He ain't heavy...Logan Hicks and Joe Iurato at Skewville. Photo by Lisa Freeman
A spray can has one job. It holds paint under pressure and delivers it, finely misted, onto a wall or other surface, where the paint becomes someone's art, and the can becomes trash. Last night, at Bushwick gallery Skewville, the can skipped the trash part. Instead, more than 200 of them, emptied over the past year by aerosol artist Logan Hicks, hung painted on the walls of Ad Deville's garage gallery.
The creation of these pieces has a cyclical feel to it, like a feedback loop with a nozzle. The vessel that delivers the substance that becomes the art then becomes the art, and the instrument of its transformation is another vessel in line for the same fate. Whatever, this is a show about making art of what’s at hand, about making beauty out of the used-up and the unwanted. It’s a message of hope, really.
Hicks, whose intricate stencils form the background for collabs with Joe Iruato and BEBAR, says his motivation for the can upcycling enterprise was closer to guilt than theory. "I go through a lot of spray paint," he said. "I kind of just started to feel guilty about throwing so many cans away—hundreds and hundreds of cans get thrown away every year. So I started collecting them. And so from there, I've just been painting cans day and night."
Logan Hicks, right, reasons with a skeptical Joe Iurato. Photo by Lisa Freeman
Behind every finished street art mural or graffiti tag stands a pile of dead cans nobody counts. For this show Hicks counted, and the result was a wall full of cans, imbued with Hicks’ signature stencil intricacy and augmented with Iurato’s precocious kids or BEBAR’s snarling monsters.
At the same time, Hicks and Iurato said they wanted to offer their supporters original art at an affordable price. Hicks and Iurato are just back from a show at West Chelsea Contemporary in Austin where their canvases carried five-figure price tags.
"I was doing 4 foot by 4 foot canvases, and that puts it out of the price range of the majority of people… I really wanted to do something smaller, more manageable, something that people could walk away with — art that was affordable," Hicks said.
People checking out the can wall at Skewville. Photo by Lisa Freeman
"There are a lot of supporters that we have that aren't gonna walk into a gallery and buy a $15,000 painting… This is nice to have something that is for everyone," Iurato said. "This was like a feel-good gesture for us. There was no pressure. We just had fun."
DeVille, whose Bushwick gallery and its predecessors have long demonstrated fealty to the New York street art scene, said a lot of artists have used empty paint cans in their practices, so he wasn’t expecting much when Hicks floated the idea. "When Logan was like, 'I'm gonna do cans,' I'm like, ‘ah, okay.’ But when he showed up—holy shit, he went above and beyond," said DeVille, himself a longtime street artist.
Skewville owner Ad DeVille explains why his gallery has a pay phone in it. Photo by Lisa Freeman
That the show features affordable art perfectly fits the Skewville model. "A lot of the artists that show here, like Joe Iurato and Logan Hicks, sell $10,000 canvases. So when someone does a show, it's Skewville — it's for the fans, it's for the artists,” he said. Then, pointing to the wall of colorful painted empties, he added: “These are $125 pieces of art… Everything's cash and carry. Just grab,” he said.
One can features a greyscale photorealistic stencil portrait: a kid in a dark cap, arms crossed tight around a globe, soft grey dots behind him. The division of labor is clear on this one: the child is pure Iurato, his signature kid figure and the World Is Ours theme, and Hicks supplies the grayscale dot pattern behind it. In another, BEBAR’s saturated monster face is in hot pink-red, turquoise and mustard atop a muted orange background. One collaboration carries its own loop inside the loop: a pattern from the Bushwick Gate, a large public work Hicks and Iurato made together in 2023, redrawn small on a can, with Iurato's motif laid over it.
One of the cans, a collaboration between Logan Hicks and Joe Iurato. Photo by Lisa Freeman
Then there are some that are all Hicks, like the one with an all-over Art Nouveau pattern: big yellow blooms and olive-green vines curling across a black background. This one shows Hicks the stencil-pattern virtuoso at his most decorative, and there's a neat inversion in it: vegetation taking over an industrial object, the can that once sprayed pigment now growing flowers that themselves were sprayed on.
There’s also a wall of photographs taken by Hicks and Iurato. Iurato’s photos focus on his grayscale photorealistic cutout works positioned in the wild; there’s a kid in a Batman costume standing in a road, and another with the kid with the globe in his lap sitting in front of a rock background. Hicks, meanwhile, brought photographs he took from outside his Brooklyn home of New York teens surfing atop moving subway trains.
The surprise of the evening was Lori Zimmer, who is usually the writer in the room. She’s the author of five books, including Art Hiding in New York, Art Hiding in Paris, and her latest, I'm Not Your Muse (2025), her excavation of 31 women artists and visionaries written off as muses. At Skewville she exhibits her own work for the first time: cyanotypes, blue-toned portraits of women layered over book pages, built in part from her 90s negatives.
Lori Zimmer with her cyanotypes. Her hat refers to her latest book, “I'm Not Your Muse.” Photo by Lisa Freeman
One of them sits atop page 162 of The Moonstone Castle Mystery, a Nancy Drew book, with Nancy and Chief Burke in dialogue and the police surrounding an old house while three girls watch from behind the trees. The cyanotype is brushed on unevenly by hand: pale through the center, so the text stays fully legible. The end result: a girl-detective page from the reading of Lori’s youth, carrying a picture shot in 1996, cyanotyped in 2026. It’s a decade-long span across one sheet of paper.
"I don't call it art. I mean, it is art, but I call it a personal history project… I write about artists that have been forgotten, and I was approaching this in that way. And I'm like, it's me," Zimmer said.
Logan Hicks, Joe Iurato and Guests is open now at Skewville, 237 Starr Street, Bushwick, Brooklyn.
