Descending the stairs into the Brooklyn basement that is home to the Destroy & Rebuild studio, your senses are immediately assaulted by loud beats and the pungent odor of paint fumes and smoke. Once you've acclimatized, you find yourself at the center of a hotbed of activity. The three-man collective that is Destroy & Rebuild is busy putting the final touches on an impressive, large canvas for the Red show at Manhattan's Cheryl Hazan Gallery and the energy in the room is palpable. Anthony Vasquez washes screens and Mike Baca waves a dryer over a corner of the canvas, while Fernando Romero paces back and forth, spouting suggestions for improving the composition of the piece. I spent an afternoon in the studio with the guys and, contrary to my initial impression, came away firmly convinced that there is definitely a method to their madness

In late 2005, Anthony founded Destroy & Rebuild after a stint in jail. His friend "By Hand" - now part of the 624713 Art Collective - introduced him to street vending and taught him the finer points of stenciling and silk-screening. Using his archive of graffiti and urban landscape photographs as a primary source, Anthony started working on creating his own screens. While he now has the capacity to burn screens in the studio, in the beginning he relied heavily on the Lower East Side community arts center ABC No Rio. By 2007, Mike had joined Destroy & Rebuild and between the two of them, they had enough material in production to start vending on their own. When Mike ran into some difficulties with the law, Fernando jumped in to help out … and the collective as it exists today was formed.

Spend enough time with Destroy & Rebuild and you'll quickly realize they are a tight unit. Each canvas is created collaboratively, with each member taking turns adding and blending various elements. Fernando favors the paint brush and is responsible for laying down the colored or textured backdrops that form the foundation of a canvas. Mike contributes graphic elements and specializes in modes of transportation (think box trucks, taxicabs or police cruisers). Anthony concentrates mainly on architectural elements and newspaper collages; he's also developed a rust patina to age and distress canvases.

When asked what motivates them, Fernando said it best: "It's about the freshness of each new piece … the excitement of creating something new … and it's a surprise every time." Not a day goes past when they're not painting, he said, and it shows in canvases that have become increasingly more refined. At their vending spot in SoHo, Destroy & Rebuild do a brisk business with their canvases. They sell to young and old, tourists and New Yorkers alike – "Even the Law loves us!" Mike chimes in, clearly amused that SoHo beat cops show an interest in their work.

The city of New York looms large as a defining influence on the work of these three native New Yorkers. Although they make use of some of New York's many iconic images, that is but one element in their repertoire. Combined with their pride in New York's graffiti heritage, with each canvas they capture a fleeting yet defining moment of New York at the end of a decade. While gentrification has run rampage in certain parts of New York, we all know that there are still plenty of raw spots to be found. This wild heart is the core of Destroy and Rebuild's work and it's powerful enough that it speaks to everyone.

Anthony, Fernando and Mike have big plans for 2010 – watch out, Europe, here they come – and a strong enough work ethic to pull it off. You can find them at the corner of Prince and Greene Thursdays through Sundays or online at http://destroyandrebuildnyc.com/.

Many thanks to the lovely Julie for her hospitality!

Happy Holidays from the Street Spot! Stay tuned for more good things next year...

Labels: destroy + rebuild, studio visit

On a recent rainy weekend near the end of October, I took the train up to Connecticut to visit the artist Cake in her studio. Although she only started putting her work on the street about two years ago, Cake is no stranger to the street art world. Through her circle of friends at Pratt Institute in the early 2000s, she had a front-row seat to the burgeoning street art scene then taking shape in Brooklyn. At the time, she was working on completing her degree in painting and very much focused on her studio art. With this in mind, I was curious to learn more about her artistic development and what motivated her to take her work out of the studio and onto the streets.

Encouraged to pick up a brush by her grandmother, a noted Chinese landscape artist in her own right, Cake immersed herself in a world of art from an early age on. Taught to paint using watercolors, she now paints exclusively with acrylics. Before embarking upon her course of studies at Pratt, she began experimenting in painting abstracts. She continued producing abstract paintings at the same time as building a body of more figurative work.


One could even say she was building bodies both figuratively and literally, as anatomical elements began appearing as a motif that bridged both areas of work. From a structural standpoint, she used skeletal outlines to differentiate between foregrounds and backgrounds in her abstracts. She admitted to relishing a certain "creepiness" associated with skulls and skeletons that, especially when incorporated into her portraits of babies and children, radiated vulnerability on the cusp of impending violence. The heart also features prominently within Cake's work and represents her attempt to put a "medicinal spin on an emotion." Through her art, she aims to therapeutically transform raw and loaded emotions into functional and neutral symbols; for Cake, the heart is a symbol far removed from stereotypical notions of romance. I sense an incredible hidden strength in Cake's work - her delicately drawn female forms, with open hearts, visible bones and arms akimbo, belie their apparent helplessness and exude a toughness that I find very appealing.


Befitting of someone who pours her heart into her art, Cake eschews the mass production methods of some of her contemporaries. Her pieces are all hand drawn and colored - in a word, each is an original. Given the incredible amount of work she invests in each piece, I asked what had changed since her days at Pratt and why had she decided to start getting up. For Cake, it was the realization that the street is not only more authentic than the gallery, but also where she feels most at home. Beginning with hand-embellished stickers, she quickly moved on to wheatpasting first small, then increasingly larger pieces as her confidence and comfort level rose. Like many street artists, she was soon completely hooked, enjoying the sensation of paint and paste on her hands and reveling in the adrenaline rush following the successful installation of a piece. Finding it liberating to let her work go, she made a conscious choice to start putting up more work and to stop worrying about what happened to it. Her work has clearly found resonance amongst her peers, as she's already completed a number of successful collaborations (notably with Veng of Robots Will Kill, Feral, and Passenger Pigeon) - with no doubt more to come.


Cake was recently one of three artists, alongside Chris Stain and Cern, tapped by Art in General to provide murals for the arts organization's fundraising gala. She is participating in Brooklynite Gallery's upcoming group show, Go Get Your Shinebox, as well as in Anno Domini's annual invitational group exhibit and art sale, Fresh Produce. You can see more of her work on her Flickr.

Labels: cake, street art, studio visit

I recently visited Elbow-Toe in his sunny Brooklyn studio to talk about inspirations and processes for his latest series of linoleum cut prints. He put up his newest street piece, You Never Wash Up After Yourself, this weekend and here’s a little insight into how it came to be:



For this particular series, Elbow-Toe has taken imagery from classical children's literature – in this case Beatrix Potter's The Tale of Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle - as a point of departure. This type of imagery resonates with viewers, he explained, because it is something people are predisposed to recognize. The challenge is to subvert the imagery by re-contextualizing it in an urban setting and to imbue it with a new set of meanings. A cursory glance reveals a cute hedgehog hanging her laundry, yet closer inspection reveals that all is not what it seems.



In composing a piece, ET begins by sketching a study. He prepares himself by reviewing photographs of his subject from many different angles, absorbing clues for anatomical structure and making notes for possible color schemes. Individual elements are not worked out in great detail, as he prefers to leave room for improvisation in transferring the sketch from paper to linoleum. Having created a reverse image on tracing paper as a guideline, he commits his image to linoleum in charcoal, setting it with a fixative when he's satisfied with the outcome.



Potter's Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle has been transformed into a homeless woman surrounded by belongings recycled from the detritus of society. She lives in a makeshift shanty built out of an upturned cardboard box with an aluminum baking pan for a roof. Her cart is a converted sardine box with buttons for wheels; in it, she has collected garbage with a syringe. In place of the heroine's missing handkerchief, the central item in Potter's story, a pair of girl's underwear imprinted with cherries flap on a makeshift yo-yo clothesline while a used condom lies discarded in the foreground. While these elements cast a decidedly dark shadow over the scene, ET insists the imagery is open to interpretation. There is a message to be gleaned from the piece, he says, but not necessarily a moral.



Using a utility knife, Elbow-Toe begins the painstaking process of carving the linoleum. The knife allows him far greater control to create fine linework and a level of detail he cannot achieve using a gouge. A piece of this size can easily take him several weeks of 5 to 8 hour work days to complete. Having suffered from painful carpal tunnel syndrome as a result of having carved large woodblocks in the past, ET now engages several interns to assist in carving. Yet critical details such as hands or faces he carves himself. He also inks and pulls all of his prints, preferring to use sign writers bond because it holds ink well. The final step prior to bringing his pieces to the street is to hand color each print with acrylic paints, thereby enhancing the print with an added layer of definition.

I encourage everyone to reflect on the next piece of Elbow-Toe's work you encounter. You can be sure that each detail has been deliberated, each symbol carefully weighed and all elements delicately balanced into a unified whole. To the keen observer goes the reward of multiple layers of meaning waiting to be discovered…

Labels: elbow-toe, process, studio visit