2Create: Art Collaborations in New York City

by Yoav Litvin

This beautifully designed book showcases the work of nine pairs of New York City's finest graffiti and street artists, delving deep into their backgrounds, techniques, and collaborative processes. Each duo consists of artists with unique styles who come together to create a larger-than-life work of street art in a neighborhood in New York, the birthplace of modern graffiti. Witness the immense creative potential of collaborations that have produced stunning examples of classic graffiti, collage work, screen printing, and murals. Each chapter provides access to a mysterious underworld, leading readers to secretive meetings of creative minds out of which ephemeral, yet nonetheless remarkable, works are born and later transferred onto walls, rooftops, trucks, and subway platforms. The combination of revealing interviews and colorful action photography produces a narrative arc of relationships formed between individuals from diverse backgrounds and creative upbringings that follows the artistic process from creative spark to collaborative masterpiece."

296 pages, Hardcover

Published November 28, 2016

About the author

Yoav Litvin is a writer, photographer and urban explorer. Yoav Litvin fuses passion for arts and peoples to create a unique style of documentation, faithfully capturing the Zeitgeist.

Reviews

[Daniel · Rating 3 out of 5]

This review originally published in Looking For a Good Book. Rated 3.0 of 5

The subtitle of this book is misleading. It reads "Art Collaborations in New York City" which sounded really fascinating to me. But what it really is is graffiti artist collaborations. Still potentially really interesting, but not what I was expecting.

Given that this book is about graffiti artist collaborations in New York City, it strikes me that the potential audience for this book is incredibly slim, though it may have more interest from a sociology perspective than from an art interest.

We get a little background on each artist and each talks briefly about what it was like or what it means to collaborate. The book is lavishly illustrated with photos of the artists at work and their final collaborative project. This is interesting at first, but while the artist backgrounds may differ, it becomes repetitive as it doesn't seem to bring about anything new.

I will also state that I have a little problem with the nature of the art itself. I've seen some incredibly beautiful graffiti art, and I would argue that in many cases, the graffiti enhances an area. But at its core, it's still vandalism. We are reminded of this by the fact that some of the artists will not let their faces appear in the book. Whether it's by hiding behind masks, or having the photos pixelated, some of the these graffiti artists can't be identified.

Some of the final projects are really interesting. The collaboration of "Icy" and "Sot" is fascinating and powerful (especially given that they are not native Americans), and the collaboration between Dasic Fernandez and Rubin 415 shows how graffiti can really enhance a community and strike a powerful message. The collaboration between "bunny m" and "SQUARE" was more of what I was expecting to see ... two distinct art styles colliding to make one work of art.

This is the sort of book that you might pick up and thumb through if you see it on a table, but it's not the sort that I can give a high recommendation to run out and buy.

Looking for a good book? 2create by Yoav Litvin is an art/sociology book about collaborating graffiti artists and has some interesting art and artist perspectives, but doesn't have a lot of appeal to those outside the New York City community.

I received a digital copy of this book from the publisher, through Edelweiss, in exchange for an honest review.

[Sharon Tyler · Rating 4 out of 5]

2create: Art Collaborations in New York City by Yoav Litvin is a book that showcases the work of nine pairs of New York City's finest graffiti and street artists, delving deep into their backgrounds, techniques, and collaborative processes. Each duo consists of artists with unique styles who come together to create a larger-than-life work of street art in a neighborhood in New York, the birthplace of modern graffiti. Witness the immense creative potential of collaborations that have produced stunning examples of classic graffiti, collage work, screen printing, and murals. Each chapter provides access to a mysterious underworld, leading readers to secretive meetings of creative minds out of which ephemeral, yet nonetheless remarkable, works are born and later transferred onto walls, rooftops, trucks, and subway platforms.

2create: Art Collaborations in New York City is a wonderful book offering the insights, artistic processes, and motivation for a variety of artists. I liked reading about the diverse artists and how they work alone, and in collaborations. The process of collaborating is as varied and interesting as the artwork that it produces. The combination of inspiration and work styles made the read very interesting. As a crafter that lives in the region of the artists interview, and the state at least one was born in, I felt a connection to some of the artist and saw some of my own inspirations and thoughts in their words. I really enjoyed reading about all these artists. It really shows that art is universal, no matter how differently it is approached and how the artists and admirers come to it.

2create: Art Collaborations in New York City is a great read for artists and art enthusiasts alike. I found the interviews and photographs to be inspiring and informative. The variety of styles, processes, and canvases was well balanced and made for a nice read.

[John Shaw · Rating 5 out of 5]

An intimate look at the creation
process for street art
with the added complication
of all the projects detailed
in this book are
collaborations
two street artists
coming together to create
something amazing

[Agnes Preszler · Rating 2 out of 5]

The idea is interesting, nine pairs of artists to create 9 works of street art. As the city is actually New York I was looking for great pieces of art. Unfortunately of the 9 only a very few resulted somewhat interesting for me (the snake, the cards, the cityscape and the rainbowlike one - but none of them struck me particularly ), the others are of an embarrassing low level, like the one with cutting out letters and photos (and all this documented with so many pictures!), oh come on!. Any student in any secondary school in any provincial city can produce better works. From artists operating in NY I'd attend more creativity,quality and originality.
The projects are very well presented with maps, interviews, a very pretentious "early life and work" section for every artist and many (too many) pictures. The problem is that the content is not worth all this fuss.