Primary Flight is my favorite non-music event we sling cream at all year. This was our third year down in Miami for the street mural project that takes place during Art Basel. What started four years ago has become the largest street mural project in the world. Hundreds of artists fly in from all over and are given walls by Primary Flight to cover. Not only does PF seem to be getting bigger but the walls a lot of the artists are painting seem to be increasing in size as well. The best part about being down there is that we get to drive an ice cream truck around the whole time giving away treats and watching the works or art as they’re being created.
I wasn’t sure if we were going to be able to make it down this year but Jakprints stepped up to sponsor us and Cory drove Beau from Long Beach to Florida so we’d have our own truck there (last year was a catastrophe and the truck we rented broke down). Because we loaded up the back freezer with the last of our Ben & Jerry’s stash of ice cream we were able to start slinging pretty early on Thursday. Our main goal was to act as an artist support truck supplying cream, pops, water, chips and candy to the painters, many of them stuck in the sun all day. We also wanted to act as a public outreach truck for Primary Flight and we handed out maps and told people where some of our favorite walls were. People often say I have the best job in the world and it sure felt like it the last five days.
Words don’t really do any justice for what went down while we were there so you should just check out Jeremiah’s pics on the right. He’s shot PF every year and did a great job and getting pics of most everything down there. There were so many great pieces this year. It seemed like most people would agree that How and Nosm, two artists from Germany was the best piece… or the one that grabbed everyone’s attention when they entered the Kohn Compound. That compound also had Surge’s Karate Cat piece which was a painting of a girl who wanted Hello Kitty to come to her birthday party but the dad couldn’t afford it so he got Karate Cat, and the kids are kinda bummed. Jim and Tina Darling brought out their friend Eugene Good to help them with a sculpture made of found wood that was a head spitting out a wave with a boat… yeah… nuts!
Witnes, Sinner and a lot of the Ironlak crew were on the far wall, which had a bitchin’, crazy alien looking character in the corner.
The Cafeina compound one block over had a bunch of artists painting and the Trusto Corp crew brought out some custom made carnival games that made things fun. Dabs & Myla (who created our last Off the Wookie cover with Surge) had a great spot straight back from the entrance and Joe Iurato was next to them. Reyes had a large wall which I dug and Ron English split a wall with Mr. Jago and Tristan Eaton, which made his skull smiley face character pop out even more. Tatiana Suarez, Aiko and a couple other female artists were also putting up work in the front area next to the bike tour program they had setup. It wasn’t directly related to the bike tour program, but a month ago I heard about a cool new project called Contrail that leaves chalk lines from bike tires and Theresa and Pepin who run it made some art pieces in the streets and outlined a route in the street so people could follow it and see a good chunk of the PF murals.
I’d love to mention all the other cool art I saw down there but there’s just too much. M-City stayed with us and we helped him finish his cool aquarium SS mural because his stencils got lost in Germany and he had to bust out a 50×20 foot mural in 10 hours. Anthony Lister had pieces all over the place it seemed and his ‘car on fire’ piece next to Asylm was pretty damn cool. There was an extra large boom box painted next to the graffiti wall of fame and plenty of other cool pieces from artists like Bask, Tes One, London Police, Burning Candy, Mers, Dolla, Kofie, Chor Boogie, Jeff Soto and Maxx 242, and many more I can’t think of right now while I’m on the plane. I missed a lot of the artists in the main Primary Flight compound who had some of the best lettering you’d ever see.
Thanks to Jakprints for making the cream slinging possible. They just introduced favicards and you should check those out at www.favicards.com they’re like small business cards for social network type things. Thanks to Logan Hicks for originally getting so many of ‘us’ involved in Primary Flight and who’s floors I used to sleep on down there. His main piece this year was in Wynwood Walls along with additional pieces by Ron English, Jeff Soto and others. Thanks for Cory for driving down, Jeremiah for the pics and to all the great cuban food and restaurants. Yum.. Thanks to all the PF crew too; Books, Typoe, Lynn and Chris, and Mike. I’m on the plane back now and already excited to get back down there next year!
If you are insane and want to see even more photos, check out Jeremiah’s Flickr collection here.
