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"ATX Urban Art" will feature over 100 local artists keeping Austin's walls colorful, past and present.
You know Austin as the Live Music Capital of the World but local urban artist J Muzacz wants you to know the city as the “Urban Art Capital of the World.”
Austin has yet to be christened with such a title but Muzacz is hoping to make household names of local mural, mosaic, street and graffiti artists with a new book titled, “ATX Urban Art.” Muzacz and his team are less than $10,000 away from their $25,000 crowdfunding goal on Indiegogo.
Divided into a chapter for each medium, over 100 local artists will be featured across 500 pages and more than 1,000 pictures in the book, which will be independently published by Muzacz and his motley crew of art school interns. Muzacz said he believes the book will be the first of its kind to showcase Austin's local artists in this format
“There are no books like this in Austin—there's no mural book, there's no graffiti book, there's no street art, nothing,” Muzacz said. “So this book, hopefully, is going to teach some people the vernacular, how to identify these certain things, and maybe even help people to appreciate graffiti, even if it is illegal.”
Muzacz started his art career off doing graffiti in middle school, which he continued during his time at the University of Texas at Austin before branching off into murals and his most recent medium, mosaics. He stayed in Austin, with some stints abroad, and now works out of East Austin's Something Cool Studios.
J Muzacz has been an artist in Austin for almost 20 years, even teaching urban painting classes for the CIty of Austin for nine years. (Laura Figi/Austonia)
The book was thought up in partnership with since-graduated interns Justin Ebel, a graphic designer and photographer, and Zoe Axelrod, a designer and Ringtone Mag founder. The pair also helped organize a comprehensive art map that provides a tour of “off the beaten path” urban artworks, including many in the book.
Going back to the 1950s, the project recounts some history about the hardships creatives’ faced with the legality of their art, gives artists a space to tell their stories, and tells the stories of artists like like Raul Valdez, Reji Thomas and Daniel Johnston, who flourished before social media was around to uplift them.
“(Urban art) is the purest form of art, I feel like, because it's not about financial gain and it's free to the public. There's something greater than commercial reasons to be doing this type of art,” Muzacz said. “This is an artist developing, evolving a craft and respecting a culture, despite the legal repercussions, despite having to pay for or steal their own paint.”
The book has a chapter each for murals, graffiti, street art and mosaics. (Zoe Axelrod)
“ATX Urban Art” also includes a host of artists who still paint the streets today, including prominent local faces like Sloke One, Bill Tavis, Angry Cloud + Descnd, Levi Ponce and Hope Hummingbird from diverse mediums. Muzacz said he hopes people use the book as an encyclopedia of local names.
“I want people to have this book as a Rolodex for your art commission, or if you have a business and you want a mural,” Muzacz said. “Here are the pioneers, here are the professionals, here are the most unique practitioners, the prolific practitioners, these are the people that need to and will keep shining, these are the names you should know.”
The book will continue crowdfunding through mid-January, and until then you will be able to snag the hefty book for $60 or the art map for $10. The book will be printed, regardless of if the group hits their goal, but Muzacz said he wouldn’t mind investments into their work.
Plus, the money goes to support artists, the design team and keeps the community colorful.
“Drive around or walk around today and imagine all those murals, street art and graffiti weren't there and think of what that space would feel like,” Muzacz said. “I'd say right now, nobody would want to live there. (During COVID), a lot of people said that the music was turned down and the visual art was turned up. Part of the Austin experience is the visual music of murals.”
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A Web3 meetup was held this week at Cosmic Coffee + Beer Garden. (Andrea Guzman/Austonia)
It’s hard to know what Web3 is without first understanding the original versions. The first web is the 90s Internet where people had their own random websites that didn’t link together, making it decentralized. In Web2, we saw the rise of Google, Facebook and other major players who configured standard ways for people to share and receive information.
Ethereum co-founder Gavin Wood and other blockchain developers say a decentralized version of the Internet, Web3, is on the way. Web3 can be thought of as synonymous with cryptocurrency, meaning it is based on the blockchain. Platforms and apps built on Web3 won’t be owned by a central gatekeeper, but rather by users. Those in the Austin crypto community believe to see a growing presence of Web3 in Austin.
Pujaa Rajan, an engineer at financial software company Stripe and adviser for startups, describes herself as a “digital nomad.” She has traveled all over from Hawaii to New York and San Francisco, looking for the crypto community in each place.
Having been in Austin for the past month, Rajan organized a Web3 meetup this week at Cosmic Coffee + Beer Garden in South Austin open to folks working in crypto or the crypto-curious. About 30 people showed up. "Compared to a lot of other cities that I went to, it is a lot more open and community-oriented here, which is what Web3 is all about,” she said.
Pujaa Rajan, an engineer at financial software company Stripe, organized a Web3 meetup in Austin during a visit. (Andrea Guzman/Austonia)
ATX DAO member Roberto Talamas, who stopped by the event, talked about the crypto group’s expansion. Web3, in Talamas’ view, expands on the previous versions which allowed people to read, then read and write. Now, he says, people can read, write and own. To Talamas, blockchain technology has powered that ownership aspect, and it can be utilized through groups like a DAO, a group that pools together capital and goes on to make investments or take on blockchain-based projects.
“The ecosystem of work with (Web3) companies here in Austin is still relatively small,” Talamas said. “And that’s one of those things that we’re trying to deal with at ATX DAO is to do all the advocacy work needed to make Austin the best Web3 city.”
Part of that community, however, has gotten a bad rep for being “crypto bros.” Rajan acknowledged that Web3 involves both finance and technology, which are fields women have historically been excluded from. But, she says the decentralization aspect creates a clean slate and a new means to form groups. “I feel like we can kind of take back the power or create a world for ourselves,” Rajan said.
The meetup at Cosmic brought together crypto users to talk about the prospects of Web3. (Andrea Guzmán/Austonia)
Meetup attendee Jonathan Hillis also talked about the idea that Web3 creates an opportunity to start over and how this could be something that grows in Austin. Born and raised in the capital city, Hills has left his Bay Area Web2 Instacart job behind to live in a cabin outside Dripping Springs last year. He and his wife, along with a group of internet friends formed a DAO called Cabin, and he's now writing on the Web3 version of Medium, known as Mirror.
When it comes to the state of Web3, four cities stand out. “The dam broke in Covid,” Hillis said. “Everybody no longer had to live in the Bay Area for tech.”
San Francisco is still rooted in Web2 traits with Big Tech and software as a service venture. New York is financial technology. Miami is another major player. But with Austin, Hillis sees a lot of potential.
“Austin is great at being a place for independent online creators of many types—musicians, but also artists,” Hillis said. “What excites me about Web3 is the opportunities for putting creators at more of the center of the value capture.”
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(Philip Taylor/Flickr)
For Carson Stanch, who moved to Austin from Brooklyn, New York, to be near family, Austin's lower cost of living was just an added bonus. According to the latest data from the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis, a $100 bill is worth $98.20 in Austin when compared to the national average in 2020, while it's worth just $84.53 in New York.
Houston native Carson Stanch moved from Brooklyn, New York to Austin just before the pandemic. (Carson Stanch)
Stanch soon realized she was a trendsetter—or perhaps a fortune teller—as the pandemic hit a few months after her move. No longer willing to spend extra money on their more expensive apartments, Stanch said many of her friends and other New Yorkers left the city amid COVID lockdowns.
"It's so expensive to live there (and) all of the reasons why you live in New York, you couldn't really do anymore," Stanch said.
Garrett Watson, a senior policy analyst with the Tax Foundation who wrote a 2018 report on the value of $100 in U.S. metros, told Austonia the report factors in the costs of goods and services with residents' incomes and compares them to the national average. The result is price parity, a number that varies drastically across the country—for instance, a $100 bill won't get you near as far in Austin as it would in more rural parts of the Hill Country.
While a Ben Franklin note was worth $4 more in New York in 2020 when compared to 2018, a $100 bill decreased by $1.60 in value in Austin. Austin's cost of living also saw the 12th-highest increase among U.S. metros from the 2010 to 2020 census.
And as the pandemic's nationwide housing boom gained extra momentum in Austin, peaking at a median home price of $575,000 in June 2021, Watson said the value of $100 could have dropped even further.
"There's just been a chronic hunger for building houses on the coasts and in certain cities in the heartland," Watson said. "Especially this year, we're seeing more and more discussion about that in Austin, and so that is a big, big factor."
Price parity bleeds into other factors as well—in San Francisco, where the value of $100 sits at $82.63, residents are nearly 18% poorer than their higher incomes suggest. But with higher incomes than the U.S. average, they may find themselves more flush with cash when moving to a cheaper city like Austin.
Many out-of-towners have used that extra change to make housing offers much higher than the asking price, Redfin chief economist Daryl Fairweather told Fox7 Austin.
"All those migrants are bringing with them high-paying jobs who are used to much more expensive housing and they’re willing to pull out all the stops to win these homes and move to Austin," Fairweather said.
But Austin is catching up to those traditional hotspots: the area was predicted to be the most expensive metro outside of the Golden State by the end of 2021.
In just two years, Stanch said she's seen some signs.
"I feel like I look around certain areas of Austin (and) they do feel more similar to downtown Brooklyn," Stanch said. "Some businesses I see might tend to cater to folks who have a little more income."
So why not move to, say, Florence, Alabama, where money is almost 20% more valuable?
Watson said the difference comes down to the value of amenities—something the study can't track.
"Part of the value in New York City is all the amenities that you're near, the value of Broadway, the value of being able to get food delivered to your door," Watson said. "So that may be reflected in people's willingness to pay higher prices... there's a lot of really great reasons why people may want to be in Austin from an identity perspective that you can't get in other parts of Texas."
In Austin, tech salaries rose 5% from 2020-2021 as big-name corporations like Oracle and Tesla—alongside Tesla's billionaire owner Elon Musk—flocked to the nation's new "boomtown." With an ever-increasing job market, eclectic culture and reputation as one of the world's best cities for move-ins, Austin's appeal might still offset its price.
But for Stanch and many others, there may still come a time when price wins over location.
"If I was to the point where homebuying was more important than being near friends and family, then I would move to get the home," Stanch said. "I think that's kind of part of my plan."
