News — 2 for 2

Leading up to our big 2-year anniversary show opening on April 3rd, we're going to share bios on each of the participating artists with a preview of one of their works for the show.

Today we feature M-City: M-City (Mariusz Waras) born 1978 in Gdynia, Poland. A graphic artist, outdoor painter, traveler and amateur architect, he graduated from the Department of Graphic Art at the Academy of Fine Arts in Gdańsk where he is currently assistant lecturer in Prof. Jerzy Ostrogórski's painting studio. He is the author of the m-city project including several hundred murals. His work focuses on urban space.

His murals may be seen in the streets of Warsaw, Gdańsk, Berlin, Paris, Rotterdam, Gent, Budapest, Bucharest, Belgrade, Ljubljana, Moscow, Sao Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, New York, Bolzano, London, Bogota, Barcelona, Valencia, Florence, Bergamo, Milan, Ancona and Prague. His gallery exhIbitions include individual and group exhibitions at the Galerie Itinerrance in Paris (2010), the Brooklynite Gallery in New York (2010), the Carmichael Gallery in LA (2010), the Traffic Gallery in Bergamo (2012, 2008), the Arsenal in Poznań (2005) and the CSW Laźnia in Gdańsk (2006). In 2008 he was invited by Banksy to the Cans Festival in London, and later that year included by the international street art expert Tristan Manco in the official list of the world's most important artists of stencil-graffiti.

Leading up to our big 2-year anniversary show, we're going to share bios on each of the participating artists with a preview of one of their works for the show.

Today we feature Bachor: A graduate of the Center for Creative Studies in downtown Detroit, former Michigander Jim Bachor has lived in Chicago now for 27 years.

Bachor’s fervor for mosaic art was born in 1998 when he first traveled to Europe and enveloped himself in the culture of London, Rome and Paris. Then for two months in 1999, Jim rented a house in Rome, exploring the ancient sites of the city and surrounding countryside. Inspired to learn more about his newly found infatuation, later that same year Jim went back to Italy and took classes in Ravenna on the demanding and meticulous art form. During subsequent archaeology-based trips to Greece, Turkey and even a dig in Pompeii, he was amazed by the various examples of 2,000 year-old art buried deep in the ground. Marble and glass don't fade so mosaics look exactly as intended by the artist who originally produced them. Jim has adapted this ancient art form to contemporary American life, capturing everyday scenes in a way that, centuries from now, will open a window onto life in the 21st century.

Beginning in May 2013, Jim began to apply this thinking to the numerous potholes filling the streets of Chicago. Temporarily fixed over and over again by city street crews he began to apply this resilient artwork as a more permanent fix. Early concepts of the artwork first installed branded the pothole as an authentic Chicago-style pothole. Further explorations played with serial numbers (to represent the vast quantities of them), phone numbers of nearby auto repair shops (to repair damage caused by them) and even flowers (as a pretty juxtaposition to the universally ugly pothole.) He is continuing the project again this year.

Leading up to our big 2-year anniversary show, we're going to share bios on each of the participating artists with a preview of one of their works for the show.

Today we feature Copyright: Copyright has been daubing the streets of the UK with his trademark pink roses for years. Fusing street art, graffiti and more traditional styles, he uses a mixture of classic painting techniques and spray can art. He creates print styles with stencils, depth with spray paint, and texture with a paintbrush.

His paintings represent ideals from the modern world and culture, portrayed within classic imagery of simple beauty, often depicted by butterflies, flowers and beautiful women. His pictures represent a contradiction of idealism and unattainable visions of beauty found in fashion, music and popular culture.

Leading up to our big 2-year anniversary show (April 3 - 26), we're going to share bios on each of the participating artists with a preview of one of their works for the show.

Today we feature HERA: Coming from a half-Pakistani, half-German background, therefore having been brought up half-Muslim and half-Catholic, Jasmin Siddiqui, aka HERA, knew quite a lot about ethical differences and complications even before elementary school. But she did not know how to deal with all the different perspectives until much later in her life when she discovered graffiti. Education-wise, the very shy girl who was born 1981 in Frankfurt, Germany, got a scholarship to spend her junior year at Venice High School in Los Angeles, a city she still visits once a year. She later went to study Graphic Design in Wiesbaden, Germany – back in 2000 a highly frequented meting point for international graffiti artists. By the time of her graduating with a diploma in 2007, Jasmin had already made a name for herself in the urban subculture she really loved, calling herself HERA after the highest Goddess in Greek mythology.

This was the necessary alter-ego, the matching super-hero-persona for a talented but thoroughly timid girl. In 2004 HERA met AKUT at a graffiti festival in Spain, and formed the crew Herakut, which still exists today and paints murals across the world. Her work has been featured in numerous books and magazines, blogs and television shows. It has been used as inspiration for countless tattoos and artwork by art students who have read her books “Herakut – The Perfect Merge” and “After The Laughter”. It amazes her, even today, that crazy twists of fate have allowed her, the torn little self-destructive kid, to share her thoughts with strangers. She believes that graffiti saved her life. And she teaches it to any child who needs a cure from feeling invisible.