RANDOM
ART AUCTION
BLACK ART AUCTION
Hello, my people! So many of you have requested a way to purchase artwork. To be honest we’ve been spending so much time working on these big public pieces that we haven’t been in the studio very much building up our inventory of artwork.
We are welcoming this winter and enjoying this time to work on new pieces. In the meantime and in-between time, we have the honor of partnering with Calabar Gallery and currently have two large pieces available for auction on their platform. Both Fame and fly could be all yours. Bidding is currently open and will be until December 14th
ABOUT THE AUCTION
“Homesick Philly” Black Art Auction Curated By Chill Moody And Atim Annette Oton Is The First Auction To Celebrate Philadelphia Black Artists Whose Work Speaks To The Creative, Vibrant Stories, Street, Fashion And Visual Culture Of The City. The Auction Will Amplify And Increase Awareness Of Black Artists, Sales For These Emerging Black Artists And Expand The Number Of Buyers And Collectors For Their Work. Working With Visit Philly’s Initiative “Homesick Philly”, The Art Auction Will Be Facilitated By Calabar Gallery’s Web Platform Who Began Art Auctions In 2020 In Response To The Need For Artists To Create Income During The Pandemic. The Auction Will Begin November 29 And Run 15 Days
UNDERNEATH IT ALL
UNDERNEATH IT ALL
So much of Blackness is defined in opposition or relation to whiteness, after the labels, the castes, the stereotypes, and social-behavioral expectations are removed, what’s underneath? This piece explores one possibility of what’s underneath it all.
It is our very first print edition and is included in @versal_amsterdam VERSO subscription box. It is printed in an edition of 50.
This month’s theme is Redaction / Annotation, inspired by the work of Christina Sharpe; in her text In the Wake: On Blackness and Being
I will be giving away this signed artists proof to a random person who helps get the word out. Yep, a sharer gets a free signed print 🙂 Please share with your fam, friends and frienemies.
Keep connecting with the true authentic self…existence is much more expansive than categorizations.
Value: In Terms of Iconography
VALUE FEATURED IN PHOTOVILLE
Hi 👋🏾 party people. We are so excited to share a collaborative project that we have been working with Erin Patrice O’Brien on. Let’s start at the very, very beginning. We met Erin Patricia O’Brien a few years back while working under a different name. We were not new to her images as she is a veteran in the game of photography. One of our members has fond memories of going through vibe magazine, swooning over O’Brien’s work, and pretty much beginning to carve her own creative identity.
Creativity doesn’t live in a vacuum. We firmly believe that everyone is inspired by everything that they take in around them from images, sound smells, movies, experiences etc. The ability to see yourself or the potential of yourself in terms of being a woman, being black, being a person of color in mainstream and celebrated is such an honor and a gift as far as personal development goes. As creatives that identify as ‘arrangers’, we are often collecting things both literally and conceptually that serves as a palette for us to work with. It has been a real fun time to include Erin Patrice O’Brien’s archives in the mix of that palette. We sit on the back of so many other creatives who have paved the way for us, This project is a homage, archival study, and celebration of all the shoulders that we sit on.
We had the pleasure of going through O’Brien’s archives and remixing them in celebration of the value it is to see yourself in terms of iconography.
This project has been in the works for a little bit over a year. We wanted to make sure that it has its proper reverence as it does deal with value. We are super excited to announce that some of the images from this collaboration along with additional collages and photographs by Mz. Icar will be on display in downtown Brooklyn as part of this year’s Photoville exhibition.
The work will be on public display at Brooklyn Bridge Park – Pier 4 Beach September 17th -November 29th
Very limited edition prints are for sale please hit us up, mz@mzicar.com for the price list.
ABOUT PHOTOVILLE
The Photoville Festival, New York City’s FREE premier photo destination, returns for a ninth year in a different way – online community and artist programming plus photo exhibitions in public spaces throughout New York City.
This annual community gathering features public exhibitions, virtual storytelling events, artist talks, workshops, demonstrations, educational programs, and community programming. The Photoville Festival provides an accessible venue for photographers and audiences from every walk of life to engage with each other, and experience thought-provoking photography from across the globe – with free admission for all!
Check out the website photoville.nyc for more details.
STUDY UP
STUDIO VISIT: STUDY UP
In this week’s studio visit we explore a few archives of painting studies. The following are the pieces featured. They are all available for sale. Contact us at mz@mzicar.com.
Title: Paint Study #1005
Size: 13 Inches X 19 Inches
Medium: Plastic Sleeve, Acrylic, Paint on paper
Year: 2018
Title: Paint Study #1006
Size: 13 Inches X 19 Inches
Medium: Plastic Sleeve, Acrylic, Paint on paper
Year: 2018
Title: Paint Study #1004
Size: 13 Inches X 19 Inches
Medium: Plastic Sleeve, Acrylic, Paint on paper
Year: 2018
Title: Paint Study #1003
Size: 13 Inches X 19 Inches
Medium: Plastic Sleeve, Acrylic, Paint on paper
Year: 2018
This is what happens when your peeps put you onto ‘Alone’. Check out our remix of this week’s studio visit
BLACKOUT
We are going to tell you a true story.
there were these people who lived here, all over, and did things a particular way…as people do. then some other people came from a far place. they came because they couldn’t figure out how to be seen where they lived. these poor people, because they were never seen, they didn’t know how to see. they used this to justify and enforced dumb rules that continued not to see people and smoosh people. These folks were so blind that after the smooshing, they traveled far and brought more people that they refused to see, so that they could create little towers to sit on top of and overlook people and places that they couldn’t see. they also told the world, that this is the most wonderful place for being seen. so if they are having trouble being seen, come here, help build some towers and be seen…just a little more then the folks they brought and the folks they smooshed, but not very much. the people who they couldn’t see started removing the bricks of the towers. when the towers started to shake the blind folks picked a representative from the folks they refused to see and tried to prove that they could see, by seeing that particular representative. this was done so they couldn’t be accused of having vision problems. it did create a bit of confusion, and some residual blindness amongst the unseen. this got the unseen folks to slow down the dismantling of the towers. this went on for many years, but the towers were still being slowly dismantled from many angles. in fact, this went on so long that the unseen started to outnumber the vision-impaired folks. then the super high towers fell. after they fell, the light was so bright that all folks had to learn to see again.
i see you.
you will see me.
This is from an installation created in 2016…we been saying.
TOLD YOU SO
TOLD YOU SO
Welcome to another week our archival studio visits. This week’s visit will be centered around the theme ‘I told you so’. One of the amazing aspects of having the opportunity to exercise creativity is that it puts the artist closer to the pulse and vibration of what’s going on and maybe sometimes even ahead of the game. All of these featured pieces represent that. All of the work featured in this grouping were a bit forward-leaning for their time, but super relevant now. At the time we were imagining kinda dark futures.
We don’t really create in that vain these days. I guess you needed to be where you were at to get to where you are now. If that was super confusing, just know that you are here 🙂
All of these pieces are available hit us up if interested mz@mzicar.com
THOTS ON ARCHIVING
THOTS ON ARCHIVING
I’m not going to lie. We spend a lot of time running around like our heads are cut off. This quarantine time has been a good moment for us to collect our thoughts, align with purpose, get our inventory together and just take a breath.
Before world war COVID broke out we had a chance to get up with our friends and visit the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture for a talk on archiving. They were specifically discussing hip hop journalists archiving, under the overarching theme of archiving Black culture. As collage artists and magazine junkies, this was so up our alley. Funny enough we happened to be in the middle of our own archiving process. We were painstakingly going through all of Junkprint’s old work categorizing measuring, storing and pricing all work to make all pieces available for purchase. Because after all if it hasn’t been archived did it even exist? And if you are relying on social media networks to create your archives keep in mind, it’s rough to build your house on other people’s property.
This time of isolation allowed us not only time to work on new pieces, but It also allowed us space and time to carefully curate video studio visits. Each week we will be pulling between 3-5 pieces of artwork and explaining the context and process of creation and how they came to exist. This group of work will be a combination of Junkprints archives as well as new Mz. Icar work.
We will be releasing the videos on YouTube, IGTV, and here every Wednesday at 11:00 a.m. Enjoy the first one below
TYPE PLAY
TYPE PLAY
We spend a lot of time playing and working on studies. Many of our projects require experimentation as they are quite tactile. We love the digital world…but real life in where it’s at, touch something fuzzy, taste something sweet, hug a tree small some plants and gaze upon something shiny in real-life, that kind of thing. These are some recent manifestations of that play. They do not have a purpose, application or home per se but one of our members has been musing about a clothing line. it’ all TBD, but in the meantime here’s some manifestations of that play.
WE LOVE
WE LOVE
The other day our homie Kendra from ‘I wanna hear pod’ put us on to Curbed’s, Nice Try Utopia podcast. Of course, we were all over it. World-building and reimagining the past and future is so our thing. The first episode is about Jamestown, the first permanent English settlement in America. The podcast goes on to debunk the romantic version of this story told in our history books as well as a contextual of the ‘why’s and how’s’. The one thing that really stood out to me was the part in which these colonizers just lose the fuck out of their humanity. They are starving they start slaughtering indigenous folks and eventually start burning down their own fort for firewood and digging up corpses and eating them. Right when they are about to leave, the company that commissioned the mission demands they stay, sends a whole bunch more Englishmen, kidnapped some folks from Angola, forced slavery and thus America. Honestly, you have to listen to this podcast, this is just a lil summary. They go in. Anyhoot, that stayed with me because origin stories have weight and in this case, if the folks who ‘settled’ America were so far gone to begin with, one could only imagine what 400 years later would look like. I mean these dudes were bat shit crazy. They needed to be getting hugs a warm meal and some trauma therapy so they could stop terrorizing the indigenous folks and get they minds rights. Nope, that didn’t happen, they just ate folks and started a nation instead.
Soooooo that got is thinking about the impact of simply loving up on each other. Like for real love, not ownership, or possessiveness. The type of love that sees oneself in another. That’s open to listening and understands how to support and be an advocate. I know, I know it sounds mad mushy, well it is, the point is to feel good. Full belly full heart etc. So we decided that we are gonna share with you things/situations we love. Cuz it’s February and those lil naked violent flying babies want us to spread love, it’s the Brooklyn way and we’re like Oprah, we love a lot and we have stellar taste. After all, our thots matter.
A couple of our members had the honor of creating an engagement video for J Mandela and Shea. We took a lil road trip, upstate, encountered some racism, loved up on some plants and highlighted the love between these two. We love the way it came out and are super duper happy about this wedding.
We love Millennium Skate rink in Camden NY, I almost don’t want to share my love of this place because I’m afraid y’all might blow it up and all its charms will be lost. So, this is what we love about it. It’s black-owned meaning that the music and vibe are centric to the black community…you won’t hear any pop music even on kids skate sessions. It’s black on black on black. It’s reasonably priced and we get our souls on the rink.
We got portraits taken. We are so fly. We love us. Here’s the back story on this masked bandit crew shot. Folks keep asking us about biopics and we tell ’em we are anonymous…and they are like ‘oh ok, can I get a bio pic?’ Le sigh, basically we really value IRL connections and feel that it is an honor and privilege to connect in the real world. As far as internet presence goes, we appreciate the interest, but we don’t know you bruh, just ‘like’ the work, vibe with us or keep it moving. Our likeness representation is not intended for content. We take our art real seriously and will not be tokenized of sexualized while doing it unless we initiate that.
We are full of love so we’ll continue to sprinkle some love posts throughout the thots.
YOU MAY SHOP NOW
We are constantly evaluating and exploring our relationship with commerce and capitalism and looking for alternative opportunities of exchange. some of this exploration has been why it’s been so long coming to getting an online store up.
I’ve been thinking a lot about what we as a society are looking for on the internet, and what we can’t we purchase or have a hard time obtaining and what we should be trying to obtain. That thot process leads me to the creation of these new cans. For me, the internet is another platform, another medium, and it’s a context in which to explore the relationship of people, their interactions and the way that we interact with the world.
We love solutions, we love the absurdity of old ads (and full disclosure can’t wait until our current ads become old these pharmaceutical commercials are out of control). we are very much so American (most apparent when we are out of the country but that’s a different post) and so inherently, we are obsessed with the notion of a very quick fix. We also love painting and have a ton of empty cans in the studio. It’s bad enough that were spraying all this aerosol into the world might as well make sure that we are upcycling.
Thus I present to you my latest collection intended for the internet.
This series wouldn’t be complete without having some type of real life experience and so we have made a quarter of each edition available on the streets. They will be done in the form of a scavenger hunt and/or We’ll be posting where these items are and they will be free and up for grabs.
Keep your eyes peeled and your ear to the streets.
If you aren’t all about running around these streets (which I can’t imagine why you wouldn’t be) you can also purchase editions on HERE
