Night after night for over a year starting in 2009, the curators Workhouse and PAC literally took street art underground by inviting the world’s leading street artists into an abandoned New York City subway station to create original artwork. The space had been abandoned for eighty years and, as PAC notes, they knew no one had been there at all, “because there was no graffiti.” Instead of a grand opening to celebrate the world’s largest underground gallery, the station was boarded up in mid-2010 when the work was completed. In the new book We Own the Night, one hundred artists and their works are documented in over two hundred images exploring the space and the process of the Underbelly project. The gallery’s location remains a secret kept by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, making it a time capsule for future generations.
We Own the Night: The Art of the Underbelly Project is out Tuesday from Rizzoli.
Ever since we began back in 2008, we have worked with photographer David Mushegain every issue to bring you a collection of some of the coolest, raddest, hippest people from all around the world. David shoots and gets to know the young kids he meets on his travels, through his friends, or just walking down the street, and we are always happy to share his discoveries with you. Our weekly postings of David’s Last People continue right here.
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The New York-based artist Garrett Pruter is known for his mosaic-style manipulations of found photographs that alter the meanings of historically and culturally important images. In his début solo exhibition at Charles Bank Gallery, Pruter will focus on the question of sexuality, reworking old pages from Playboy and Penthouse magazines into abstract expanses of bare flesh. In the first of a new series of studio visits, Pruter invited The Last Magazine‘s Zara Zachrisson for a preview of his new work.
Garrett Pruter’s “Mixed Signals” runs at Charles Bank Gallery from February 9 to March 11.
I wanted to create a stripped-down beauty piece, showing what it’s like to be watched and be watching, thus “Inside Out.” Since it was to be an abstraction, I looked for a girl who had a story written in her face. A girl with intrigue and allure.
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Melvin Majors remembers every face he has ever served and only needs four hours of sleep a night. With his alert eyes, soft smile, and shining cheeks, he is a living advertisement for the organic lifestyle. Though he can expound on all the physiological benefits of organic juicing, what keeps the customers coming back is the additional emotional benefits of his juices. “I throw some of my true Southern-roots spirit in there, which makes it more energizing, more electric,” he says.
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