The Bowery Art Wall unveiled its 2019 canvas with #TatsCru. The canvas turned a page mid-year to #queenandreaone ~ today we watched as #tomokazumatsuyama and crew were putting what looked like finishing touches on a stunning new Bowery Wall.
The artist began, with a blank canvas on September 10th. We caught up with him on September 21st, with the Wall nearing completion, and a continuous flow of onlookers ~ cellphone cameras in hand.
His work is best described in his dossier this way ~ “Matsuyama’s work responds to his own bi-cultural experience of growing up between Japan and America by bringing together aspects of both Eastern and Western aesthetic systems.His practice repositions traditional icons within a broader global context in order to create a distinctive style that resists cultural categorization and embodies what the artist refers to as the “struggle of reckoning the familiar local with the familiar global.” By raising questions of national and individual identity through the formal qualities and subject matter of his paintings, Matsuyama examines the “natural chaos” of our social environments and challenges viewers to confront their own conceptions of cultural homogeneity.”
The artist,, Tomokazu Matsuyama, (Matzu), was born in Japan (1976), and after attending Sophia University in Tokyo, he moved to New York, where he received his MFA in Communications Design in 2004 from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn.
He has an impressive exhibition resume, including the Japan Society, Reischauer Institute at Harvard University, the Katzen Arts Center at American University Museum in Washington, D.C., and the Museum of Contemporary Art Museum in Sydney, Australia, and on and on……
From 2012 to 2017, Matsuyama was an Adjunct Professor at the School of Visual Arts, NYC. His works are in the permanent collections of Asian Art Museum, San Francisco, the Royal Family, Dubai, UAE, The Standard Hotel, the Cosmopolitan Hotel Group, Microsoft Collection, and on and on….
The artist lives and works in Brooklyn.
Goldman Properties, curated by Jessica Goldman Srebnick continues the promotion and exhibition of murals at The Wynwood Walls in Miami and Houston Bowery Wall here in New York.
The Bowery Wall is located on the corner of Bowery and Houston Street on the Lower East Side.
Want more street art? Check out The Mural Project and Graffiti in the Sky, Beyond the Streets NYC still on view for a few more weeks! Save the date for JR: Chronicles arriving at Brooklyn Museum in October.
