Want to support local Triangle area artists? Want to help support arts education? Want to help provide art scholarships for kids? Want to do all of the above while eating, drinking and purchasing some sweet ass art? For only $50? What? If your answer is yes, then come out to the Artspace Give and Take event tonight!
50 works of art (from some heavy hitters in our area) will be for sale for $50 each, with proceeds benefitting the Artspace Summer Arts Program Scholarship Fund, providing 50 full day week-long scholarships to Wake County students demonstrating financial need and an interest in the arts.
Check out some of the original pieces that will be up for grabs:
Check out the artists and pieces available (well, the pieces are available – I don’t know about the artists), buy tickets or donate to a good cause here. Do it for the kids.
And yes, I may have my eye on a piece – but I’ll never tell.
There’s a little part of me (okay, huge) that wishes I grew up in NYC in the late 70s/early 80s during the rise of hip hop and breakdancing. And I’ll be the first to admit I LOVE a good dance off. So when I recently came across the site for Nike Troupe Battle, calling ‘all new and old style hip hoppers, freestylers, poppers, lockers, b-boys and b-girls and design freaks,’ I was intrigued. Turns out it’s a website showcasing the new Nike Air Troupe, a shoe designed, engineered and tested for freestyle and hip hop dancers.
The cool part? You can design your own Nike Troupe, judge other people’s designs, see the galleries of other designers who are of course dancers, and learn some about the vast world of modern hip hop dance.
Like any good marketing machine, there is of course the end goal here of selling shoes and Nike is quite clever in the way they use a cutting edge flash site and make it super interactive. I love the part on the site where it explains the Troupe ‘is not only exceptionally cushioned, it contains specific innovative technology to maximize your spin, allow for a smooth freeze and to a glide without problems whether indoor, or outdoor on the streets.’ Whoa (For a second there I started thinking this shoe might increase my odds and help me overcome a late start into my dancing career). So the question is, is this the cash cow continuing to capitalize off of street culture? Or is this marketing brilliance and overdue attention finally showcasing an amazing talent? You be the judge. In the meantime, I’m going to pop in Breakin’ and hope that my design scores some points. That’s right, CAbbeyAir.
Casey Porn, local Raleigh artist and self-proclaimed ‘Small Dog Enthusiast,’ came across my radar a coupla years ago during a trip to Artspace. Since then, I’ve become enamored with her evolving work and the personalities of each piece.
Her work is typically a combination of india ink, acrylic and spray paint.
According to her site, her interests include, but are not limited to: the secret lives of animals, chihuahua culture…
big eyed figurines, baby deer, saggy nipples…
space travel, bananas, and Japan. These things may or may not influence her work.
LOVE it! Need it. For more of it, check out her gallery here!
So I’m the new kid over here at OK Great and already have a reputation for spending my day zoning out to tunes (maybe a tish too loud) while focusing on projects. To this day, sometimes a song will roll across my iPod that I fondly recall having the cassette tape of…or for that matter, having hijacked the song onto a dub of mine. Aaaah, the mix tape. I think I managed to work Beastie Boys and Q-Tip’s ‘Get it Together’ onto no less than 4 different mixes.
Remember the days of having that blank tape (or tape you’d recorded over 12 times) perfectly poised and paused in your tape deck, waiting in anticipation of the next song that would roll across the FM station? Inevitably, there would always be a DJ talking through it or a commercial that came on before the song was REALLY over…but those were the days. Be it to fine tune your aspirations of becomin’ a mixmaster, acquiring all the latest jams without having the ‘flow to actually buy the songs, or the big one – creating a mix tape for that someone special – mix tapes MEANT something. There was blood, sweat, tears and some serious teenage hormones poured into those works of adolescent art. If none of this is ringing a bell, you’re either (sadly) too young to know what I’m talking about or need to read the book ‘Love is a Mix Tape,’ which will take you on a nostalgic, emotional ride to the soundtrack of 80’s punk and hip hop playlists. Seriously.
So, imagine my surprise when I happened upon the website, Cassette Generator, the other day:
Yeah, it’s a little bittersweet that it’s a site that makes a digital mix tape image for you…but if only for nostalgia sake, I highly recommend some shenanigans of the mix tape type courtesy of this site. It’ll make you feel like a kid again. Andfor extra credit, what would be YOUR song addition to the Ok Great mix tape?
Oh, and if ya don’t know what G Bust means…see Kristy.
Just another music video in a long line of superb music videos from the band Royksopp. This particular song features Karin Dreijer Andersson from The Knife.
I am officially a finalist in the Soft & Furry logo competition! Here’s a little brief from their website about the contest -
SOFT&FURRY™ is a project dedicated to creativity and collaboration. The premise behind S&F is to elicit participation in an alternative logo design competition. The winning logo will adorn the packaging and other associated elements of an all new, fully custom, handmade line of designer collectible toys.
