WHERE WE’RE HEADED
JUXTAPOZ.COM 135EVENTS
JR: The Chronicles of San
Francisco and Stephen Powers:
Daymaker @ SFMOMA
Opening May 23, 2019 (JR)
and May 18, 2019 (Powers)
sfmoma.org
It’s rare that a major museum focuses on two
of the most prominent street and graffiti artists
of their generation at the same time. But this
Spring, the San Francisco Museum of Modern
Art will be hosting two installations from
renowned French artist JR, as well as Brooklyn-
based Stephen “ESPO” Powers, respectively.
JR’s The Chronicles of San Francisco will open
on May 23, 2019 inside SFMOMA’s Roberts
Family Gallery, with a massive photo collage that
captures human quirk and character. JR and
his team embedded themselves in SF, setting
up 22 predetermined locations across the city,
filming, interviewing and photographing anyone
passing by who wished to participate. The
resulting interactive mural will tie in perfectly
with the body of work presented by Powers in
Daymaker. Long attributed to a sign-painting
aesthetic that mixes humour, daily observation
and typography, Powers’s installations present
a new form of communication. Opening on
May 18th, Powers will create a site-specific
installation of his sign-paintings and fine art
works on the museum’s third floor Architecture
- Design space. Both exhibits, although different
in execution, are powerful statements about
human connection, this idea that the mundane,
overlooked aspects of daily life can be examined,
enjoyed and celebrated. Such a valuable nuance
maintains a healthy community, and just might
be a theme the world needs to embrace in 2019.
L’Avenir: Graffuturism Group
Exhibition @ Mirus Gallery,
Denver
April 26—May 25, 2018
mirusgallery.com
“In general, I try and distinguish between what
one calls the Future and ‘l’avenir’ (the ‘to come.’)
The future is that which—tomorrow, later, next
century—will be.” Any art show that kicks off
its theme with a quote from the philosopher,
Jacques Derrida, is, in our book, heading in a
thoughtful direction. The artist, Poesia, who
has edited and published the influential online
blog, Graffuturism.com since 2010, was at the
forefront of pushing graffiti style artwork as it
made its way into the contemporary art lexicon.
Many of the artists he has curated in the new
exhibition, L’Avenir, opening at Mirus Gallery
in Denver on April 26, 2019, helped make the
transition possible, but also held influential and
experimental places in the history of graffiti art
itself: Augustine Kofie, Tobias Kroeger (above),
Carlos Mare, Doze Green, Jaybo Monk, Kenor,
and Matt W. Moore, among others. These artists
were consistently looking at what was to come,
pushing the boundaries of what graffiti could
conceivably be. “We are at a special time and
moment in our art form,” Poesia says of the
exhibit. “We are embraced by the mainstream
and are able to engage the public like no other
form of contemporary art, yet we remain outside
of academia, so to speak. What once was avant-
garde now caters to a small group of pseudo
intellectuals that push theory over practice in
most cases in our current art world... L’Avenir
is an exhibition curated by myself that calls
into question what is already here, but more
importantly what to ‘is to come’.”Inès Longevial: One Year
@ Galerie des Tournelles, Paris
March 29—31, 2019
ineslongevial.com
Just a glance at Inès Longevial’s artwork and
you know she was born for a solo show in Paris.
A native of Southern France, her paintings
and drawings seem to travel in time from an
early twentieth Century European salon to
2019 in timeless portraits that are both classic
and contemporary. Recent postings on her
Instagram account, where she shared her own
adolescent drawing replicas of van Gogh works
done in her early teens, seem to confirm her
eye for a particular classical painting approach.
Now based in Paris, Longevial seems right at
home. After a residency and exhibition in San
Francisco in 2018, Longevial is back in the City
of Lights producing her own solo show, One
Year, at Galerie des Tournelles in the Marais from
March 29—31, 2019. Recent travels to Morocco
for ceramics and the framework of her portraits
will make up the bulk of One Year in an exhibition
that also serves as a release of a new book of
Longevial’s work, featuring paintings, drawings,
and drafts. The collection beautifully illustrates
not only her work, but the evolution behind her
process and growth, how ideas ferment and
are fleshed out afterwards. When discussing
the book and her new exhibition, Longevial
referenced a telling quote from a former Parisian,
Ernest Hemingway: “I had learned already never
to empty the well of my writing, but always to
stop when there was still something there in the
deep part of the well, and let it refill at night from
the springs that fed it.”