Urban Art Association

Jeffrey Deitch Will Bring Street-Art Show to Coney Island, by dreadnatty on Apr 30, 2015 3:20:25 GMT 1, Jeffrey Deitch Will Bring Street-Art Show to Coney Island

artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/04/29/jeffrey-deitch-will-bring-street-art-show-to-coney-island/?smid=tw-share

When the art dealer and curator Jeffrey Deitch mounted his sprawling “Art in the Streets” exhibition in 2011 at the Museum of Contemporar Art in Los Angeles, his plan from the beginning was to take the show to New York, one of the cradles of the graffiti movement. But the Brooklyn Museum, which had agreed to organize the New York exhibition, dropped out, citing a lack of funding, and Mr. Deitch, then the director of the contemporary museum in Los Angeles, was unable to find another venue.

Now, back in New York as a kind of itinerant showman and dealmaker, Mr. Deitch is planning a next-best-thing version. This summer he will open a street-art show in Coney Island, in cooperation with the real-estate developer Joseph J. Sitt, founder and chief executive of Thor Equities, which has become a major landowner in the Coney Island amusement-park area in recent years. “Coney Art Walls” will feature work by more than a dozen graffiti and street artists, many of them old-school and some new, including Lady Pink, Daze, Lee Quiñones, Swoon, Mister Cartoon, JR, Sheryo and Icy Signs, the storefront art project run by the artist Stephen Powers.

Some artists are expected to begin working in May, when the walls go up. In keeping with the spirit of street art, others will add work later and the walls will remain up into September, with no announced end date.

“I’ve always loved the energy that comes out of the New York vernacular, and I’ve dreamed of doing a show in Coney Island since I first started going there in the ’70s,” Mr. Deitch said.

The show will be centered at 1320 Bowery Street and will take place on more than 25 temporary walls built by Thor Equities, which drew criticism last year for allowing some of its land in Coney Island to sit vacant and collect garbage. The walls will be interspersed with truck containers to create a pop-up summer village, where concerts will be held, with food sold by vendors organized by Smorgasburg.

“We hope this will be successful and draw crowds and have an economic impact and continue on into next year,” Mr. Deitch said. “They really need things like this in Coney Island.”