All right, this news is a couple of weeks old, but with the artistic presence on this site, I thought it bore repeating; not to mention, in the light of all the awful swirling around this week, a little cheerful news where we can might do us good.

So rumor apparently had it for years that, hidden within the walls of some mysterious building in Manhattan, lurked stretches of fantastic modern artwork. How prevalent was this rumor? I don't know, I don't run in many New York City art circles. That said, any perpetrators of said rumor were either well informed or excellent guessers, because it's just what developers found in a SoHo building set for condo conversion.

For having been painted over for decades, that's some astonishingly intact masonry. Score! Story has it that DeAk hinted of the loft's secrets to the Namers (the father-son developing team who bought the building back in 2004), but it wasn't until Namer the Younger uncovered a Futura 2000 signature scrawling was uncovered in a corner above a cabinet that renovation was halted and the site took a turn for the archaeological -- ultimately uncovering a sprawling mural awash in pinks and reds and metallics, featuring contributions from Fab 5 Freddy and Jean-Michel Basquiat. According to critics, even that is not the most exciting part about the discovery.

Being men of good taste, the Namers immediately invested in some good conservation work, painstakingly peeling and transferring the brightly decorated plaster from its mortar to a more portable backing board. From there -- after getting all the official appraising and documentation -- the mural is being publicly unveiled as part of Gallery 151's Wild Style Exhibit, scheduled to run through February 15th. It's not the most refined thing to look at. Then again, the brightest beginnings of eras rarely are. It's history.


_DictionaryGirl_ says: "Big ups to Drah, my favorite local graffiti artist. Holla!"