We’re thrilled the share the Long Beach Museum of Art has extended ‘Vitality and Verve: Transforming the Urban Landscape’ an additional month till October 25th. If you have yet to be convinced to make the trip down to Long Beach for this monumental exhibition, here is the press round up of the show highlighting the fantastic work and its importance to the post-contemporary art movement.
Artist Meggs, who created a triptych throughout the museum, describes his pieces in his own words.
“‘Not the Enemy’ my 3-part installation represents the misconceptions, fears and negative stigmas associated with graffiti culture.
When institutions begin to recognise the social and artistic importance of this movement, its also important to recognise and understand the roots of that movement and the broad spectrum of people & practices it involves. Several weeks prior to this monumental show, unarmed 19 year old Hector Morejon was shot & killed by police in Long Beach whilst allegedly painting graffiti in an abandoned building.
One of two teens killed in Long Beach in so many months. As an artist who has explored and painted in abandoned buildings myself, I felt it was important to recognise this tragic event and how unnecessarily extreme this course of action was, as is much of the negative social stigma and over-inflated harsh legal penalties associated with Graffiti Art.
This is also part of a larger problem, the treatment and violence towards unarmed citizens in the US.
No doubt police and lawmakers have a hard job to do, but the re-occurrence and number of these ‘unarmed’ shootings is evidence that current practices and policies must be changed to end community tensions and avoid more unnecessary deaths.”
