San Francisco on Friday, May 18th (6-9pm).
New mixed media paintings and installation. This will be his first show in San Francisco in 12 years and his first on the West Coast since 2007... We're very excited. Below is a lil' taste of what's to come.
Hamishi emailed over some photos from his current show Nothing Special running at Melbourne's Paradise Hills through this Saturday, May 5th. If you're in Melbourne, view it in person as we're sure it looks even better in person.
Hamishi participated in last November's group show 11.11.11 @FFDG back in November with Mario Martinez showing a solo show... Man, that's was a nutty opening before the cops showed up.
Spoke Art here in SF opens the group show Synergy curated by LA's Thinkspace this Thursday, May 3rd (6-10pm) featuring works by a slew of artists that Thinkspace works with. Spoke Art sent us a taste for you to sample.
We had the pleasure of meeting Flavio Samelo when we were in Sao Paulo last summer (blog). He's a skateboarder/ photographer and talented artist. Here are some photos from some of his recent mural done in Rio de Janeiro, also in his words.
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