Culture Kings Artist Collective
Everyone feels irrational pride in locally bred successes, like "your boy" the CEO who learned his high school math from the same teacher as you, or the big-time QB who didn't learn math from the same teacher as you. For a gallery of similar lovable local talent, check out Culture Kings Artist Collective.
An annex to the Culture Kings clothing boutique, AC uses its owner's connections in the music/graffiti worlds to deliver a gallery of paintings, sculptures, and photos from artists who're either connected to Miami's street culture scene, or are so home-grown, you've probably purchased Big Bites from the same 7-11. Artists include local boy Johnny Robles, who polished his craft in Florence before creating “Plunge”, a slightly cartoonish sculpture of a toilet plunger reshaping a massive wad of sticky pink stuff (a comment on the artistic process), and the painting “Exterior Womb”, using dreamy realism to depict a tranced-out kid wearing headphones while overhead floats a roiling ball of power plants, dolphins, bombs, internal organs, and a couple playing tonsil hockey, who seem more interested in each other's external organs. Other masters include Crome, one of Fla's preeminent graffiti/tattoo artists, whose “Purple People Eater” is a diptych in which a demon-eyed tagger emerges from under the nervous mask of a normal kid; and Tatiana Suarez, whose “Candy Clown 1” painting depicts a doe-eyed topless girl in smeared clown makeup preparing to bite into a candied apple with a huge ant lurking on the other side -- yo, topless chick: this bug's for you!
There's an opening party April 11 from 7 to 10pm, with comped hors d'oeuvres, Red Stripe, and Ciroc Vodka, and downtempo funk and soul spun by local talent, DJ Razor -- totally your boy, as you...cut yourself using a razor in 7th grade!
