Graffiti art (Uncommissioned Street Art) Featured on Pink Concrete Block Wall and at the Geffen Contemporary at MOCA in Little Tokyo

by Catherine Schofield Sezgin, ARCA Blog Editor-in-Chief

Last week, under view of the famed Hollywood sign (which once itself advertised a housing tract), I photographed old and new 'uncommissioned' street art on a concrete block wall at the northwest corner of Beverly Boulevard and La Brea Boulevard.  A kosher deli and bakery on the other side of this wall has many customers in the attire of people belonging to the Orthodox Jewish community. Somehow the non-commissioned street art here does not seem as offensive or as scary as those photographs I took last month of graffiti outside of the musée d'art moderne de la ville de Paris.

'Art in the Streets' opened Sunday in Los Angeles at the Geffen Contemporary at MOCA in Little Tokyo.  The show is curated by MOCA Director Jeffrey Deitch, a former New York art consultant and dealer who's former gallery still publicizes an archived website, and "made possible by" The Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation, the art philanthropy organization founded on profits from building suburban tract housing (read about Eli Broad in The New Yorker here).  Outlaw art seems to have been invited through the front door.

Northwest corner of La Brea and  Beverly