Icy and Sot

"Merry X-mas" Brooklyn, New York, 2012

Since the 2009 uprisings in Tehran, the Iranian creative community hasn't had the easiest time of it whenever it chooses to question its government. Whether they stay or leave, a small yet flourishing underground art culture has emerged globally.

Two of the most prominent figures in that movement are brothers Icy and Sot, skaters and street artists from the city of Tabriz, in northwestern Iran, specializing primarily in stencil artwork. On March 14, they and their work will be paying a visit to Houston at Aerosol Warfare Gallery - another stop on their East Middle West Tour of four U.S. cities. Fellow Iranian rabble-rousers the punk rock band The Yellow Dogs are part of the excursion.

We recently spoke with Icy and Sot in San Francisco and Los Angeles.

Tell us about the East Middle West Tour.

Icy: It's something we have been planning with The Yellow Dogs for a few months now, so it's exciting to be finally living it -- taking our art to a broader audience and spreading awareness. We will be introducing new work and also site-specific installations in each city, with live sets from The Yellow Dogs at each opening-night event.

Sot: It will be eight guys traveling 8,000 miles in a small van, but it has been and will be worth it. There are so many people that we have met online and corresponded with, but until now we have not been able to meet them face to face. So that's been really special, and we can't wait to meet more of those people in Houston and Chicago, and to also make new friends and earn new fans.

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Photos by Altamese Osborne

Across the street from Discovery Green stands Phoenicia Specialty Foods Downtown Market, a stately eight-month-old addition to the family-owned grocery store's original Westheimer location. Inside the store, blinding white walls are lined with shelves holding ethnic foods and goods, while freshly baked pita bread puffs work their way down a conveyor belt and into an employee's waiting hands. Walk down what employees call the "runway," and you bump into the store's adjoining Market Bar, an intimate brick space that offers dishes culled from Phoenicia's own aisles, a nightclub atmosphere and art-lined walls -- like artist GONZO247's Yummy! 247 exhibition, which opened to a hip crowd Wednesday night. ("Yummy" is, not-so-coincidentally, Phoenicia's slogan du jour.)

The Market, or MKT, Bar regularly hangs art pieces on its walls, changing exhibitions every few months. "It was time to rotate the art," said Haig Tcholakian, Phoenicia's Wine and Beer Manager, listed on the store's website as "The Brother of Brews." Phoenicia's key players already had GONZO247, graffiti artist extraordinaire and cofounder of street art group Aerosol Warfare, in mind for the next rotation. Tcholakian had taken a graffiti writing skills class from the artist, and Tina Zulu, owner of public relations, web design and branding firm Zulu Creative (Phoenicia is one of her clients), was already a fan of the "spray can artist," as GONZO247 calls himself.

"I asked how he could tie in the market to the art that he created," Zulu remembers saying.

GONZO247 took about three weeks from conception to execution to create a 16-piece series of spray-painted works. "The theme is a day in the life of Phoenicia," he explained.

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The Art Guys are coming to Houston's East End.

The East End revival continues. This time with a "dream team of famous public works artists" who will transform the area with out-of-the-box benches and trash cans.

The Greater East End District recently announced that Anthony Thompson Shumate, Gary Sweeney, METALAB and the Art Guys (a.k.a. Michael Galbreth and Jack Massing) are working on pedestrian-centric streetscape projects that will also include public transportation stops, information kiosks and street signage.

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Photo courtesy Alex Luster

Street art documentarian Alex Luster, a 2012 MasterMinds winner, poses with Houston's anonymous street artists.

Under cover of night, Houston's anonymous street artists have been toiling away in secret at Winter Street Studios, building the most amazing collaborative mural of street art Houston will have ever seen. If you're a fan of Cutthroat, Shreddi, Ack!, 2:12 or any of Houston's other street artists, you want to be sure to make it to our 2012 Artopia and MasterMinds awards ceremony, Saturday, January 28, at 8 p.m at Winter Street. Why? Because this mural will be destroyed once the party's over. You'll only have one chance to see it.

Until then, you can take a sneak peek at our slideshow of detail shots of the Artopia mural. See if you can guess the artist behind each slide.

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Nathaniel Donnett stands next to one of his "new news" newspaper racks.

Nathaniel Donnett has created his own newspaper.

That's right: Donnett has taken on the media. He has created a free, faux periodical, joined with seven separately decorated newspaper racks placed strategically throughout the Third Ward area, that combine for a street art/art installation/print media/social commentary fusion entitled "What's The New News?"

Fed up with what he says are negatively slanted news stories printed about his Third Ward community, the visual artist has made it his mission to rewrite, reprint and ultimately refocus on the Third Ward as a community full of culture and life.

"I wanted to fulfill a need or concern in the way that I knew how to address it," said Donnett. "Not all media is one-dimensional."

The newspapers and their corresponding racks are located in seven locations in Third Ward: the Almeda Street Mail Office, The Breakfast Klub, The Reggae Hut, the Black Heritage Art Gallery, the Texas Southern University Art Department, the El Dorado Room, the Community Artists Collective and the S.H.A.P.E. Community Center.

A "feed box" newspaper rack sits at the Black Heritage Art Gallery.

Each newspaper rack is designed to match its surroundings.

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ACK! takes on Jenni's Noodle House.

If you are just about to the point of Christmas decoration overload and even the most ridiculous looking blow-up snowman inside a snow globe doesn't make you crack a smile, head over to Jenni's Noodle House in the Heights for something totally different. Look up and you will see a recently constructed, 14-foot "holiday" installation piece atop the roof.

You might recognize the guy in the party hat slurping up a bowl of Jenni's hot noodles as the signature character of Houston graffiti artist ACK! ACK!'s work can be seen all over town on the sides of buildings and abandoned lots. Putting up a giant, billboard-sized creation is new territory for the artist, who usually does his best to keep a low profile.

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Courtesy photo

The very first red dot, in rural Kansas.

"Anyone know about these red dots painted around Montrose," a poster recently asked on the local music forum Hands Up Houston. "Keep seeing them, have always wondered."

The question included a link to a Google Maps street view of one Montrose-area dot. Another poster said he'd heard the artist painted the orbs while nude, a story that piqued our interest.

Art Attack has seen those red dots before, too. But for some reason they'd never really stood out in all the other weirdness that makes up the Montrose. But having never heard of the Red Dot Boys before that Hands Up post, we decided to do a little research and get to the bottom (pun intended) of the question.

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Photo by Abby Koenig

Lots more pictures from Via Colori can be found in our slideshow.

This weekend marked the annual Via Colori street painting festival. Now in its sixth year, the weekend-long festival brings the asphalt surrounding Sam Houston Park to life with art...literally. Artists from across the country, as well as a plethora of local talent, take it to the streets and create giant works out of chalk. Each artist is designated a portioned-off square within which to spend the weekend creating their pastel masterpieces.

The process kicked off Saturday morning and went through Sunday evening, giving patrons 48 hours to watch the artists in action. The squares range from 4x4 to 10x10, and that's feet! The works created also range in style, effort and talent. The genres displayed in this weekend's works were a delightful assortment of contemporary to classic, the "Creation of Adam" to a Keith Haring tribute, Warhol and Basquiat to Woody and Buzz (that's "Lightyear"). There are no criteria for what an artist can do with their square; it is just a matter of personal flavor.

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Gene Morgan

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You make street art. I picture you dressed in all black, sneaking-up late night, just to wheat paste a poster of a cat below a giant advertisement for Bud Light. Or maybe you spend hours painting a wall with well-executed artwork, and it's extremely likely this artwork has no deeper meaning other than "this building was ugly, I put some pretty colors on it."

I don't like street art. It's usually ugly, overly hyped, and it has very little social or intellectual content beyond its surface. It's rare to find a situation when a regular-ass person is affected by it.

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If you've been living in Houston these last few months, unless you have a singular case of tunnel vision or are literally visually impaired, you are all too aware of the "Dick for Houston" campaign.

The former Inbred Whiteboy bassist-turned-attorney Eric Dick is running for city council at large, and his red-and-white posters are now as ubiquitous on Houston city streets and highways as nail salons and "We buy gold" emporiums.

Houston's street art community has taken note. They may not like Dick's message or aesthetic, but they damn sure have been impressed with the dude's work ethic and sheer volume. But then Dick was heard to utter some anti-street art sentiments recently, and now local artist Shreddi has decided to fire back. Let the dick-swinging begin...

Art Attack: What is it about Eric Dick that gets to you?

Shreddi: I don't think a lot of people have picked up on the fact that politicians use graffiti tactics for their personal gain. Each election year, without fail, we get this illegal political signage jammed all over empty lots, chain-link fences, telephone poles, etc. The problem is, once elected, these politicians persecute the general public for doing the same fucking thing...It's a double standard. It's funny too, because when I pulled down one of these signs, there was another political sign underneath it. So they're even covering each other's tags. I read last year the city spent a million dollars on graffiti cleanup. Politicians could probably cut that number in half if they'd stop posting their mind-numbing graffiti everywhere. Obviously I have no problem with self-promotion, or art in the streets. I have a problem with politicians holding the public to standards they don't abide to themselves. And I don't have anything specifically against Dick....his ballsy sign campaign just stood out.

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