Sean Rocha

Retna graf going up on the Deitch wall

It is 10.12pm on a Sunday and Retna is in one of his moods.  The West Coast graffiti artist, whose real name is Marquis Lewis, is working on a mural for what used to be called the Deitch wall (for art impresario Jeffrey Deitch, whose war with the mad genius Italian artist Blu I wrote about previously) and is now just the commissioned street art space at the corner of Houston and the Bowery.  This is the wall that most recently had a torn-comics piece by Faile and — as I wrote about in this post — before that a photo by the French artist JR.  Now, it is Retna’s turn to put up his crazy personal language.  Or will be: the wall was supposed to be done yesterday and might not even get done tonight, but that’s alright because Retna has a few things to say to the passersby and when he is not doing that he’s dancing — yes, that’s him in the photograph above.

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Click here to read all my posts about street art.  Or here to read a history of the Deitch wall — which started with Keith Haring 30 years, long before Deitch got involved — on the Complex site.  But, really, you should watch this stop-motion video by Blu about evolution and the Big Bang, which is just mind blowing.

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 4th, 2012 at 10:11 pm. It is filed under That is Genius and tagged with art, Deitch, New York, Retna, street art. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.