That’s right, Washington DC. Perhaps YOU don’t think of it a a mecca for street art, urban art, or what Art Whino is helping to define as “New Brow.” Nephew Please! These cats god mad skillz. And I would be honored to share a studio (or a wall) with any of them. They Showed and Showered all of the artists with much love and mad hospitality. So to each and everyone of you - RESPECT!
And to the rest of the world, recognize the creative capacity of The Nation’s Capital Cats - ya dig!
DC ARTISTS
Alan Defibaugh
Alex Meade
Alexa Meade is an installation artist based in the Washington, DC area. Her background in the world of political communications has fueled her intellectual interest in the tensions between perception and reality. Alexa Meade’s innovative use of paint on the three dimensional surfaces of found objects, live models, and architectural spaces has been incorporated into a series of installations that create a perceptual shift in how we experience and interpret spatial relationships.
AM Radio
AM Radio, a subsidiary of Mosi Design Group, is a collective of visual artists, whose mission is to infuse the raw elements of sound and texture to inspire life. The creative process incorporates the work of artists and DJs to paint large compositions before live audiences. With each painting taking approximately four hours to complete, the technique is a challenge of graphic resourcefulness. It compresses the creative experience into spontaneous reactions of time, space and energy - a result that captures the mood, sound and electricity of the environment.
Anthony Dihle
Aniekan Udofia
Artistic Sole
Imani K Brown (in.fa.mousIKB) is an emerging name in the urban arts industry. Establishing herself as a tattoo artist in 2006, IKB created ARTISTIC SOLE, an artistic entity committed to & inspired by wearable art. Though it encompasses everything from tattoos, to live art, customized toys and much more, Artistic Sole has gained a name best known for its custom hand painted kicks with a graffiti twist. Since conception, IKB and Artistic Sole have released a limited edition line of custom sneakers, Art & Sole(ism). IKB has appeared on behalf of Artistic Sole in numerous editorials and projects including The DEFintion of Hip Hip, Acclaim Magazine, Highsnobette, Female Sneaker Fiend, Art Whino, SolSource, One Versus Many, The City of Ink, and DEKKA.
Ben Tolman
Ben Tolman grew up and lives in Washington, DC. He received my BFA from the Corcoran College of Art in 2005. He has exhibited across the country as well as internationally. He currently has a drawing on exhibit at the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery as part of the Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition.
Billy Mode
Billy Colbert
Brandon Hill
Cabezon
Chris Bishop
Washington DC based artist Chris Bishop pays homage to his two true loves in his Pretty Girls & Robots series of paintings. Bishop employs bold outlines, cartoon simplicity and bright colors to bring to life the empty, cold-hearted death machines… and those are just the girls!
Dana Ellyn
Daniel Barojas
Daniel Barojas is an artist who works in many various artistic mediums including: mixed media illustration, watercolor, graphic/product design, jewelry, photography, toys & graffiti. Born in Mexico – Mexico City and now living in the USA, Daniel uses his cultural and street influences as inspirations for his art.
Daniel Barojas is the founder of R5 Imaging, a creative services company that offers his talents to the public. Daniel is involved in trying to spread positivity by means of creativity, recently he founded “The Mason Jar” which will serve as an avenue for him and others to effect positive change to various causes around the globe. Daniel Barojas as The Mason Jar’s creator is in charge organizing and curating shows/event like the “Say Whaaat” exhibit which featured art on toys by various artists; which were auctioned on eBay to generate funds for donation to charity. This statement: “Consciousness & Caring through Creativity” not only serves as the official slogan of “The Mason Jar” but also as Daniel’s mission in life.
Darren Smith
As the international design editor for National Geographic Magazine, Darren Smith uses his editorial eye and attention to detail. He applies the same skills to astonishing results in his handmade photo mosaics, in which he pastes together hundreds or thousands of small fragments cut from his photographs. Frustrated by the limitations of traditional photography, but also disappointed in the plastic appearance of digitally manipulated images, he created his mosaic technique to have his own way of remixing reality, to transform a digital medium with the hand, and to create surreal new worlds of intense detail and optimism. Smith’s work has been featured in solo and group shows in Washington, D.C., Virginia, Maryland, and Paris, France. His artwork is in private collections on both sides of the Atlantic. He is represented by Honfleur Gallery and lives and works in Washington, D.C., with his wife and daughter.
Decoy
Drew Storm Graham
When Drew Graham was 11 years old he moved to Madrid and immediately fell in love with graffiti visually and conceptually. Graffiti embodies a bold, impetuous attitude rooted in controversy and rebellion. As a junior in high school Drew returned to the United States and moved to DC. He was not struck by the amount of graffiti he saw in Madrid, instead he saw tattoos as the more rebellious form of art. He quickly drew parallels between graffiti and tattoo art as being confrontational, taboo, and demanding public reaction.
edward alan gross
edward alan gross is interested in thoughtfully charged situations. His goal is to capture suggestions of poetic possibilities rather than one clearly resolved narrative. to achieve this he uses color, light, and shadow involving a host of images from the profound to the absurd. Then to evolve the narrative further he combines found objects to create a shift between the imagined and the observed. this effort is used to provoke, ignite and hopefully comically entertain the viewers thought process as well as his own.
El Stabo
Spawned out from the ugly Barrios of Sunset Park NYC, El Stabo has been picking on the scab of the art market since the early nineties. With a cannibalistic ferocity he has indulged in the art of making art. At one point in his creative life, after waking from the vomit soaked bed sheets, he pushes the young ghetto maiden off the bed and decides to enroll in a art school. A wasted 8 years,,yes..eight years..in the Fashion Institute of technology. After the brain washing and misdirection’s of the faculty, Elstabo has been able to focus on his favorite subjects. So ladies and gentlemen, please enjoy the manifestations that emerge out of the strange mind of Elstabo.
Emily Greene Liddle
Emily Greene Liddle was born and raised just outside of Baltimore, MD before moving to Washington, DC in 1999 to attend college. She graduated cum laude from the Catholic University of America in 2004 with a dual bachelors degree in Fine Arts and Art Education. Emily currently lives, teaches, and paints in the DC metro area. Working mainly with oil on canvas, Liddle uses classical academic technique to portray modern pop imagery. While her paintings initially appear light and playful, her subject matter plays on deeper themes of contrast and contradiction in form, function, and perception in modern Pop culture.
Francisco Munoz
James Walker
Website
“…..I never made a conscious decision to become an artist, it’s something I’ve always done for as long as I can remember. I take pictures and draw and paint and collage debris and objects as intuitively as possible and I’ve never specialized in anything except making the best art that I can. Real artists don’t have a choice about making art, it’s simply a matter of satisfying an insatiable urgency to create…..
Jared Davis
Jazi Rock
Kevin Thomas Irvin (AKA) Jazi Rock was born in 1972 in the impoverished neighborhood of southwest Baltimore. Being raised by only his mother, Kevin turned to the streets to be his father, his acceptance, and his comfort zone. As a boy Kevin searched for an identity and struggled to express his souls frustrations with the world around him, like many others in his neighborhood. While others turned to drugs and crime, Kevin discovered the the book that forever changed his life. At the ripe age of 12 Kevin was infected by the graffiti bug when he saw Martha Coopers infamous book, “Subway Art” circulate around his neighborhood.
Through the years Jazi does not seek perfection but he seeks refinement. Jazi has made a transition from street graffiti to canvas as time went on. He has taken what he has learned form the streets to apply it to the world of fine arts.
Jessica van Brakle
Lady Glock
Lady Glock started shooting as a child, after she received her first camera at age seven. Having lived in a number of cities over the years, she has crafted a style that stems directly from being an urban dweller. Lady Glock studied at a small anarchist filled liberal arts college in Massachusetts before getting her MA in photography and urban cultures in London. Preferring to remain an international woman of mystery, she has traveled to many parts of the world where she has photographed her way through some exciting situations. From violent social unrest in Spain to to the vibrance exhibited in both life and graffiti in Miami…when captured through Lady Glock’s lens, we all see the world a little clearer.
Leah Bassett
Leah Sarah Bassett (born 1983) is an up and coming artist out of Baltimore. She is originally from Cape Cod and the Berkshires of Massachusetts. Leah picked up a paintbrush at a very early age due to the influence of her parents, Alice Babcock Lynch and Marc Bassett; accomplished artists in the New England area.
For the past few years, Leah has been experimenting with several techniques and mediums, integrating her contrasting styles. She feels she has grown into mixtures that best convey her ideas. She attended Corcoran School of Art and Design and had a studio in Howard County Center of the Arts. Artistic influences include Leonardo da Vinci, Rembrandt, Caravaggio, Klimt and Egon Schiele.
Luz Del Mar Rosado
Matt Sesow
Matt Somma
Matthew Parker
Matthew Parker is a native Washingtonian. He is an Architect and graduated from The University of Tennessee, where his curriculum taught him ways to observe, to understand spatial relationships, and to gather the experience of a specific place. His photographic collages embody movement of time, experience, memory and spatial relationships as variables captured in the scene.
He begins all collages with a sketch. Then, rotates the camera to achieve the different angles and layer each photo with his observance of a place, during different times of the day or year to create a dynamic scene. When you see a change in the tone from one photo to the other, it’s the result of a different time that he was at the location. He believes these multiple layers of variables engage the viewer’s eyes and body allowing them to experience the poetics of space, even allowing the scene to pull the viewer in. Please visit the website at www.reinventing-reality.com or more information.
Michael Weber
Mike Weber was born in February of 1975 in St. Louis, Missouri. He attended Southwest Missouri State University and The Art Institute of Dallas, receiving degrees in Visual Communications and Computer Animation/Multimedia. For over ten years Mike’s passion was in the print and broadcast design world where he designed and art directed broadcast graphics and animation for Showtime, HBO, Comedy Central, A&E, History Channel, Nickelodeon, ABC, CBS, NBC, FOX, WB, The Golf Channel, and many others. His television career took him to New York where he began developing his personal artwork. In 2001, Mike resigned from his design career to devote full time to his art in Washington, DC. His works are an unusual use of mixed media- oil, acrylic, found objects, cut papers and finished with a thick coat of glossy gel medium. Each piece tells a rich story from his well document German family lineage.
Michael Owen
Michael Owen is a contemporary painter who’s work is found hung in galleries as well as on the streets. Visually, Michael’s work uses bold, graphic imagery which pulls the viewer into the piece, to divulge softer and intimate messages and metaphors. While Michael’s work could be classified as figurative, it’s subtle compositional details and and deep messages ring true of a more conceptual genre. Michael is the artist behind one of the nation’s longest murals, located in Baltimore, Maryland, covering both sides of a quarter-mile underpass.
Nils Westergard
Nils Westergard is an 18 year old artist from Falls Church, Virginia. He started working with stencils and spray paint in the 7th grade, and is currently a senior at George Mason High School with plans to attend VCU Arts in the fall. His work focuses primarily on figures of authority and transforming what is often considered an ugly art form and medium, into something of beauty.
Peter Chang
Peter Krsko
Rodney
Scott G. Brooks
Scott G Brooks is originally from Flint, Michigan, and currently lives and works in Washington, DC. His subject matter ranges from simple portraiture to intricate narratives. In his paintings, he takes social, psychological, and political issues and injects them with a dark sense of humor. Anatomical distortions separate the figures from the photographic ideal, which gives him the freedom to create his own distorted reality. His work is described as twisted and offbeat, sentimental, and disturbing. In addition to exhibiting in galleries, he has also illustrated several children’s books. His influences include Mad Magazine, Disney, Saturday morning cartoons, and talking heads on cable news.
Sergio Martinez
D.C. based architect Sergio Martinez is the second generation of a South American civil engineer and a North American farmer. After receiving his bachelor’s degree in architecture from Virginia Tech, Sergio worked as an apprentice in a fine furniture wood shop and later at a local ironwork shop to acquire practical hands-on knowledge. For the past 10 years he has worked for various prestigious award winning architecture firms in the metropolitan area and has designed several projects in the D.C. area.
This summer Sergio designed and built “Olas”, five bamboo sculptures at the Crystal City Water Park, as part of the Crystal Art – Eco Art project promoted by the Crystal City BID. On January 2010 “Olas” was the recipient of the Design Arlington Award of Excellence for a Public Art Project.
His studio space is currently located in Baltimore, Maryland. He creates works of architecture, furniture, sculpture, home accessories and just released a new line of jewelry. In all of his work, Sergio Martinez aspires to create beautiful authentic works of integrity and substance, from environmentally responsible materials, that allows human beings to poetically dwell.
Susannah Parnin
sylvia ortiz
Shawn Martinbrough
Terry Plater
Terry Plater’s mom use to always recite a poem to his siblings and himself when he was a kid, the poem was called “Mother to Son” by Langston Hughes. It starts off “Well son, life for me ain’t been no crystal stair”, and it took some growing up to understand that the poem she recited was her way of telling them that life isn’t easy, and no matter what’s in your way the days aren’t going to stop coming. The years of her life summed up in a 20 bar poem, this is the power that art holds. To be able to speaks volumes with just a few words, a note or two, or some strokes of a paint brush. This is something that Terry consider whenever he starts a new creation.
Terry is just a country boy from a town way down in the boonies, brother to 6, son of a loving mother and father. He has been drawing since he could remember and don’t see stopping anytime soon. Probably one of the nicest guys you’ll ever meet, always smiling, even when he should be frowning. Although inside of him there is a lot of struggling, he hates what his eyes see, parents killing their off spring, off springs killing their parents, people not caring about anything but them selves. The only time anything makes sense, the only time Terry is at peace is when he’s creating. This is why he’s an artist, because if he wasn’t this world would drive him crazy.
Tim Conlon
Tim Conlon is an artist known for large-scale murals, graffiti art, and works on canvas. Conlonʼs work has been featured in museums and galleries across the country, including the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery and the Corcoran Gallery of Art. Conlonʼs work has appeared in feature films, television ads, art books and magazines, custom clothing designs, and on large street billboard advertising. Conlon is also an animator, illustrator, web designer, and video editor.
Tim Slayton - Truth Among Liars
Truth Among Liars is a cutting edge art and design unit out of Washington D.C. that specializes in textiles and concrete.
Treva Elwood
Trevor Young
Twitch
Twitch grew up in trailer park, isolated from the world in back hills of West Virginia where he always ran with the wrong crowd and spent most of the time in trouble with the law. All of his life he longed to live in the big city and at age 18 he hitched a ride to Washington DC and has lived ever since. Somewhere in between he has managed to get married, have a son, and trick a lot of folks into thinking he knows a thing or two about art. He has no formal art training to date and still spends most of time in trouble.
Ultra
Yulia Graham
Born in Yaroslavl, Russia, currently based in Washington DC, USA. Award-winning graphic artist, Yulia has worked in the design industry over 7 years. Her design experience includes developing strategic and creative concepts, identities, and brands using mixed media within a design context. She is a partner for YUDES1GN studio and does freelance projects through the AQUENT agency. Member of AIGA and Washington Project for the Arts.
- got to come strong for the Red, White & Blue (wink).
