SaveArtSpace is proud to present our 10th Anniversary celebration The People’s Art, a group public art exhibition on billboard ad space in New York, NY, opening May 30, 2025, curated by Anne-Laure Lemaitre, RJ Rushmore, Zahra Sherzad, Steven P. Harrington and Jaime Rojo, & Travis Rix.

The People’s Art is an art of, and for, the people. This is the art of the commons, that shared space between the tyranny of privatization and the compromise of collectivity. In a medium dedicated to telling the people what they want, SaveArtSpace allows us to occupy public space as a personal place where we can imagine what we need.

We invite artists of all ages and talents to submit their artwork between March 3, 2024 and April 14, 2025. This is an opportunity to have your work placed on ad space in New York, NY. Up to 50 artists will be selected from the open call.

Open call for art ends April 14, 2025. There is a $10 donation per image submission to participate, each donation is tax deductible and goes to producing the public art. Selected artists will be announced after April 28, 2025. Public art will be on view starting May 30, 2025 in New York, NY, and will be on view for at least one month.

The selected artists will also be exhibited at Satellite Gallery, 279 Broome St, NYC, with a one-night opening reception anniversary party on May 30, 2025, 6-9p.

The People’s Art is an art of, and for, the people. In a town like New York City, we’ve got plenty of established spaces - galleries, museums, lobbies and the like - to showcase the art that exists as trophies and baubles in the marketplace of luxury products, or to serve the glut of cultural production like sewer drains in a deluge. This is a project, in however many billboards it takes to get a gesture out there that can dance in the public imagination without becoming a brand, that is all about the space between polemics and poetics, how we communicate in this crowded place without screaming, like the way we somehow know how to walk the busiest of sidewalks without running into one another. It’s a folkloric choreography of lover’s leaps and slapstick pratfalls, talking out loud because you think your phone gives you permission to occupy the bandwidth of everyone around you, or because you’re just fucking crazy. It’s a way of looking as well as representing, the terms of engagement where we try not to stare but aren’t afraid to wink.

Signs of the times, the veritable zits of our zeitgeist, we’ve demeaned and damned billboards at least since Lady Bird talked her hubby President Lyndon Johnson into enacting the Highway Beautification Act (HBA) back in 1965 - the idea being that beauty would make America a better place to live. No doubt the time is nigh for some new assault on this ongoing ugliness (the equivalent of late night TV ads on the cultural landscape), maybe we can call it MABA, but until then let us celebrate billboards as the old-fashioned eye-sores they truly are - neglected vestiges from an early outbreak of a visual rash - the residual old scar tissue of corporate co-option and commercial coercion that has since all but subsumed the society of the spectacle.

An art of the people needs to speak a lingua franca and there can be no more common language than the come-on. We don’t shoot the shit in Latin or iambic pentameter; we communicate in the vulgar vernacular of persuasion. Wherever the artist’s billboards of SaveArtSpace appear like deranged interventions in the quotidian, they do not so much bust out of the normalcy as weave their idiosyncrasies into it, joining the din of optical overload like an odd harmony in an ancient Greek chorus, queries and quandaries in the surface of surety, alternatives to the obvious not afraid of eschewing subtlety for the sake of commanding attention. This is the art of the commons, that shared space between the tyranny of privatization and the compromise of collectivity. In a medium dedicated to telling the people what they want, SaveArtSpace allows us to occupy public space as a personal place where we can imagine what we need. - Carlo McCormick

Curators

Anne-Laure Lemaitre is a New York-based curator, writer, and creative producer specialized in site-specific and in-situ art. She advocates for anchoring art in its context as a means to further its impact, trigger new perspectives, and explore new conceptual territories and separates her time between consulting for corporations and institutions, writing about practices she strongly believes in, and executing curatorial programs focused on emerging art. She serves on the advisory committee of Civil Arts and Beverly’s.

Connect with Anne-Laure at @annelauresees.

RJ Rushmore is a writer, curator and public art advocate. He is the founder of the street art blog Vandalog and culture-jamming campaign Art in Ad Places. As a curator, he has collaborated with Poster House, Mural Arts Philadelphia, The L.I.S.A. Project NYC and Haverford College. Rushmore’s writing has appeared in Hyperallergic, The Philadelphia Citizen, Complex, and numerous books.

Connect with RJ at @rjrushmore.

Zahra Sherzad is founder of Noorvision LLC, an NYC based independent production company, and has been involved in the contemporary art world for 20 years curating and producing a number of art shows with recognized artists, musicians, DJs, filmmakers, and creatives that have gone on to define street culture as a whole. Currently, Zahra is Head of Visual Art and an Impact Producer for Level Forward, an entertainment company that develops, produces, and finances high quality entertainment with Oscar, Emmy, and Tony-winning producers. Clients have included: Zappos, Amazon Music, Rockstar Games, AK Worldwide, No Commission Art Fair (Swizz Beats), Moniker Art Fair, Times Square Arts Alliance, and Creative Time.

Connect with Zahra at @zahrasherzad.

Steven P. Harrington and Jaime Rojo are internationally recognized curators, cultural commentators, and documentarians of street art and graffiti, best known as the founders of Brooklyn Street Art (BSA), a leading platform dedicated to showcasing and analyzing urban art movements worldwide. 

With a keen eye for emerging and established artists, they have curated exhibitions and cultural programs in cities such as New York, Berlin, LA, and Moscow, where they co-curated Artmossphere, Russia’s first-ever street art biennale. Their curatorial work has also been featured at institutions such as Urban Nation Museum in Berlin, where they took over the entire museum to curate the career retrospective of “Subway Art” photographer Martha Cooper, called “Martha Cooper: Taking Pictures” from October 2020 to May 2022.  

Since 2008 they have published more than 6,000 articles on their website BrooklynStreetArt.com, documenting the ever-evolving global street art scene and advancing the dialogue between street art, graffiti, and contemporary visual culture. Their extensive travels have taken them to five continents, allowing them to engage with artists and movements in vastly different cultural contexts from Miami to Mexico City to Marrakesh.  

Harrington and Rojo have lectured at academic and cultural institutions worldwide, including the Brooklyn Museum, Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art (LACMA), Sotheby’s Institute of Art, Christie’s Education, various art fairs and festivals. They are founding members of the Martha Cooper Library in Berlin where they have begun the first Martha Cooper Scholarship for aspiring photographers in 2025. Their expertise is sought after in discussions about how street art intersects with fine art, activism, and public space. 

A defining aspect of their impact on the global graffiti and street art scene is their unwavering commitment to archiving, curating, and critically analyzing the movement. By meticulously preserving its history and evolution, they ensure that future generations can engage with its depth and significance. As leading voices in contemporary urban art discourse, they play a crucial role in shaping its narrative, bridging the divide between independent street culture and mainstream recognition with insight and authority.

Connect with Steven & Jamie at @bkstreetart.

Travis Rix is the founder and director of SaveArtSpace.

Connect with Travis at @trvsrx.

SaveArtSpace

Founded in 2015, SaveArtSpace is a non-profit organization that works to create an urban gallery experience, launching exhibitions that address intersectional themes and foster a message of social change that benefits the working class. By placing culture over commercialism, SaveArtSpace aims to empower artists from all walks of life and inspire a new generation of young creatives and activists.