The Grande Halle de la Villette was built in the 1860s to process forty-five hundred cattle a day. This summer, it's holding graffiti instead.
A cathedral for cattle, once
Architect Jules de Mérindol raised the Grande Halle aux Boeufs between 1865 and 1867 as the centerpiece of what was then Europe's largest slaughterhouse complex, a 20,000-square-meter iron-and-glass hall built under Haussmann's plan to consolidate Paris's scattered abattoirs into one site. At its peak the hall processed up to 4,500 cattle a day. Refrigeration made the whole complex obsolete, and the slaughterhouses closed in 1974. The building was listed as a historic monument in 1979 and reopened as a cultural venue in 1985. Now, from May 27 through August 30, it's hosting BEYOND THE STREETS across 3,600 square meters of floor space.
The man who consulted on Banksy's fake documentary
The show is curated by Roger Gastman, a graffiti historian who started out in 1997 selling aerosol paint tips and self-publishing a zine called While You Were Sleeping. He later co-founded Swindle Magazine with Shepard Fairey, consulted on and appeared in Banksy's Exit Through the Gift Shop, and co-curated Art in the Streets, the 2011 Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles survey of graffiti and street art that became one of the most attended shows in the museum's history. Gastman launched BEYOND THE STREETS as its own touring exhibition in 2018, in a 40,000-square-foot space in downtown Los Angeles, with more than 100 artists. Paris is the show's next stop and its largest footprint to date.
A hundred artists, a dozen French names
The Paris edition brings together more than one hundred artists spanning American graffiti pioneers and the French scene that grew up alongside them. More than a dozen French artists are singled out specifically, a nod to a city with its own decades-long relationship to graffiti that rarely gets billing next to New York and Los Angeles. The exhibition is built from historical works, rare archives, photographs, and installations made specifically for the space, tracing how a movement that started on walls and trains ended up reshaping language, fashion, music, and activism far beyond the art world.
The gift shop, again
BEYOND THE STREETS Paris includes a retail space designed with Sarah Andelman, co-founder of the shuttered Parisian concept store Colette, selling limited editions and artist collaborations. It is the same tension that follows graffiti into every museum it enters: a movement built on writing on surfaces nobody owns, now selling prints on the way out the door. Gastman lived that exact tension on camera once already, patching together Mr. Brainwash's collapsing gallery show for Banksy's cameras in Exit Through the Gift Shop. In Paris, he is curating the version with the cash register built in from the start.
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