ExhibitBE graffiti activist Brandan Odums at New Orleans Jazz Fest 2015
By Doug MacCash, NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune
on May 02, 2015 at 7:00 AM, updated May 02, 2015 at 7:02 AM
Not all of the stars at the New Orleans Jazz Fest 2015 express themselves with guitars or trombones. Brandan Odums' instrument is a can of spray paint.
Odums made headlines in September 2013 when he joined other graffiti artists in painting murals in the interior of the fenced-off Florida public housing development, which had been unoccupied since Hurricane Katrina and the 2005 flood that immediately followed.
In the early 21st century, no art form has been hotter than graffiti. But most graffiti is merely self-referential. Renegade spray painting is often political in that it is an illegal anti-authority action. It rarely, however, has anything specific to say beyond raw subversiveness.
In New Orleans, Odums changed that. His graffiti murals were portraits of Civil Rights heroes from Martin Luther King Jr. to Angela Davis to Bob Marley. Rendered in a colorful, representational style, Odums' paintings were a tribute to the generations of activists who had come before. His suite of works, which he called "ProjectBe," packed a particular political punch in the context of the empty and debris-strewn Florida apartments.
Not since Banksy bombed the city with Hurricane and flood-related stencils in 2008 had graffiti had such an important reason to exist. The trouble was, though Odums' multi-part graffiti masterpiece was well known, for safety reasons, the public couldn't get a look at it.
So in the fall of 2014, Odums reprised the project on an even grander scale, on the outside of a similarly empty and ruined apartment complex on New Orleans' West Bank. The project, called "ExhibitBE," included multi-story murals by graffiti artists from across the city, country and world as well as Odums' portraits. It became a city-wide sensation, with large crowds gathering amid the towering paintings. Odums called it the biggest graffiti environment in the south.
read more: http://news360.com/digestarticle/8z9X4yK1S0STAhEvXy-OCg
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