Contemporary urban art: one artist's journey
- Ricci Michaels / Ena Nearon Menefield
- Aug 17, 2017
- 2 min read
Ricci Michaels is an award-winning artist, poet, muralist and proud disabled American veteran who has served in the Cincinnati community for over 25 years. A self-taught artist, her work has been displayed in numerous galleries including the Cincinnati Freedom Center and the Cincinnati Art Museum. Ricci is legally blind and as an artist with a visual disability, her work is often textured and interactive and reflects the social and political issues of the day.
Eclectic in her approach, Michaels uses vivid colors and elongated fluid figures to tell stories of everyday urban life. She grew up painting what she lived. Now she paints what she feels, using a painting style that is in-your-face vibrant color with stark lines and random thoughts "of a mad woman," as she describes herself.
Contemporary urban art can be defined as a style of art that relates to cities and city life often done by artists who live in or have a passion for city life. In that way urban art combines street art and graffiti and is often used to summarize all visual art forms arising in urban areas, being inspired by urban architecture or present urban lifestyle. Because the urban arts are characterized by existing in the public space, they are often viewed as vandalism and destruction of private property.
Although urban art started at the neighborhood level, where a lot of people of different cultures live together, it is an international art form with an unlimited number of uses nowadays. Many urban artists travel from city to city and have social contacts all over the world.
The notion of 'Urban Art' developed from street art which is primarily concerned with graffiti culture. Urban art represents a broader cross-section of artists that, in addition to covering traditional street artists working in formal gallery spaces, also cover artists using more traditional media but with a subject matter that deals with contemporary urban culture and political issues.
In Paris, Le Mur is a public museum of urban art. Wikipedia, the Free encyclopedia
"STREET ART IS DEAD... MAKE WAY FOR CONTEMPORARY URBAN ART !!
Exhibited on gallery picture rails and made credible through auctions, it seems the days of street art as an illegal artistic pastime are over. The internet and social networks, along with recognition from the art market, have thus revolutionized the way in which we approach these pieces from the street, which challenge the place of the individual within urban areas. This phenomenon has been widely challenged, starting with the very definition of street art."
http://observatoire-art-contemporain.com/revue_decryptage/analyse_a_decoder.php?langue=en&id=20120555
