Simon Doonan and Eames Inspiration to benefit Operation Design from ArtScoutTV.com on Vimeo.

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Uh, wow.

Yesterday, Beth from ArtScoutTV, Ilene, Nancy and I went on a whirlwind art studio tour of five participating artists for Eames Inspiration.  I’ve attached a few photos to show you how incredibly explosive, powerful and energetic these pieces are turning out to be.  We spoke at length to Cern; Elbow-Toe; Damon Giandes; Fernando Romero; Mike Baca and David Cooper about their inspirations, their excitement for the project  and their worldwide travels to ignite their brands on a global level.  These artists are truly amazing.

I speak for Beth, Nancy and Ilene when I say it was one of the most invigorating, exhausting and yes, inspiring afternoons I’ve spent in New York.  I think you will agree that Eames Inspiration has already begun to make its mark, even before the chairs are completed!

Thanks to everyone and enjoy!  And BilliKid and Luna – wow.

-Brian Maloney, Operation Design, Co-Founding Director, Secretary

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PUBLIC WORKS DEPARTMENT presents

EAMES INSPIRATION a benefit in support of Operation Design

at Barneys New York windows on Madison Avenue and 61st Street

Curated by Billi Kid and Luna Park

Sponsored by the EAMES FOUNDATION,the EAMES OFFICE, HERMAN MILLER. Supported by GAWKER ARTISTS, additional sponsorship by Wichcraft

EAMES INSPIRATION participating artists are:

AAKASH NIHALANI
Aakash Nihalani is fast becoming recognized as one of the world’s most striking emerging installation artists. Celebrated for his ephemeral modifications of the urban landscape, the young Brooklyn-based tape specialist wields an abstract narrative of isometric shapes and flamboyant hues grounded in quiet irony and idiosyncratic precision. The fluidity of his simple, colorful style — which employs familiar shapes to produce unexpected visuals — initiates an inviting, living dialogue that traverses the chaos of city streets, the white walls of the gallery and the constancy of home. http://www.aakashnihalani.com/

BILLI KID
Billi Kid is an NYC street artist, curator, life-long doodler, art enthusiast and design junkie. His work blur the lines between graffiti, pop culture, iconography and art. Never to busy to look, feel and listen, his collaborative works with artist from around the world have been celebrated in both the media and street art community alike. His passion for the streets has led him to curate ground breaking exhibitions that have helped bridge the gap between the urban landscape and the sterile indoor environment. http://www.billikid.com/

BLANCO
Presently Blanco weighs 168 lbs and runs 2 miles in 12 minutes. His diet consists mostly of orange juice and baklava. He enjoys reading, cycling, street art, playing soccer and listening to the most recent Minor Threat album. He is also trying to learn how to paint.

CAKE
Cake is a New York based street artist who uses anatomy as a way to describe the intricate relationship structures humans have with others and themselves.  The drawings are her ode to lines, the forms those lines make and the mechanical pencil.

CELSO
El Celso is a Brooklyn-based artist. The Art Newspaper described his recent show, “Art Burn,” an international contemporary art expo & immolation, as a “bonfire of the art vanities” and the Miami Herald declared it “a funky Basel sideshow.” His work is featured in numerous publications, street art books, web sites and blogs as well as a number of private collections. http://elcelso.com/

CERN
Cern began writing graffiti in the early nineties. Diverse in his scope, he has created numerous collaborative murals with the YMI crew and artists around the world and exhibited canvas and watercolor works in galleries around New York City and beyond. Cern has been included in books such as Burning New York and Graffiti World. http://www.ymicrew.com/

DAMON GINANDES
The work of NYC based mixed-media and street artist, Damon Ginandes, blurs the boundaries of the two and three dimensional through various techniques and materials. Weaving the figure with abstraction, Ginandes creates portraits of souls – starkly silent, yet intensely present characters who appear caught in spacial ambiguity. Devoid of context and stripped of external identity, they are are ageless, anonymous, and solitary. Their longing stares serve as a mute communication from which a distinct visual and psychological intimacy emerges. http://www.damonginandes.com/.

DARKCLOUD
The Darkcloud image has been a constant staple in the urban art scene since 2003. Conveying his art through constant installation, the image can be seen nationwide, particularly on the east and west coasts. The meaning being unclear for most, it stems from the concept that angst is always following us. It is a visual representation of the darkness in our lives we are unable to escape. The artist attempts to bring a positive light to that darkness.

DAVID COOPER
David Cooper lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. His paintings are quick glimpses of awkward and humorous imaginary events. These tall tales are meant to entertain and delight the viewer. He invites you to let your guard down and to expect the unexpected in his world, with one curious eye brow raised and maybe a smile or not.  http://www.davidcooperart.com/

ELBOW-TOE
ELBOW-TOE is a Brooklyn, NY based artist that has been creating introspective urban art for several years. His artwork for the streets is grounded in myth, symbolism and poetry and is primarily executed in woodcut, stencil or large-scale charcoal drawings. His oeuvre is a study of human gesture as communication and he utilizes public spaces as stages for private moments. He is particularly interested in the ability of environmental forces outside his control to create a timeless quality to the work thereby allowing it to feel as if it has been memory and is part of the collective unconscious. http://www.elbow-toe.com/

JOE IURATO
Joe Iurato signs his work :01. He doesn’t do it to conceal his identity, though. It’s his belief that a single second is the most powerful measurement of time — it only takes a second to decide you’re going to move forward in a positive direction, regardless of the obstacles and challenges you’ll face in life. From that decisive moment on, you should never look back.  His stencil art is a direct reflection of his daily interactions, inspirations and emotions. While the subjects of his paintings are often as random as each fleeting moment, a theme you’ll find reoccurring are powerful portraits of the young and old. For Joe, the stories and recollections of the elderly pave way to wisdom, and the curious gaze of a child reminds how precious and honest innocence is. Kind, gentle, often contemplative and full of soul, these portraits remain a large part of Joe’s expanding body of work. http://www.joeiurato.com

JAMES AND KARLA MURRAY
James and Karla Murray are professional photographers and authors who specialize in urban and low-light photography using both film and digital formats.  Their bestselling and critically acclaimed book Store Front: The Disappearing Face of New York as well as their graffiti publications, Broken Windows, Burning New York and Miami Graffiti have set the standard for urban documentation. James and Karla’s photographs have regularly appeared in publications around the globe including, The Source, City Magazine, Rolling Stone, Stern and Time Out New York. Their work is housed in major permanent collections, including the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage in Washington, D.C. and the New York Public Library. They are represented by CLIC Gallery in New York City and Galerie Basia Embiricos in Paris, France. James and Karla live in New York City and Miami with their dog Tabasco. http://www.jamesandkarlamurray.com/

LUNA PARK
In her sixth year of photographing and documenting New York City street art and graffiti, Luna Park likes nothing better than spending her free time wandering around NYC, exploring the intersections of industrial and residential areas, searching for beauty in unexpected places. Luna has built an extensive archive of urban art images at http://www.flickr.com/photos/lunapark and blogs regularly at http://thestreetspot.com. Her work has been exhibited in New York and Los Angeles and is regularly published in urban art books, magazines and blogs. She is passionate about urban art and supportive of all creative endeavors to redefine public space.

MATT SIREN
Matt Siren is an illustrator and street artist based out of Queens, NY. His art is heavily stimulated by images from the 80’s (cartoons, video games, graffiti, heavy metal CD covers), posters in the Art Nouveau style, pinup, and the emergence of modern day (computer generated) graphic design & branding.  His work is iconic – both clean and gritty, using clean lines over textural backgrounds. In 2005, he created “Ghost Girl” as his signature icon to represent his current work. Matt’s work can been seen in clothing lines by Better Days Clothing, skateboards by Reciprocal Skateboards, RoyalFlush Magazine, numerous galleries in the NYC area, as well as throughout the streets of Manhattan. http://www.mattsiren.com/

NOHJCOLEY
NohJColey:  Illustrator, graphic designer, painter, screen printer, collage artist, designer, poet, and interpreter of modern events. After an early interest in creating CD and DVD cover designs, NohJColey became highly fascinated with street art. Using his background in graphic design and collage, he began pasting 22×17 posters in public spaces throughout New York featuring graphic and textual commentary designed to change how individuals function in society. Following a period of disillusionment with the mechanical aspect of this approach, he revisited his early love of fine art and returned to his work with a more nuanced and highly crafted aesthetic. His subject matter continues to revolve around the turmoil of experience one encounters throughout everyday life, and arts unstated mission to penetrate this turmoil that separates humanity from an understanding of self.

PERU ANA ANA PERU
Peru Ana Ana Peru originated in Bushwick, Brooklyn. Currently they spend a good amount of their time making random trinkets and leaving them on streets and in public spaces for other people to find, as well
as trying to solve a Rubik’s cube in under thirty seconds.

SKEWVILLE
Skewville is most known for their fake wooden sneakers. As kids, Ad and twin brother, Droo, tossed their old sneakers over local power lines when they got new ones. It was both a symbol of change and a way to represent the hood. In 1999 they gave birth to their sneaker mission, ”When Dogs Fly”, and started making Wooden Dogs to continue their childhood mission. Since then, thousands have been silkscreened, hand cut, drilled, laced, and then tossed all over the globe. Over the past 10 years, Skewville has gained the respect of old and new street artists from around the world. While still continuing to build their street cred, they have also crossed over to the gallery scene, implementing their street-feel indoors. While always evolving their ideas, the Skewville style will continue to to be a New York Classic. http://www.skewville.org/

SOFIA MALDONADO
Sofia Maldonado is a painter mixing interdisciplinary art practice with street culture. The use of color in her works portrays her admiration for the Caribbean landscape, city chaos and the abandoned structures within. There is an evident blend of fashion, the Latina female aesthetic and street culture in her visual concept. Born in Puerto Rico from a Cuban mother in 1984, she pursued undergraduate work in art and design at La Escuela de Artes Plasticas and received her Painting MFA from Pratt Institute, New York in 2006. Sofia lives and paints in Brooklyn. http://www.sofiamaldonado.com/

STIKMAN
Since the early 1990’s the artist behind these Stikman sculptures and images has been exploring the realm of a curious old tablet found in a flea market. The image in the tablet was that of a mysterious man made out of sticks and pressed into a soft clay tablet leaving only an impression behind. The basic elements of the original stickman continue to reveal themselves in ever changing forms. A Visual Serialism. A structure free from content that behaves as a pure phenomenon. An organizing system that unfolds from a single point. And that point is a void where a physical presence once was. Some observers claim to see shamanistic qualities in these feral glyphs and votives. The figures populate the urban environment with their endless repetition and variation, embellishing the ordinary streetscape while revealing the consequences of the physical world’s forces on an idea. They become alive in the natural cycles that grind them out of existence as we observe their deterioration day after day.

UR®NEW YORK
Teamed together thru the art of grafitti Mike Baca aka 2ESAE and Fernando Romero aka SKI joined forces with the intentions to learn and grow as artists. Our mission as a collective is to create an urban industrial feel to our art by combining mediums such as photography, silk-screening, graphic design, and graffiti. Each piece tells the story of our lives, our struggles, and our environments. We want to inspire creativity amongst people specifically the youth so they can pick up where we leave off. http://www.urnewyork.com/

VENG
Originally from Staten Island, NY, Veng joined Robots Will Kill four years ago. About a year ago, he adapted his character series, lending his unique touch to the streets of NYC. As graffiti culture uses letters as a means of framework for their art, Veng attempts to morph his individual characters to become an ironic statement that blurs the line between fantasy and reality. Heavily influenced by the Flemish masters of the 15th century, he tries to capture the figurative emotions of the era, reworked within his own unique twist. Through doing so, Veng’s characters warp time and space, adding a modern view of centuries past, or vice versa. His ambition rests within the ability to capture a moment in an alternate history and reinterpret it as to where the viewer becomes immersed within the art and feels as if they are a part of the story. http://vengpaintings.com/