Tag: Jay Shells
ANIMAL showcases a different street artist regularly in our feature, Scratching the Surface. This week, we profile Jay Shells. Name/Alias: Jason Shelowitz / Jay Shells Decade you were born in: Tail end of the ’70s City you currently live: New York, New York Drugs or natural highs? Natural. How did you get your name? My […]
After getting New Yorkers to clean up their act with his etiquette campaign, artist Jay Shells has been memorializing iconic hip-hop lyrics with the Rap Quotes project. For the project, Shells identifies specific locations mentioned in rap songs, paints them on street signs, and posts them at the intersections they identify. It’s a way to […]
“Let’s face it. What I’m doing isn’t really vandalism,” Jay Shells tells ANIMAL after a weekend of putting his site-specific Rap Quotes around Philadelphia. “But the questionably legal act of installing signs became trickiest around City Hall and the Liberty Bell where an abundance of bored security guards are waiting to flex on a smart ass like me.” But he got it done. […]
On Saturday night in Los Angeles, a crowd filled 1988 Gallery for an exhibition of “Rap Quotes,” a series of works by Jay Shells. The right side of the gallery housed the artist’s New York City street signs, which he’s been hanging at specific locations mentioned in hip hop songs since last year; the left […]
So far, artist Jay Shells has installed a total of 68 site-specific “Rap Quotes” in New York, with more coming. Yesterday, just like old times when we first covered the project, ANIMAL followed Shells as he put up 21 new uncanny signs with hip hop lyrics that shout-out street corners and locations in Queens, Brooklyn, Manhattan, the […]
ANIMAL’s feature Artist’s Notebook asks artists to show us their original “idea sketch” next to a finished piece. This week, Jay Shells — of Rap Quotes fame on both coasts — talks about his New York-centric, labor-of-love-intensive wood burning series, on view March 7th-9th at the Fountain Art Fair. A little over two years ago, while walking my dogs […]
The federal ruling that deemed the NYPD’s stop-and-frisk tactics unconstitutional was a landmark decision, but the battle is far from over. Mayor Bloomberg, who recently said “I think we disproportionately stop whites too much and minorities too little,” already said he’s going to appeal the decision. In the meantime, to keep the pressure on, ANIMAL teamed […]
After schooling New Yorkers on etiquette via numerous unsanctioned interventions, artist Jay Shells channeled his love of hip hop music and his uncanny sign-making skills towards a brand new project: “Rap Quotes.” For this ongoing project, Shells created official-looking street signs quoting famous rap lyrics that shout out specific street corners and locations. He then […]
Artist Jay Shells — who our readers know from putting up uncanny “subway etiquette,” telling the cops to clean up after their horses and gloriously punking Fox News — is getting married, yey! His proposal was perfectly appropriate: “RACHEL WILL YOU MARRY ME?” in five graffitied rooftops on the Upper East Side. “I was definitely going to paint the proposal […]
