Yesterday, I made a bonsai drive up to the MOCA in LA to see “Art In The Streets” before it shuts down this week. I ALMOST slept on this, and I honestly would of kicked my own ass if I missed this show. If you didn’t make it in the flesh for whatever reason, I’m going to warn you that his post will not fairly represent this massive graffiti/street art retrospective. It was one for the history books kinda like “Beautiful Losers” was — except this one was 5 times bigger and focused on artists who were prolific in “vandalism.”

The line to get inside was ridiculous. I almost waited an hour before Peter Stormare (The Big Lebowski, Fargo), hooked it up fat by handing the guys in front of me 6 tickets as he exited the show. In turn, they hooked me up with one which saved me 40 more minutes of standing in line, and 10 bucks to boost.

Now I’ve seen a couple gigantic exhibitions at this location, most memorably Taskahi Murakami’s mid-career retrospective a couple years back, but this show was by far the largest museum show I’ve ever seen. It was jam packed with people, jam packed with work, and jam packed on the history of contemporary graffiti and street art.

The individual artists included in this show have been profound influences on me for the last 10+ years, but the medium and aesthetic which some of them pioneered has been influencing me for at least 20 years. The show didn’t just cover the visual world of graffiti, but also the sub-cultures that fed it: punk rock, hip hop, heavy metal, skateboarding and surfing.

Simply put, it was epic. I took 90 photos + video, and I still felt like I missed tons of stuff. To fully digest this show, it would of required AT LEAST 2 trips with 3+ hours each visit. Below is a photo recap of SOME of my favorites. Stand-outs were: {the Street Market by ESPO, REAS, TWIST (Ray Fong), & AMAZE}, Banksy, Os Gemeos, Margart Kilgallen, REVOK, Keith Haring, Jean-Michel Basquiat (SAMO), Haze, Mister Cartoon, Jeffery Deitch (curator), etc… Below are flicks from some of my favorite pieces & installations. If below isn’t enough (which it isn’t), there is always the exhibit’s 300 page catalog!