News on the arts, music, dining, restaurants and all things that make our city a cultural mecca on the rise.
Public art captures a moment in time reflecting a community and its spirit. The beauty of public art is that it can inspire heal; the hard part is that it comes and it goes.
Amara Phelps, work also featured in the show, struck through her wall label with ‘S-O-L-D’ in a purple marker. Amara, Yasmin Safarzadeh (curator), and plenty of staff from the Opportunity Networks would meet weekly for the preceding months in a studio space all their own at Positive Street Art in Nashua. Guided by their peers, but mostly themselves, they would assemble a body of work. Studies in concept, figure, form, and display were practiced, some galleried but none wasted.
Graffiti is a form of street art that is a worldwide art movement, hugely popular and growing. Displays of it are mostly found in urban areas and public locations on exterior walls, highway overpasses, and bridges. It ranges from small sprayed “tags” to murals that cover entire building facades. Street art is no longer seen as just vandalism.
Something unforeseen and unprecedented in the recent past is growing in New Hampshire. Internationally renowned curator and metalsmith Margaret Jacobs (Akwesasne Mohawk) and notorious rabble-rouser and multimedia artist Yasamin Safarzadeh have joined forces with Positive Street Art to establish a multi-year endeavor with a growing list of community partners to bring us one of the most happening and accessible Contemporary Indigenous exhibitions to grace this side of the Northeast.
On May 6, the 40th Annual Arts Awards Gala honors businesses, individual artists and cultural organizations for positively impacting communities across the Granite State. The event will be at the DoubleTree by Hilton Manchester Downtown from 5 to 8 p.m.