The Boston Globe gets excited about a California trend coming to town:
Space 242 is one of the first commercial galleries in Boston to show lowbrow art, a West Coast wave that’s lapping at Boston’s shores. Boston is, in many ways, a highbrow city, so lowbrow art has been a long time coming.
“California is its spiritual home,” Neelon says of the movement. “The market, and the people in California, are more forward thinking than on the East Coast, and certainly in Boston.” Trying to talk with Bostonians about lowbrow art, a frustrated Neelon adds, “is like talking to my parents.”
“To say there are dozens of lowbrow art galleries in California would be an understatement,” says Caleb Neelon, a Cambridge artist and writer who had a show of such art in April in San Francisco and has written for Juxtapoz.
The style was born of hot-rod culture in Los Angeles in the 1950s and coalesced in the 1990s around Juxtapoz magazine. It encompasses underground comics, graffiti, tattoo art, rock posters, album covers, and art springing from the cultures of skateboarding and surfing. It’s also been called urban art and pop surrealism – and it’s designed to be accessible to anyone.
Lowbrow Wave on a Highbrow Shore (Boston Globe)
