Graffiti Summer Vacation features the work of Lady Pink, Josephine Barreiro, Michela Martello, Anna Walinska and more! This show is as much about community as it is about showcasing female street and graffiti artists and writers.

This summer from June 6 to August 6, Pen + Brush will open its gallery walls to the NYC community, inviting female graffiti and street artists and writers to make their art on our walls. The goal is to mix female artists who are already influencing the landscape of street and graffiti art with the voices of writers, and make their work accessible to Pen + Brush’s network and to the New York City community.

During our Graffiti Summer Vacation, we will hold a series of writing and graffiti workshops. Artist Michela Martello will teach a workshop for kids on the graffiti alphabet. Martello’s interactive mural Graffiti Goddess (pictured above) is currently on view in our space, and has become a compelling site for communal expression and inspiration. Martello has several mural commissions around New York and New Jersey and counts street art as one of the defining influences over her work. Pen + Brush welcomes her blend of strength and softness, of domesticity and demolition, into the public realm, where the art takes a stand against the anxieties of 2017 and affirms women’s power in the face of current political and social devaluing of women as artists and people. Graffiti Goddess will remain on view throughout the Graffiti Summer Vacation. The ongoing additions of words and art from the public have turned this mural into a vibrant, evolving public art project that serves as proof of the power engagement through art and words that will now spread throughout our entire space with this summer exhibit.

There will also be a series of five interlocking writing workshops led by poet and educator Marissa Anne Ayala. In this series, participants will read and respond to poetry by female writers and leverage language to explore, question, and speak out loud in reaction to the politics of the self, family, gender, geography, race. This series is designed to develop writers as poet-activists as participants both explore poetic narratives and create their own. These workshops are designed for new writers, seasoned writers, artists, and activists seeking to engage with the power of protest via the arts.

Finally, artist Josephine Barreiro will lead a workshop, also for kids, which focuses on creating street art through the quiet magic of sticker art; Handmade slaps and postals. Barreiro hails from Newark; NJ and cites graffiti, specifically that of the urban center, as the groundwork for her gestural and energetic technique and also as the inspiration for her work. The artist’s deep-seated love for graffiti/street art and abstract expressionism gives way to a body of work that is laced with anger, spontaneous energy, and personal as well as cultural memory. Barreiro will also contribute a mural featuring her black and white paintings in which distorted figures, symbols, and gestural lines morph into expressive street art abstractions.

Pen + Brush has invited a number of prominent female graffiti and street artists to contribute their voices to our walls throughout the summer. We hope that by bringing a diverse collection of artists and writers to the gallery space, we are also encouraging the New York City community to engage in a dialogue not only with these artists but with each other.