NOTES FROM THE UNDERGROUND: LOOKING BACK AT STREET ART'S PEAK IN "ELEVEN SPRING"
via papermag.com
Street art has always been transgressive, with underground artists marrying beauty with the power of illegal actions--art that went hand in hand with the very real danger of arrest. Now street art and graffiti have transitioned into a mainstream genre, and art on walls is as likely to be an ad coopting that power as an actual guerilla artwork.
Eleven Spring: A Celebration of Street Art, out this week, celebrates a pivotal moment in that change. It's the tenth anniversary of a massive, five-floor collaboration that brought together street artists from around the world to take over the building at the titular address in Soho. The contributors, including Shepard Fairey, Swoon, JR, Faile, and more, are a laundry list of the '00s era heavyweights--many of whom have gone on to have successful careers inside the traditional art world. We spoke with Sara Schiller, co-founder of website Wooster Collective and co-author with husband Marc, about the importance of the Eleven Spring show, the need for illegality in street art, and how New York has lost its edge.
What was the importance, looking back over ten years, of the Eleven Spring show in bringing street art to the general population and art world?
I think the importance of the show itself is that it happened at a really pivotal moment in street art where it was still more of an underground thing. It hadn't really entered the mainstream, brands hadn't co-opted it, etc. The Wooster Collective blog was this intersection of street artists from around the world. We were putting up art from all over the world, people were having a dialogue, and this building almost became the physical symbol of that. And what happened afterwards—and some people would say that perhaps Wooster Collective and the show helped this happen—is street art became much more mainstream. Gentrification is sort of always happening, cities are always evolving and changing. Soho had been such a hub for art, and this building in particular had been a living outside gallery for over a decade. As we saw that starting to change, both from the forces of property owners wanting to keep their buildings more pristine and a very active vandalism squad that was fueled to crack down on artists, a lot of those artists began to move out of the neighborhood and put their work up in other cities. Because New York had lost its edge, and it moved on to Berlin and Barcelona.
To see additional photos and interview in its entirety, click here.