I adore street art. Wooster Collective is the definitive site to find the freshest work going up on streets all around the world. Their online archive keeps a record of this transient art. And no, street art isn’t all tagging and graffiti. Some of the pieces I find most enchanting are 3D.
Seen on the streets of New York
How did Wooster Collective start?
Sara: It was the convergence of a couple things. We were living in a loft on Wooster St. and we got a puppy named Hudson. Marc had just been to Tokyo and bought a digital camera. Marc was walking the dog one day, the dog was peeing, and while he was standing there, he looked up and said, “Oh my god, what’s that?” It was a little piece of street art. He took a photo of it, and as he walked the dog around, took more photos.
Marc: We realized that the neighborhood we were in was exploding with art.
Sara: It was exploding, at that time. 2000, 2001.
Marc: It was like if you lifted a manhole cover up and saw this whole world down there. “Holy shit, I had no idea that it was there.” You literally couldn’t go four feet without seeing or discovering some hidden object, that some creative person put there for your personal enjoyment. That’s the reason so many people become obsessed with street art – it’s very personal.
Ckoe’s Bees in Amsterdam
You have that moment of discovery.
Sara: It feel like it’s yours.
Marc: When you come across a Swoon piece that she hand cut, even though you know that it’s been put on the street for everybody, you feel like there’s this personal connection to it.
Sara: Now, I think, everyone experiences things – concerts, events, birthday parties, whatever – via their phone or their digital camera. Marc was on the beginning of that. He started taking photos and it was his way of capturing these ephemeral experiences. The pieces would change over time, and we really captured that.
When did you start your site?
Marc: I started to get interested in blogging. Blogging software had just come out, and I didn’t like the way I was publishing all these photographs. I couldn’t really talk or write about them.
Sara: They were just published as big blocks of images.
Marc: So we got some blogging software and we just started. Artists started talking about it. At the time, traditional media wasn’t really writing about street art. And if they were writing about graffiti, they were only writing about it as vandalism. People connected with the Wooster Collective site. It started to really grow, and then as the traditional media started looking for what was happening in the art world, they started referring to our site. It grew and grew and grew over the years. But it’s still very much a personal blog. It has no advertising. We haven’t upgraded anything. It hasn’t really changed in 6 years.
Crateman in Melbourne
Well, there’s one notable change – at first, you were going out and finding material to post. But now people submit art to you. When did that shift happen?
Marc: That’s absolutely correct. It happened pretty quickly. Artists all talk to each other. People like to see themselves, right? So if we put up the work of an artist in Spain, and that artist sees that their work is recognized, they email all their friends. And then their friends email us their work.
Sara: That was how the network started. And just in the way we said, “Hey, let’s try blogging software,” we’ve experimented with many other things along the way. One morning we woke up and decided we wanted to do podcasts. We did those, and we put them up.
Marc: Everything we do is an experiment. Other than posting every day, which we’ve done now for many, many years without ever wanting to stop, we don’t commit to doing any projects for a long period of time. If we’re twittering, we’ll twitter as long as it’s fun, and then we’ll move on to something else. If we have a Facebook page, we’ll have fun with the Facebook page and move on. It’s about learning, and experimenting, and seeing what the reaction is.
Umbrella Bloom by Sam Spenser
What other experiments have you done?
Sara: We used to do street art walking tours. Those were really fun because unlike online, we could watch someone see a piece of street art for the first time. People would bring their moms. We had women who lived in New York City for forty years on the Upper West Side just exploding and embracing street art. “Is that a piece of art? Is that a piece?” It was really rewarding, and a nice way to give back to the city.
Marc: Since Sara and I both have other jobs, we don’t have to say yes to anything regarding Wooster Collective. There’s a reality that sets in when you’re relying on a project for your income. You go down a road where you need to have advertising, and then you need to meet with this person, and you need to do this, and you need to do that. It becomes work. Sara and I made a decision that we didn’t want to go home and start a second job called Wooster Collective.
How did you start putting on shows?
Marc: We did a group show, “Hollywood Remix.”
Sara: This was really fun. I think it was in ‘05. We lived above an art gallery, and we convinced her to give us the space in July, when they were usually closed for a couple weeks. The idea was to send out all of these posters, and have the artists remix them, paint them, etc. Then they mailed them back to us. We thought 200 or so people would show up, and it ended up being 6 or 700 people.
What a positive reaction! And somehow you went from that to the 11 Spring show?
Sara: We can’t talk about experimenting without talking about 11 Spring. I think from the outside, it seemed so amazing and huge, and like Wooster Collective, was this big company. In reality, it was so far from that, and such a bootstrapped operation. It was very organic and happened with so little resources. It’s a great example of just going out there, doing something, and having it blossom.
How did it start?
Sara: There was a lot of art up on the outside of the building.The developer who bought the building fell in love with the fact that the art was changing every week, as she was in the process of buying it. So she sent us an email and said, “I bought this building, I don’t know anything about the artists, but I love art and I want to learn more.” And Marc said, “Come over for a glass of wine.” So Caroline Cummings showed up with her building manager, Malcolm Stevenson. We had a glass of wine, and she said, “I’d love to honor the history of this building.”
That sounds like a dream!
Sara: It was a dream. They weren’t starting demolition for six or eight more weeks, so there was this lag period with nothing happening. We said, “Well maybe some of the artists could paint the inside, and we could have a cocktail party, and invite people to see it.” And on that day or the next day, she basically handed us a set of keys, and trusted us.
Marc: The art was all going to be destroyed. You had to paint directly onto the walls. All of the artists knew that the work was going to be ephemeral – they couldn’t own it, they couldn’t sell it, they couldn’t keep it. Certain artists respond really well to that, and the impermanence is actually a motivator.
Sara: The artists just started painting the walls. We got on the phone, and said, “Fly over, you can sleep on our floor, we want to make this a global thing.” We opened up the and WK, who lives in this neighborhood, came over with his cart. He said, “Sara, I want this wall,” and he points and a 20ft long by 17 ft high wall. He ended up putting, you know, a million dollar painting on this wall. He set the bar for every other artist who came in.
Dface at 11 Spring
What was the opening like?
Sara: We locked the artists in there the last night, and they painted all night. We came in in the morning, to open at 9AM, and they just took all their paintbrushes and pushed them off to the side. Within 3 or 4 hours, there was a 4 or 5 hour wait to get in to the show.
Marc: At that moment there was a lot of discussion about galleries and museums, and what that experience is like, and does it need to change? All of a sudden this happened, and people responded really well. People want authentic experiences. They also want to interact, and feel like they are participating.
Sara: Seeing the paint cans made them understand that this was fresh art.
Marc: The paint was still wet. The brushes weren’t props. If you go to the galleries in Chelsea, it’s great to see art in that context, but it’s not participatory.
Sara: There were holes in the floor at 11 Spring. Malcolm and Marc carried a guy in a wheelchair up five flights of stairs to get to the top.
Doze at 11 Spring
What an emotional experience.
Sara: It was a life-changing experience. If we had said, “We’re going to put on a show with 75 artists from around the world, and we’re going to paint 5 stories, and open it up and have 6,000 people,” we would never have done it. We’d say, “it’s too big,” or, “We need $30,000.” Instead, we just said, “Let’s do this, and see what happens.” It was an intense 7 weeks, and we definitely had fears, but we embraced them.
Marc: Our goal is to push ourselves out of our comfort zones. We wanted to learn how books come together, and are made, so we thought, “OK, we’ll publish our own book.” We wanted to understand gallery shows, so we organized one. I think if you look at different kinds of people, there are people that push themselves out of their comfort zone and go on to amazing things, and there are others that just can’t. They just can’t push themselves too far because it’s too nerve-wracking.
You have to have a stomach for a certain, say, element of chaos.
Sara: I’d call it ambiguity. A stomach for ambiguity. I’m not sure it’s always chaotic. There are moments. But it’s always blurry, foggy, and you have to make sense of it. Then, once you do, there’s more ambiguity that you have to make sense of.