Last weekend’s 70th birthday surprise for street art photographer Martha Cooper at the Houston Street mural wall was short-lived, as one of its contributors, Crash, has already nearly completed the latest commission for the site. When ARTINFO swung by this morning the image of a fist-swinging Popeye — a possible Jeff Koons homage? — bursting through the cartoonishly rendered letters of the artist’s name, was looking close to finished.
Crash, whose real name is John Matos, curated Fashion Moda’s landmark graffiti exhibition “Graffiti Art Success for America” in 1980, collaborated with Keith Haring on a series of murals at the Musée d’art Moderne de la Ville de Paris in 1984, and was featured prominently in the 2006 exhibition “Graffiti” at the Brooklyn Museum, which has several of his works in its permanent collection.
His last major public art commission in Manhattan was for the Public Art Fund’s “Spectator Billboard” in 1981, for which he created a colorful, animated version of his name that was displayed on a billboard-sized screen in Times Square. His Houston Street mural looks like it will be finished by the end of the weekend.
— Benjamin Sutton
(Photo by the author.)
