An Art Student and Graffiti Artist Shows Off His Many Tattoos (Photos)

In Ink Spot, Amy Price stops strangers in Dallas to shoot, and learn about, their body art.
 
Chances are you've seen 31 year-old Jonathan Nicolini's graffiti art around Dallas, but have you seen his body art? This Art Institute of Dallas student and part time low-key graffiti artist is addicted to tagging walls as well as his body. On his left arm is a bright and colorful combination of graffiti and art.

Nicolini's forearm sports a tat that reads "slave to art." "It is suppose to be a postal sticker, like the ones that everyone tags and slaps around town."

Below, there's a skull wearing a gas mask, tattooed as if it were ripped off the side of a building. It's displayed alongside a dripping wet paint roller and a short and stubby pencil. Along the outer forearm tattooed in traditional graffiti wild style are the words, "before crime."

"I love graffiti. I've been doing [graffiti] for about 12 years now just off and on, here and there."

On the other arm he has dedicated the artwork to his prior Navy life. He was a jet engine mechanic for four years. His traditional Sailor Jerry-style "Love Thy Neighbor" tattoo features brass knuckles, a billy club and a straight razor with the words "hate 'em shave 'em CO." Below is a paperclip.

"It stands for people against people ever re-enlisting civilian life incentive program," he says. The paperclip traditionally stands for people who, near the end of their enlistment, advocate for civilian life over the military. Next to the paperclip is the number 14 that he says he got because he missed out on the Friday the 13th deal and figured why the hell not just get a 14.

He also has a five-cent beer tattoo alongside his rib cage, stretching to his lower right hip in memory of his former drinking life.

On the other side is a skull with a spray cap and a cartoon-looking pen and paintbrush tied into a knot. He said graffiti will always be his first love, and he isn't stopping anytime soon. "I'm addicted to it honestly," he says. "I tell [my girlfriend] all the time I'm going to stop. The same day I'd go out and do it."
Armed with paint markers in his pockets at all times, Nicolini says the art makes Dallas more interesting and is a personal stress reliever.

He hopes to one day have his art featured in a gallery.

MICA student gives rides in her homemade 'pedicab'

Charles Village resident interviews passengers for oral histories as part of art project

Michelle Nugent, a student in the community arts program at MICA, is studying how people interact by taking them for rides on a homemade pedicab.

When Andrea Nugent visited family and friends in her native Philippines in 2010, it was her first visit in three decades — and the first visit ever for her American-born daughter, Michelle.

For Michelle Nugent, one of the most memorable sights of the trip was a popular form of transportation, rickshaw-like tricycles called pedicabs, featuring rear, hooded cabs with seats for passengers.

"My second cousin pedaled us. He was 40 years old and pedaling his butt off," she recalled.
But the pedicabs were more than a cultural highlight. They were an artistic vision for the younger Nugent, a graduate student at the Maryland Institute College of Art. What she loved most about them were the spirited conversations and interaction they fostered between pedaler and passenger.

"It struck me as really exciting and meaningful, an intimate means of transportation," she said.
Now, for her thesis in MICA's Master of Fine Arts program in Community Arts, Nugent, 25, of Charles Village, has started The Pedicab Project, which she promotes with the slogan, "Transportation-driven conversation."

Five-foot-two and 110 pounds, she gives people free rides in her own, art-trike version of a pedicab, complete with a working bell; and she interviews the passengers for a series of oral histories.
"I think of it as an interactive kinetic sculpture," Nugent said.

On her website, http://thepedicabproject.tumblr.com, and in a pamphlet that she hands out to potential passengers, Nugent writes, "The Pedicab Project records, preserves and shares American oral histories collected from interviews within (communities) through a series of pedicab rides physically operated by community artist Michelle Nugent."

"Join the journey," she writes.
The project is Nugent's way of exploring her cultural heritage as a Filipino-American and its influence on her artwork. The pedicab rides also offer passengers a platform for sharing stories about their own heritage, culture and identity.

"Do you have a compelling story to tell about yourself, family, friends or community? Ride the pedicab and share your story," Nugent writes.

Looking for passengers
Nugent, a former AmeriCorps after-school community art teacher at Guilford Elementary School, began planning The Pedicab Project in September 2011 and began riding the pedicab around late last summer. She has taken oral histories from 30 passengers in the Charles Village area and at MICA Place, a community-outreach campus in east Baltimore, where she parks the pedicab in her cubbyhole studio space when she's not using it.

She has trolled for passengers at community association meetings, a block party in Lake Walker, recent events such as The Big Draw in Wyman Park Dell and at the 32nd Street Farmers Market in Waverly. But she also has picked up strangers in the streets.

One of her passengers was Cymantha Governs, 38, a writer for Johns Hopkins Medicine International, who met Nugent at the block party in Lake Walker.

"It was a good time," Governs said in an email.

Governs, who is of Middle Eastern descent and is married to a black man, said she was excited to have a conversation with Nugent about race because Nugent is of Filipino descent and "I feel like the race conversation in Baltimore is often solely about black and white."

Nugent expects to graduate in April. Her thesis presentation in Station North from March 29 to April 14 will be part of a larger show for MICA Masters of Fine Arts graduates. After that, she hopes to post all of her oral histories online.

But she has set no limit yet on how many oral histories she will do.

Get Off My Lawn Screw the Art Gods, Museum Tower Sure Is Pretty

Funny how you can drive by a thing a dozen times and never really see it. An early morning errand today took me through the north end of downtown on the Woodall Rodgers Freeway. I looked up from traffic and was stunned by the sheer beauty of the new Museum Tower building.

Just ahead of me the 42-story glass-wrapped oval column soared up into the morning sun like an immense geyser of glittering blue water. Designed by Scott Johnson, the tower is another movement in a very long symphony of glass in Dallas going back at least into the late 1970s. Is it the light or is it us? Dallas just does love to sparkle.

Oh, I know, I know, I'm not supposed to be saying nice things about Museum Tower. It has offended the art gods. It must be pariah. You know all about that.

Museum Tower, a ritzy condo building, is the one that reflects too much light onto the Nasher Sculpture Center, according to the Nasher Sculpture Center, which is a temple of the art gods. Because it has offended the art gods, Museum Tower is always to be spoken of with disdain and opprobrium by us in the media, who are the janitorial staff of the art gods.

Fortunately this does not apply to me, because I work for a branch of the media well known to be art ungodly anyway, but for many of my brethren in the ink-stained ranks, a carelessly positive word about Museum Tower could easily earn a place on the next list for a major reduction in force.
And so it's all finger-wagging and frowns from most reporters.
I'm just saying it's a beautiful building. That's all. Look, maybe it does reflect too much light. What do I know? I'm not a lightologist. All I'm saying is that I looked up from the freeway and ... wow! It's gorgeous.

How much of that beauty is marred forever by the reflection contretemps and the wrath of the art gods? Well, you know, 100 years ago when I was young, I was a reporter in Detroit, and I used to go out to this wonderful old island park in the Detroit River called Belle Isle. I am ashamed to say that I sometimes drank beer during working hours out there, often sitting on the lip of a marvelous 1920s fountain that had all kinds of fish and cherubs and Neptune himself spouting water at each other. It was laughter in stone and water.

Not far off was a life-size statue of some old dude sitting in a chair staring at the fountain. I went over and looked at it one day. It was a likeness of the benefactor who donated the money for the fountain, a guy named Jim Scott.

So finally after hanging out around the fountain for years, I decided to look up Jim Scott and see who he was. It turned out he was a rich and infamous playboy, a notorious gambler and frequenter of whorehouses who donated the fountain as a way of flipping the bird to the respectable folks of Detroit.

There was huge controversy over whether his gift should even be accepted and the fountain built. A Roman Catholic bishop spluttered, "Only a good man who has wrought things for humanity should be honored in this way."

But it got built. Time marched on. The controversy was forgotten. Eventually Jim Scott was forgotten -- history's forgiveness. But the fountain is still there, tinkling like a merry xylophone in a city that could use a good joke once in a while.

This morning I thought of that fountain for some reason as I sped by Museum Tower. In fact I could swear that just as I passed into the tunnel beneath deck park, Museum Tower winked at me.

British Art World Figures Protest Possible Sale of a Henry Moore

The cash-strapped council of the Borough of Tower Hamlets in the East End of London is expected to decide on Wednesday whether it will proceed with plans to sell a valuable Henry Moore sculpture despite opposition from Sir Nicholas Serota, director of the Tate; Danny Boyle, the filmmaker; and artists including Jeremy Deller, who have signed an open letter saying that the sale “goes against the spirit of Henry Moore’s original sale” of the work.

The artist sold “Draped Seated Woman,’’ a large 1957 bronze, to the London County Council, which no longer exists, for a discounted price of £6,000 in 1960, on the understanding that it would be displayed in a public space and would therefore enrich the lives of residents in an economically depressed area.

When the housing project where it was on view was demolished in the late 1990s, the sculpture was moved to the Yorkshire Sculpture Park in Northern England. Now leading members of the arts community, in a letter published in the London Observer on Sunday, are opposing the sale. Some are saying that the sculpture – which weighs some 1.5 metric tons – should be on display at Olympic Park in London.

Prices for Moore’s monumental sculptures have been rising in recent years. At Christie’s in February “Reclining Figure: Festival,’’ from 1951 made a record price of $30.1 million. “Draped Seated Woman,’’ experts say, could fetch upward of $32 million.