08/31/2026
Hello! Kaytea Petro here! KnK’s head curator called me today and told me to make a post talking about my favorite pieces in the show (OR ELSE! She’s such a taskmaster!) I’ve given it some thought, and I can’t really say what my favorite pieces in the show are, because what I love about ian the meow · cat art Jeremy Novy and The Velvet Bandit work is how they interact with the environments that they live in. These three artists are special, because their street art is not just some flash, an expression of bravado, or a marker of ownership over a space; their art is designed to gently prod, and poke the viewer to be better. To participate in community.
As such, I’m going to break the rule that Kalie Capadona laid out for me, and I’m going to talk about moments in this show that I love. The first one (first photo) is a The Velvet Bandit stop sign with Flock cameras on the left, and two paintings by Ian the Meow where the cat is getting twisted in a world of it’s own complication. I hung these together, not just because they look great together formally (the shape and color contrast is beautiful), but because it’s kinda a metaphor about human instinct. We think that if we can just record and keep more of the fleeting world, we’ll be safer, better, something that we’re not currently. It’s a quandary, really.
The second moment I love, is the Keith Haring image, and The Velvet Bandit’s commentary on graffiti. There’s a few things about this moment. One, I grew up in San Francisco during the AIDS crisis, and my mom was on the Public Health Committee that made the decision to shut down the bathhouses because of AIDS (I was a a kindergartner or very young and probably coloring while waiting for her). The SFMOMA has a huge collection of Haring’s work, and I think that this piece by jeremy would contextualize the collection for the contemporary era. We stand on the feet of giants and all that, and I remember going to the Haring opening at MoMA during college (or high school?) and looking around the room and noticing how many locally famous gay men weren’t there, and noticing who was. Rents in SF did stay low in the 80’s and early 90’s and thrifting was amazing, because of AIDS.
