Joe Ficalora’s Bushwick Collective has long been in the business of painting over reused industrial spaces, so it wasn’t surprising to see another of his monuments to post-representational gaudiness looming over Cooper Avenue, above a parking lot built into the Atlas Park Mall (80-00 Cooper Ave.), all the way in faraway Glendale.
The squat retail park, named after the popular ealy 20th-century bodybuilder Charles Atlas, was first developed in 1902 by a predecessor of the cabinet hardware manufacturer Grass America, and later by the rag merchant Henry Hemmerdinger, who had called it Atlas Terminals and housed an industrial park of factories that closed a half-century later. In 2006, his great-grandson Damon Hemmerdinger decided to build a mall there, though Hemmerdinger departed from that project three years later, and the mall has changed ownership continuously throughout the years.
Once, shortly after I graduated college, I shot a short movie with a friend in the Johnny Rockets affixed to the second floor of the mall, itself since departed along with the corner Manor Oktoberfest, a German bar, one of the mall’s original tenants. I remembered getting a beer there too, just once during the bar’s final summer, where I watched a father reconcile tersely with a daughter he hadn’t seen in decades, and who didn’t seem keen on seeing him now either. It was a depressing scene and I was tripping pretty hard on acid, between screenings at the Regal of First Omen and that Alex Garland’s Civil War, and it felt like we were the only people in the entire world, or at least the only ones at that bar, which would unceremoniously close a few months later.
Ficalora’s decision to erect one of his enormous Bushwick Collective murals on the outside wall of the desiccating mall’s parking lot felt, nevertheless, remarkable. It was hard to think of somewhere that was less Bushwick than a shopping mall knowingly located outside the boundaries of the MTA train lines, anchored by a massive, candy-colored Regal cineplex. Putting a graffiti-style mural here felt like planting a flag on the moon, or building a Whole Foods in Bushwick.
He had commissioned this one from Wellington Naberezny, a Brazilian artist who also goes by the name Sipros, and claims to have some renown for painting various people with “Big Ears,” as testified by the largely identical biographies he’s supplied to a handful of websites. He has some 120,000 followers on Instagram. Sometime between 2018 and 2022, he went deep into Queens to paint a massive white boy with huge ears, freckles and holding balloons, making no expression at all besides a kind of quiet stuntedness: our very own Skyler Gisondo here to pointlessly look down on the “frequently late” Q54 bus line to Jamaica, Queens.
It was one of the ugliest things I’ve seen in my entire life and, for that reason, it deserved to stay there forever. And now it was gone—neither Ficalora, Naberezny, nor billionaire developer Ben Ashkenazy, who bought the mall last year, responded to requests for comment about the decision to consign Naberezny’s masterpiece of white boy phrenology to history.
Not everyone was staying silent about it.
“It’s literally the only mural the Bushwick Collective has done that I don’t hate and now it’s gone,” wrote Tom, one of the latest guys to operate a noise collective in nearby Ridgewood called Skinny Apartment (IYKYK). The group has been around for about a decade, putting on shows in their collective basement, and recently put out a compilation of some 39 songs from bands that have played there over the years; local DIY acts with names like Seneca Newmaker and Naked Hermit. At a reading at Molasses (770 Hart St.) the other week, someone told me the space was featured briefly in that new John Wilson movie The History of Concrete.
Tom had some thoughts about the work the Bushwick Collective has done in the area, closer to Bushwick, though Tom later clarified to me that he was “no expert on graf[iti], therefore I have no real publishable opinion. I just think their art is tacky.”
“The Bushwick Collective has wreaked tasteless havoc unto the outer boroughs. Like, the lowest brow of ‘street art.’ Massive ugly basic bitch murals on businesses to prevent actual graf[iti] artists from painting. The only thing that they ever did that I could remotely defend was that fucking boy with the stupid balloon and giant ears on the outside of Atlas Park and it’s gone. It’s been erased from history,” Tom wrote on Instagram.
He later sent me a photo of a woman being photographed in front of a pair of neon-colored angel wings, which he said was from one of the tours of Bushwick Collective’s various murals in Bushwick, popular with the area’s French tourists and Australians, too.
“There is no articulable thought I have that is not summed up in this photo,” he said.
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