Kobra, who is known for his community involvement, has spent years working in his hometown of San Paolo, Brazil as part of a project called “Muros da Memoria (Wall of Memories)” which aims to transform dull urban scenery through the beauty of art. “My goal is to give this gift to Sao Paulo, through my work. I believe that it contributes to bring the good old days to the residents and the visitors of the city, and to give a better look to the city” says Kobra. Now the artist is giving the city of New York a gift by using his talents to remind us of victorious times and the splendor of urban life.

Kobra’s mural is quite possibly the artist’s attempt to give something back to NYC after all the city has done for him—graffiti and hip hop music have inspired him since he began practicing his craft as a young teenager. Kobra has an aptitude for capturing the character of the city through its glorious past, so that those who lived during those great times can remember them and those who did not experience them can foresee the potential of great things to come for the city they inhabit. The spectacular massive-scale artwork can be view at 25^th and 10^th avenue from the High Line Park.

“If you lived here you’d be home by now”, Oakland, 2008, Eric Araujo

The House Project, interdisciplinary artist Eric Araujo’s sculptural exploration of the relationship between artists and the disenfranchised members of society, began in 2005 while the artist was living in San Francisco. Now Araujo offers an extension of this thoroughly explored idea: a public installation project titled Hole Up, in which the sculptor builds small-scale houses that are inserted in urban areas with a significant homeless population. The miniature homes can accommodate a person seeking shelter and are there for that very purpose.

Araujo, now officially a New York artist, has placed his tiny shelters in several U.S. cities, with each home reflecting the architecture of middleclass homes within each host city. The houses are not only functional in terms of providing refuge, but a reflection of a world which cannot accommodate the people in it and a government incompetent at keeping its citizens employed or providing dignified housing for the lower classes. The exhibition, the artist created two houses, with the intention of eventually installing them in a public space.

Araujo’s modest structures are mostly constructed out of salvaged materials and are not designed to be permanent or endure long-term exposure to the elements. They almost serve as metaphors for the dreams of the inhabitant, those which rarely come true due to the harshness of the surrounding world. They provide a temporary illusion of stability, which is what the structural design of a home symbolizes. An overview of Hole Up is currently being exhibited by Gowanus’ Littlefield performance and art space.

"Girl with a Blackberry" 2011, Awol Erizku

With a distinctive retro style and an interest in reinventing iconic images from art history, Awol Erizku creates eye-catching photographs. The young Ethiopian-born multi-media artist grew up in the Bronx and his work exhibits influences both from urban pop culture of the 90s as well as fine art from different eras. Erizku, who specializes in staged photography (and who will soon be working toward his MFA at Yale), has already made a name for himself by working with the likes of David LaChapelle and Lorna Simpson. His latest show is set for June 14 – July 20 at Hasted Kraeutler.

"Boy Holding Grapes" 2012, Awol Erizku

“I want to create substantial work that represents my culture in a positive light. I want to celebrate the elegance and the beauty of African American Men and women,” says Erizku about his work, which he describes as a search for cultural identity with a sense of humor. For these photographs, the artist is interested in getting to know each person’s personality, so that he can match them to a certain concept. He allows each subject to let their guard down so that the process can come naturally and the image is an honest one. For that reason, it’s fair to compare Erizku to the master painters he references. His method is like that of a portrait painter who wants to capture the person as much as the times the individual identifies with.

"Girl with a Bamboo Earing" 2009, Awol Erizku

"Either Or" from "Me Versus Me" 2011, Carly Zufelt

Carly Zufelt is a multimedia artist from Tucson, Arizona, whose short series “Me Versus Me” poses her body against itself. She becomes two different characters in the same picture, both representations of the artist. Whether stripped down, in make-up and costume, or portraying a man in drag, Zufelt is nearly exclusively the subject of her photographs.

From "Poolside" 2011, Cathrin Schulz

Cathrin Schulz is German photographer interested in capturing the unusual energy of a single moment without staging and using very simple techniques. The image shown is from “Poolside” a series which is part of a long-term project called “Authenti(c)ity of America” documenting her vision of America. All of the photographs are of the same community pool. She explores the change of energy of place meant for recreation and social encounters when it is empty and quite.

"Seeing Things" from "Monsters in the Closets" 2012, Wendy Sacks

Wendy Sacks is not only a photographer, but a Pediatrician whose work with children inspires her imagery. She has been documenting medical cases with photographs since early in her medical career, discovering the beauty of life and death through the lens of her camera. Sacks’ wishes to leave her photographs open to personal interpretation for the viewer to reckon with his or her own spiritual awareness.

"PrayWay" by Slavs and Tatars, with paintings by Lynette Yiadom-Boakye in the background

A collision of the sacred and the profane – the rahlé, the traditional book stand used for holy books, and the takht or river-bed, vernacular seating areas used in tea-salons – PrayWay is part installation, part sculpture, part seating area, and all polemical platform. Slavs and Tatars are an art collective interested in the area “east of the Berlin Wall and west of the Great Wall of China”.

"Hard Wet Epic" Lynette Yiadom-Boakye

None of the figures in Lynette Yiadom-Boakye’s paintings are real people, but like characters in a novel, each has his or her own background story, own purpose, own personal life. Yiadom-Boakye embraces the painting medium by utilizing the urgency of fast paint application.

"Eavesdropping" by Amalia Pica

Amalia Pica’s multicolored, carefully place arrangement of found glasses, references the childhood activity of pressing glasses against a wall to eavesdrop on a conversation going on in another room. Upon reflection, the work has more political rather than playful edge, with the idea of one listening to what is not intended to be publicly heard by means of a voyeuristic act.

"We the People" by Danh Vo

These large sculptural pieces come from Vo’s exact copy of the French sculptor Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi’s 22m tall Statue of Liberty. Vo has taken this adopted symbol of American freedom and broken it down to fragments that will never be welded together. The work is commemorative of the struggle of immigrants like Vo and his Vietnamese family.

"He wore them like talismans all over his body" (detail) by Minam Apang

From her series of paintings, War with the Stars, Minam Apang’s dark and meticulously detailed works offer an introspective world of fantasy. Cultures and symbolism clash. The artist was influenced by the instability of her life, which led her to travel across the world, with the only constant being her own self and imagination.

"Material" by Iman Issa

Part of a larger installation of ten separate displays, Issa’s objects are titled from left to right: “Material for a sculpture commemorating the life of a soldier who died defending his nation against intruding enemies”, “Material for a sculpture proposed as an alternative to a monument that has become an embarrassment to its people”, “Material for a sculpture representing a bygone era of luxury and decadence”, “Material for a sculpture representing a monument erected in the spirit of defiance of a larger power”. This is Issa’s way of negotiating the simplistic language of monuments that are intended to symbolize complicated issues.

One of the several video exhibits was  O SECULO by Cinthia Marcelle and Tiago Mata Machado. It is a both a visual and musical experience of thrown objects forming an orchestra of sound as they crash against the pavement of an empty street.

"Little Monster" 2011, Dafna Steinberg

Pop Art, ever since its commencement in the 1960s, has proven to be one of the most lasting movements of American art. Is it a surprise? The bright colors and clean lines of advertisement, the cult of personality built around celebrity, and social issues brought to light by media coverage seem to be more relevant now than ever. TNC Gallery’s POW: Pop Now presents itself as an exhibition of the work of 10 artists as they explore the new frontiers of Pop Art, providing evidence of how this thematic approach, a reaction to mass media, lives in the present day.

The young artists, mostly based in Brooklyn, Washington DC, and Salt Lake City, grew up in an America catering to all their capitalist needs. The bizarreness of consumer culture imagery is not strange to them. Some of the artists themselves work in advertisement and graphic design as a means of steady income, following in the footsteps of Andy Warhol.

"Black Betty" 2012, Forest Allread

But the familiarity of the style of the work allows these multimedia artists to create their own narrative and inject part of the personal into the public. Some of the works are celebratory, others are political, and yet others embrace the bizarre by juxtaposing everyday objects and materials. But these are not Warhols playing with contemporary iconography; they are dealing with the reality having to construct a genuine identity in a culture obsessed with branding, public image, and self promotion.

"Houdini Walking the Line" 2011, Tomeu Coll

“He began to make far-flung expeditions to frozen tundras on his own dime just to meet people who were living in the harshest of conditions. Why? To let them know somebody cared about them, to recognize the resilience it takes to survive outside the box—where Tomeu lives to this day”, photographer Donna Ferrato tells us about the career path taken by the young Majorcan she met at a workshop in Barcelona. Tomeu Coll is known for images of the rough life—he has traveled to sites in the Ukraine and Latvia still in Soviet-era ruins, in addition to rural areas of Majorca, to capture images of people and their surroundings. Coll is now partly based in New York City. How has he experienced the city during the few years he has lived here?

There are, of course, those moments of everyday life in New York. Many of the images are from Leonard Street, Tribeca, were we can assume Coll worked (maybe continues working) after accompanying Ferrato and fellow students to Manhattan. He photographed the people he met and the physicality of the city with fresh eyes and very charming sense of optimism.

"Madison Avenue" 2011, Tomeu Coll

But perhaps Coll’s most memorable photographs of NY are those related to two 2011 events: the Occupy Wall Street protests and the 10 year anniversary of the attacks on the World Trade Center, both of which were given the honor of separate projects, OWS: First Days, and Ten Years After. The circus atmosphere of these occasions allowed for moments of bizarre performance, such as the demonstrations by the extremist hate group that calls themselves the Westboro Baptist Church. Another photograph shows a more orderly, if not haunting environment, with police officers hired to patrol Zuccotti Park during the OWS occupation lined up as they await orders from their superiors. The two lights commemorating the 9/11 terrorist attacks shoot up into the night sky, partly hidden by buildings. Even in the “civilized” environment of the city, the photographer has found problematic subjects similar to those in his earlier work.

"Zuccotti Park & Twin Lights" 2011, Tomeu Coll

"Spirited Away" 2012, Michael Bevilacqua

The story goes that it started with a can of chrome paint left behind by one of Michael Bevilacqua’s friends. Then he began going over paintings with chrome, completely covering the picture plane with the dripping, lustrous paint. His new exhibition Ceremony, displays an entirely new body of work, at odds with his normally painterly, colorful style. The title of Bevilacqua’s show is inspired by his near obsession with the Manchester, England music label Factory Records and the alternative bands it promoted from the late 1970s through the early 1990s. Bevilacqua, a New York based painter, approaches his newly simplified work by referencing his fanatical interests.

"Bad Daddy" 2011, Michael Bevilacqua

Ceremony makes use of text to carry through the artist’s musical inspiration. Words, dates and symbols, have a meaningful connection to how the painter interprets certain favorite songs. This is something Bevilacqua has embraced as a way of adding a personal touch to generally abstract artwork and can be seen in fairly recent paintings which reference bands like the Gorillaz. The motif of “Disorder” printed on the new canvases is borrowed from a song by Joy Division and the chrome recalls the industrial history of Factory Record’s hometown. Ceremony is up March 29 – April 28, 2012 at Kravets Wehby.

Installation view for "Ceremony"

The 32 or so artists involved will use a variety of media on the empty canvas that is the Andrew Freedman Home. “Some of the artistic responses to the space including where artists have repurposed furniture and found objects for their installation, compel us to confront the inequalities of our time but also the strength of the human spirit to overcome adversity” says Manon Slome curator of This Side of Paradise. In addition, the extensive cultural and educational programming that will accompany the exhibition is not limited to theater performances, cooking classes, film screenings, and community choir shows.

Check out as contributing artists Mario Chamorro and Daniel Paluska set up for their Happy Room, a collection of messages of happiness, at the Andrew Freedman Home.

Mandala Flea Market Mutants: Pop Protocol and the Seven Transformations of Good-luck National Defense Cats

Inoue, a native of Kyoto, Japan, explores her interest in the relationship between people and objects by working with mass-produced items and determining their cultural value. For her imaginary marketplace, she creates hybrid objects from typical urban market pop culture finds and traditional cultural symbols through casting and other mediums. The resulting figures, whether representing Buddah, Coca-Cola bottles, or Hello Kitty, inspire ideas and questions around the effects of globalization and market-based economies on historically rich cultures.

Mandala Flea Market Mutants runs March 17 – April 22 alongside Jeanne Quinn’s LaceMath.

You can learn more about Yoko Inoue by watching an earlier interview with her through Smack Mellon’s Vimeo channel.