Underground Art Gallery

“We could be anyone; we are everywhere.”
— The Guerilla Girls

 

The slick surface of this modern world teems with all the color and light that money can buy. Blink, and a thousand flickering ad campaigns blink back. Look anywhere: larger-than-life billboards and mass-produced poster boards blare down from every building, telling us whom to trust, what to want, and how to get it. Walk down the street and the airbrushed propaganda walks apace, or passes by on the side of a bus, a train, a taxi, a pair of pants. Peruse the homestead: magazines, newspapers, flyers, wrappers, postcards, inserts, bags, poster boards, and coupons clamor for us to SUBMIT. To CONSUME. To OBEY.

 

 

 

There is no space. There is no escaping the ephemera. We are at the mercy of commercial art.

 

Or are we?

 

There are those who question the façade—artists who, for the sake of personal expression, are taking back the surface for themselves. Favoring media that allow for easy and repetitive communication to a broad populace, such as silk-screening, spray cans, Xerox, photography, posters, stickers, t-shirts, the Internet and other DIY media, these artists are altering the writing on the wall.

 

They, too, are everywhere . . .

Zines
Political rebellion and artistic experimentation were the fuel for the 1960s development of the zine. From Punk zines of the 1970s to the growing popularity of the 2000s ezines, this medium gives a voice to all those who have something to say and want to be heard.

 

Comix
It was 1967 and the world was about to witness the birth of a new and soon to be highly pervasive DIY art form: the comix. Comix titles quickly vaulted into the thousands as every group started its presses, producing uncensored publications that supported their cause, their beliefs, their philosophical concerns.

 

Graffiti Art
Started in the late 1960s as simple “tags” scrawled in permanent marker in NYC subways, graffiti art evolved, with the invention of spray paint, into the highly elaborate, multicolored “burners” of today. A grand imagination coupled with painstaking attention to detail separates the “writers” from those who dabble in graffiti art.

 

Shepard Fairey
As a student at the Rhode Island School of Design in the 1980s, Fairey began his “Andre The Giant Has A Posse” propaganda campaign, not knowing that his DIY sticker and poster project would spread, not only from coast to coast, but around the world.

 

The Guerilla Girls
A 1985 exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art in NYC featured 196 artists who, according to its curator, represented the most important artists in the world. Only 13 of these artists were women. This insult spurred a handful of female artists, writers, performers and filmmakers to dig deeper. Thus was The Guerilla Girls formed.