iheartmyart:

Dutch Artists Bring the Rainbow to Rio Slums

“After an assignment filming a hip-hop documentary in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro,Jeroen Koolhaas and Dre Urhahn (better known as Haas&Hahn) decided to add their own flair to the neighborhood and help the community at the same time. There is rarely anything sexy about charity work, but Haas&Haan have succeeded in “bringing art to unexpected places” and creating some hope in an otherwise drab atmosphere. And you thought no good could ever possibly come out of an MTV hip-hop documentary.”   —Flavorwire

How exactly does painting a wretched slum in rainbow colors help the community?

“Hey, extremely famous and wealthy archi-artists, thanks for traipsing through our poor favela with your expensive cameras and cool-hunting producers! We’re so thankful that you’ve decided to splash eye-searing colors all over our houses in an attempt to cover over the desperate, grinding poverty in our area, and then use it as a publicity stunt to claim you’ve helped our community! We’re certainly glad you didn’t use your influence and monetary backing to open a community center, a drug rehab facility or an after-school program to steer youth from street gangs. Rainbows for all!”

Seems like Dirty Projector’s album Bitte Orca (mentioned just this week on the blog) made quite the impression on the creator of fabulous webcomic Octopus Pie. Hanna is looking mischievous as always, and Eve a little worries (as always). When good music and good webcomickry collide!

I saw this in an empty storefront downtown. It’s like the Great Depression all over again. Try some snake oil!

This photo makes me so very happy. I can’t stop giggling at it.

(c) saRRa

Capitol Hill bathrooms are apparently the place.

This is how to combat 103 degree days.

Yes, those are nectarine chunks floating in the Moscato. Bliss.

io9 - A Field of Light Sabers, Powered By Ambient Electricity - Richard box

United Artists Theater — Photo by Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre

The above isn’t some fantastical setpiece or an image from a theme park haunted mansion, but instead the abandoned interior of Detroit’s United Artist Theater. Built in 1928, it has been empty and left to decline in an epically rococco manner since the 1970s.

The theater, like a stalagtited Spanish-Moroccan castillo, is one of many abandoned buildings photographed by French artists Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre for their series “The Ruins of Detroit.” In it, hotels, schools, auto plants and train stations slump, sag and erode in plain view, some seeming haunted and sere and others just lonely and misused. A beautiful 1890s house sits forlorn and alone in the midst of a weedy park, its proud turrets collapsing inward like a melting sandcastle. The wide, spiderwebbed brickwork and weeping ceiling of the Fisher 21 Body Plant is a grim expanse of monochrome, a place silent as a crypt and slowly breaking itself apart.

Part of the discomfiture produced by these photos is the fact that the abandonment and subsequent decay is so recent. Buildings like the David Broderick tower, where this photo of a dentist’s office was taken, have only been empty since the 1980s. Yet the depth and breadth of damage is astonishing: rot creeps at the corners, floor tiles are smashed and uprooted, and no painted surface is left without shreds peeling from it. The urban landscape of quiet decrepitude captured by these photographers is a clear herald of what we may see in cities all across the US, if not the world, in just a handful of years.

I’m not a native Seattlite, so I occasionally stumble across something in the city that makes me go, “hot dayumn! That is awesome!”

This time, it’s the UPS Waterfall Garden Park. Commemorating the hundred year anniversary of UPS, the garden is apparently the “birthplace” of the company. That’s interesting in a vaguely not interesting way, but…look at that waterfall! It’s right off of run-down Pioneer Square, tucked away against the UPS headquarters. Hidden behind its thick iron gates, it’s barely discernible from the street, but the sound of rushing water gives it away. Concrete benches and platforms ring the urban oasis, and a spray of honeysuckle falls over the pools where the water drains.

Whodathunk?

Sun drenched skies, crocuses busting out of the ground, clouds on the move; it’s beginning to look a lot like spring over here. That is, until the next set of gloom doomery comes our way.

Photo locales: (1) Slave to the Needle, Ballard (2) Crocuses, Phinney Ridge (3) Gasworks Park, Fremont