The definitive guide to visual art in New York and baby sister to insane D.I.Y. mega-project Tokyo Art Beat has launched!

Tonight: A celebration of ten years of LOST, L.A.'s primero graffiti magazine, celebrating the anniversary and the release of the new LOST book. 

The book contains highlights of the past decade editor/designer EyeOne has spent documenting LA writing. Includes imagery by Atlas (if you haven't caught the documentary on his work, watch it now!), Pale, Cab, Haeler, and more. Screenprinted board covers, numbered limited edition of 2000.

Even if you are not a graffiti fan per se, the LOSt book is a musthave for folks interested in Angeleno culture. More about LOST here. 

LOST is a picture-perfect example of designer as author. 

Thursday, May 1 the CalArts graphic design T-Shirt Show. T-shirts designed by design students, faculty, and alumni will be sold to raise money for the CalArts AIGA student group, for workshops, shows, and other events for the students.

Where: CalArts, Tatum coffee shop
When: May 1st, 7:30pm - 11pm

The shirts are always super-rad at this event. Go early to score new designs from famous alumni!

CalArts' graduating graphic design MFA class  is selling sets of the visiting artist posters on ebay. There are a few sets of all 24 posters and several sets of 6. The auctions will be going up throughout the week, so check back often.

They are selling them to raise money for a class trip and for the AIGA student group.

Own a piece of history. 

My book, Parallel Strokes, is available now via the book website.

Click to read more ...

Tentacles, Horns, and Scales
April 19th Thrash Out in Koenji, Tokyo.
Artshow, toy release, sneak  attack.
Featuring all new works by Koji Harmon , Bwana Spoons, and Martin Ontiveros.
Sponsored by Dekline footwear.

 Come join us for good times, art, toys, prizes, and a few big suprises.
Thrash Out is the Flagship store and gallery of mind bending vinyl pioneers Gargamel.

Gargamel makes toys that look like Jolly Rancher coated diamonds.

Koji, Bwana, and Martin make art and toys that explode with color, depth, and endless imagination.

Collector and fan Takaomi Fujiki put it best when he said “Happy Beam Discharge!”

For more info as it becomes available,

Click to read more ...

The seventh annual Portland Documentary and eXperimental Film Festival (PDX Fest, for short!) is just two short weeks away! This year the festival will be taking place at the historic Hollywood Theatre from April 30 – May 4, 2008.  We will also be hosting an exciting sidebar program of video installation work and multi-media performances at galleryHomeland. This year's festival is easily our biggest yet featuring five jam-packed days of provocative, artistic and firmly uncompromising films and videos from around the globe.  The full schedule is now up for your eager eyes at www.peripheralproduce.com. Check it out!

Click to read more ...

Through 20 interviews with 29 key figures in the Tokyo art world and 6 essays by art specialists, Art Space Tokyo fleshes out a thorough exploration of the Tokyo art world and the issues that revolve around these spaces.

The guide is lavishly ornamented with over 50 beautiful pen and ink illustrations by Nobumasa Takahashi, bringing readers intimately close to the voices and spaces within.

Topics include:

- Japan's position within the rise of the Asian art scene
- Takashi Murakami and the relationship between contemporary art and manga/anime
changes in the Ginza area's position in the Tokyo art world
- an account of connecting with the Tokyo art world as a foreign curator
- converting subway luggage lockers into galleries
- 100 artists renovating a 160 year old warehouse
- contemporary Japanese architecture and urban regeneration in Tokyo
- the current state of Japanese art publishing and art criticism
- international art fairs in Tokyo
- the collecting of artwork and the history of Japanese auction houses
- art and performance in Tokyo's public spaces
- graffiti in Tokyo

World premiere on VLU:

My new book, Parallel Strokes, is available now via the book website. It isn't officially being released for a  week, but I figured VLU readers should have the first pick.  

About Parallel Strokes:

Parallel Strokes is a collection of interviews with twenty-plus contemporary typeface designers, graffiti writers, and lettering artists around the world. The book is introduced with a comprehensive essay charting the history of graffiti, its relation to type design, and how the two practices relate in the wider context of lettering.

Interviews within include conversations with pan-European type design collecitve Underware, Japanese type designer Akira Kobayashi, American graffiti writer and fine artist Barry McGee/Twist, German graffiti writers Daim and Seak, American lettering artist, graphic designer and design eductor Ed Fella, among others. Parallel Strokes is an enquiry into the history, context, and development of lettering today, both culturally approved and illicit.

Full list of interviewees:

Akira Kobayashi
Underware
Ed Fella
Delta
Jerry Inscoe/Joker
Jens Gehlhaar
Daim
Seak
Jonas Williamsson
Handselecta
Tauba Auerbach
Lady Pink
She One
Eklips AWR/MSK
Eskae
Renos
Mike Giant
Chaz Bojorquez
Barry McGee/Twist

 

The result of a six years of research in the combined arts of lettering, graffiti, and typeface design, Parallel Strokes is a collection of interviews some of the best letterform creators in the world today.

Chaz Bojorquez talks about the origins of barrio graffiti in Los Angeles and the evolution of the craft. Fellow Angeleno, vernacular graphic designer Ed Fella, speaks about his history in lettering and how he earned the title “The King of Zing” in Detroit design and illustration circles. Famed Japanese type designer Akira Kobayashi discusses Roman and Japanese letterforms while showcasing a lifetime of type design work. European graffiti writers Daim, Seak, and Delta share their thoughts on dimensional graffiti lettering while American graffiti writer Mike Giant talks about vernacular lettering, typeface design, and the evolution of graffiti handstyles.

 
Parallel Strokes is richly illustrated throughout, featuring copious previously unpublished work by the interviewed artists, as well as supplementary illustrations and photographs detailing contemporary and historical trends in graffiti and type design.

The first 100 orders come with a two color 17" × 20" Parallel Strokes poster printed using recycled paper and soy inks at Portland, Oregon's Pinball Publishing.

 
Parallel Strokes is 244 pages thick and available for $25 with free shipping worldwide. 

The Pecha Kucha Night: A Celebration book is finally available online. Pecha Kucha Night is a series of global events where 20 presenters take the stage to present 20 slides, about which they will speak for 20 seconds each.

This book is a "best of", with presentations by Japanese super-architect Toyo Ito, Marcus Fairs, PKN founders Astrid Klein and Mark Dytham of the insanely awesome and talented Klein Dytham architecture, Tokyo dance group Strange Kinoko, graphic designers Namaiki, type designer Odod Ezer, and British designer Sebastian Conran.

The book was edited by Uleshka deshou, founder of PingMag, and designed by, um, Ian Lynam Design. It weighs in at 176 pages, softcover, and has a nice UV gloss screenprinted cover. The text is a mixture of English and Japanese.

At ¥2000 ($18.75) each, including global priority shipping from Japan, it's a steal.

Here’s a great library of Ernst Haeckel’s Artforms of Nature, available as 300dpi jpegs. The site’s in German, but it’s easy enough to find great specimens. Haeckel’s works are all in the public domain.

From Haeckel’s Wikipedia entry:

Ernst Haeckel was an eminent German biologist, naturalist, philosopher, physician, professor and artist. He named thousands of new species, mapped a genealogical tree relating all life forms, and coined many terms in biology, including phylum, phylogeny, ecology and the kingdom Protista.
 

The official announcement of the launch of this new site:

PingMag MAKE is the sister site to PingMag.
We use an interview format to put the spotlight on a wide range of
people active in rural areas. We document the voices of these
unknown heroes and broadcast them to the world. It's the
Japan-based magazine about people and making things,
coming out once a week. We're passing on the passion,
ideas, skills, and life stories of people who are building today
and exploring tomorrow: craftsmen, engineers, entrepreneurs, and inventors.

The unofficial announcement from my end:

This is a really great idea- there are so many small cottage industries from "days gone by" that produce amazing handmade goods that could benefit from a bit of exposure and hopefully some fresh clientel. The site opens with a visit to a custom umbrella maker (folks use umbrellas here regularly, mind you) and a prosthetics shop.

I love any creative agency in Sweden that comes out with their own brand of jeans. Oh, and their work for clients is brilliant too. Here are some short cuts because the site is pretty deep and some of the best gems are hidden. Here here, here, here.

Long overdue, Neojaponisme launches with an initial manifesto, outlining the magazine's strategy for broadcasting cutural criticism, design writing, historical essays, music, and original artwork from Japan to the world.

 

Existing to encourage the heroic experiments of the gracefully over-ambitious, Machine Project presents workshops, events, installations and performances on a semi-regular basis. For more information check out the mission statement. (taken from http://www.machineproject.com) Call in sick for work and take some workshops.

Built by Nikki Farquharson. Random Got Beautiful has a nice healthy blend of being able to rely on a collaborative effort while supporting self promotion. She liked the idea of creating an online collage of random photographs taken by different people, open for anyone to submit and view. ‘Random is Good’ is a motto for Nikki, so her friend Anthony suggested to call this site Random Got Beautiful (or RGB for short) once colour was decided to be the first theme. She wants as many people to get involved by submitting themed photographs to one place.

Jarr Geerligs' Flickr Collection of Amsterdam Posters is an excellent document of recent posters dotting the city of Amsterdam. For those of us stuck in the car dominated USA blandscape of ad-man/corporate dictated design, it is heartening to see that someone out there gets it.

Geoff, always ahead of the crowd don't follow it is pointless. Via boico

Get site crawler ready, Germany's Form Magazine Archives await.

Well curated record cover archive. Via Ian Brook