Rob likes Momo, and here is why:
Since about 2000 or 2001 I began seeing a lot of what I now know was Momo’s work around downtown. His public work has always been that of a street artist, a poster artist, and a lot of it caught my eye. In 2005 I spotted one particular poster that I really dug. It was a spoof of a New Yorker cover, dated two years in advance, and it featured a guy scraping a “MOMO” poster off a wall at the corner of Grand and Wooster.
I regularly passed these posters in a few locations on my way to work each day, and I began to get a wicked little voice in my head telling me to try and scrape one off a wall to keep for myself. Fortunately I chose not to be an asshole, and instead did my best to track down an email address for the artist. Offering to buy or barter, I told Momo I loved that particular poster and hoped he would consider parting with an extra print if he had one. It turns out that he had never sold any of his work at that point, and it was clear he wasn’t entirely comfortable with the idea of a sale. But he left me with a sense that we might be able to work something out down the road.
Several months later Momo sent an email to a group of fans/supporters/friends. A print had been made available for purchase through a benefit auction at the famous squat-turned-gallery ABC No Rio, and — if I remember correctly — we had just a few hours to get there and place written bids. Luckily for me, nobody interested was there at the end of the auction. When they called for final bids, I was ready with a pen and won the print for a very reasonable sum. Coincidentally, at about the same time I was moving into an apartment on Wooster Street, right by the corner where the fictional scene takes place, which made me especially happy to have the print.
When Momo took his first step into retail sales a year or two later, he did so with a limited run of smaller scale reprints of this same New Yorker poster. It seemed like a test run for him at the time, to see how the retail experience went, perhaps as much for him personally as for the prints. If you are at all interested, it appears you can still purchase these prints and test his comfort level.
The only other public sale of his work that I know of was the recent publication of 3am-6am, a monograph published and distributed by Rojo. Frankly, I’m not a big fan of this recent work, but I greatly appreciate it because I know that Momo is not producing work for me, for a gallery, for critics, or anyone else. Above all other reasons, Rob likes Momo because he seems to be producing work for the sole purpose of expression and interaction with the world around him.
With an apparent aversion to monetary reward for artistic pursuits, Momo remains true to himself, regardless of anything that may be going on around him in the art world. Many street artists have gotten caught up in the ongoing battle of art v commerce, both in the community and in their own careers. And the art scene has been damaged by both the commercial success of guerilla artists, and the obnoxious protests against them.
Yet while artists like Shepard Fairey have become almost strictly commercial artists who now write cease and desist letters to artists spoofing their work, Momo has kept his poster work almost entirely apart from the commercial world.
So keep your eyes open for Momo’s work, and keep an eye out for all of the other great work from the artists busily gluing their work to walls in the wee hours. If you want to become a bit more familiar with who is out there, start by browsing the Wooster Collective site.
- Rob
PS: Incidentally, tangentially, and otherwise digressively, I may have first come across Momo’s work far from New York City. Some of my favorite railroad graffiti is the stuff I saw while taking Amtrak cross-country in the late 90’s. The Empire Builder route took me from Manhattan to Chicago to Portland, Oregon, and then back again many times, and each was its own adventure. The highlight of the trip was always Glacier National Park, where it turns out an artist named Momo was riding freight cars to and from the bars in Whitefish on the weekends. And when he wasn’t riding the freights, he was covering them in graffitti. Apparently some of the freight art I came to appreciate so much was probably the early public expression of an artist I would contact some years later.
