“ALPHABET SOUP II” Group Show
September 24, 2022SATURDAY AUGUST 20, 2022, 5-10PM
OPENING RECEPTION:
“ALPHABET SOUP II” GROUP SHOW
EASTERN PROJECTS is proud to present our SUMMER 2022 GROUP SHOW: “ALPHABET SOUP II” with artists Big Sleeps, Chaz Bojorquez, Cryptic, Defer, Retna, and Prime. Join us this Saturday, August 20, 5-10pm, no reservations required. These artists are all ” HANDSTYLE” masters of their craft, traveling the world and representing Los Angeles and West Coast graffiti. The first “Alphabet Soup” show took place at the “Boathouse Gallery” in Lincoln Heights in the summer of 2013. Some of these artists were emerging, a few already established, come see the evolution of their practices 9 years later.
Each artist created a serigraph print for this occasion, they will be available for purchase starting Saturday August 20.
Alphabet Soup ll runs from August 20, 2022- September 17, 2022
Alphabet Soup ll Group Show Artists Talk with David Brafman and Steve Grody
Saturday, September 3, 2022, from 5-7pm
Free admission, no reservation required
Conversation with Los Angeles leading artists, Chaz Bojorquez, David “Big Sleeps” Cavazos, Cryptik, Alex “Defer” Kizu, Jose “Prime” Reza, and moderated by David Brafman
With special guest Steve Grody.
David Brafman has been the Getty’s rare books curator since 2002. In 2011 Art collectors Ed and Brandy Sweeney wanted to amass and donate to Getty Research Institute (GRI) a master-piece book, a black book of graffiti and tattoo art that represented crews throughout LA. They were directed to Brafman, whose career stemmed from his favorite high school pastime: tagging D-trains with Egyptian hieroglyphs while they slept in the Brooklyn Rail Yards. Through the Sweeney’s Brafman invited art-crews from all over the city to GRI to view and page through books and manuscripts that somehow resonated with his nights in the Brooklyn yards. 151 of Los Angeles’s most renowned graffiti and tattoo artists pored through Renaissance writing manuals, emblem books, and catalogues of horse-brands, volumes on perspective and sacred geometry, virtuoso calligraphic penwork (both European and Islamic) and a 1751 book from Naples on Peruvian Quipu ‘knot-language.’ There were others.
In 2012 The 151 responded by donating 143 works on paper—some were collaborative—bound into a unique black-leather 4 x 1 foot volume (when opened), called Getty Graffiti Black Book. The artists, however, wanted another title. They had been struck by a 17th-century liber amicorum (“book of friends”), a genre of manuscript originally sold as bound blank leaves, passed from hand to hand to be filled with signatures, poetry, mottoes, and coats of arms—artistic symbols of social identity. A kindred object to a street writer’s black book. So, the artists insisted on the Getty Black Book’s real title: They named it LA Liber Amicorum, for it had transformed rival crews into an LA Book of Friends.
10 years later Getty published a mini-me trade version: LA Graffiti Black Book (Los Angeles, Getty Publications: 2022) with an intro. by Brafman.
Steve Grody has been documenting graffiti in Los Angeles since the early 1980’s, canvasing the neighborhoods with his camera. Over the last 20 plus years, he has amassed over 20,000 images of graffiti, murals, the artists, and their environments. In 2007, he published his first book from his archives,Graffiti L.A.: Street Styles and Art.