NEW YORK, OCTOBER 30 – Women in street art break the glass ceiling at the United Nations headquarters in New York: a major exhibition, open until November 29, features a series of works – some created specifically for the occasion – by female artists including Japanese Lady Aiko, the first woman to paint on the Bowery Wall, and Kelsey Montague, loved by Taylor Swift, as well as younger talents like Danielle Mastrion, who collaborated with Spike Lee in Brooklyn for the past six years.
Lady Aiko, Kelsey Montague, Swoon among the artists
Among the artists participating in the initiative at the UN headquarters are spray paint veterans such as Swoon (Caledonia Curry, one of the first women to gain international recognition) and Lady Pink, who began at 17 hanging out with Andy Warhol, Keith Haring, and Jean-Michel Basquiat. Selected by multimedia artist and bestselling author Alessandra Mattanza and architect Augusto Ferretti, the lineup also includes Italian artists like Lediesis, whose “Superwomen” appeared on Florence street walls on March 8, 2019, and Danish artist Jacoba Niepoort, whose faceless nude figures embrace on facades to express loneliness and alienation.
Mattanza is participating with a robot art piece dedicated to Iranian Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old who died in a hospital in Tehran, after being arrested for allegedly not wearing the hijab in accordance with government standards. Mattanza began studying female graffiti artists for her book Street Art is Female, published in Italy by White Star/National Geographic Italia, which won first prize for non-fiction at the National Journalism Awards in Los Angeles in December 2023.
49 years old Aiko Nakagawa arrived in New York from Tokyo in the mid-90s with an English dictionary in her suitcase and started her career as an assistant to Takashi Murakami in Brooklyn: “He was young like me and preparing his first exhibit. But to be honest, it didn’t feel like a breakthrough. I was just assisting a Japanese man so he could succeed at ‘his work.’” Aiko soon felt the need to move on, and began using the walls of the Lower East Side and Hell’s Kitchen as her canvases. After a phase in Europe, she returned to New York and co-founded the trio Faile (an anagram of “A Life”) with Patrick McNeil and Patrick Miller, which she left in 2006 to work with Banksy on the 2010 documentary Exit Through the Gift Shop. With a style blending Japanese aesthetics and Western pop culture, Lady Aiko was chosen in 2012 to paint the Bowery Wall, making her the first woman to be given the prestigious street art location in Manhattan. In this exhibit, Aiko presents a triptych using stencil techniques, featuring motifs of a skull and crossbones alongside a rabbit.
Support from the Italian Mission
With the support of the Permanent Italian Mission to the United Nations, the exhibit includes only two works by male artists: Fin Dac and Tvboy, the Italian Salvatore Benintende, considered one of the inventors of neopop. Among the artists is Ukrainian-American Maya Hayuk, who amplifies the anonymous work of women in Eastern Europe who weave fabrics or embroide. She was the third woman, after Aiko and Swoon, to paint on the Bowery Wall. Maya rejects the label of “woman artist” and agreed to participate only because the exhibit is at the UN headquarters. “The exciting thing about street art,” she explains, “is its activist and anonymous nature. Like 25 years ago in San Francisco, it’s the work that takes precedence, not the identity of the person.” (@OnuItalia).
