Gaia

When a 50 foot-poster of Gaia’s image was wheat-pasted in the neighborhood, it became a photo-op location for local residents. The image was also hung at Case[werks] Showroom & Gallery, for its own fundraising event.

These internationally renowned artists created public murals in the Station North Arts and Entertainment District as a quick pick-me-up for a transitional neighborhood that houses both young artists who attend the nearby Maryland Institute College of Art, and economically challenged long term residents. The mural project will be akin to one in Miami’s Wynwood district, going beyond the typical haphazard spray paint or wheatpaste to create an art destination.

Grist Magazine hailed Gaia’s arrival "into the inner sanctum of the art world. Galleries from Washington, D.C., to Chicago, San Francisco, and L.A. have exhibited his work. In September, he spent several weeks in Miami, contributing a mural to Wynwood Walls."

Kristen Hileman, curator of contemporary art at the Baltimore Museum of Art, said "This is an artist who wasn’t just tagging things and doing a quick hit in an urban site," Hileman says. "This is a person engaged with the health of the city as an ecosystem and wanting to see the abandoned buildings of Baltimore used for a better purpose than they were." She says that Gaia has the self-awareness to know that part of his role as an artist is to, like Gauguin, live in a culture that really isn't his own.

After a successful mural project at the W DC Hotel's Pinea Restaurant, the designers were trying to hire Gaia for another W project, but it took years to come together since Starwood was bought out by Marriott and the entire design team left. There was a W Hotel being built in Bellevue WA and Gaia signed the contract and began the work for a three story triptych soaring up a staircase from the hotel entrance making it the first impression a guest would see. After 18 days of working on the a scaffold, the murals were completed one week before the hotel's official June 15, 2017 grand opening.

The artist will be curating and painting murals at the 2015 O+ Festival in Kington, NY on October 9–11.

In February Gaia participated in the 2014 Pow Wow Hawaii mural festival in Honolulu. This was Pow Wow's fourth year and Gaia was invited to create a mural and a painting whose images referenced Hawaii's pre-colonial culture. Andrew Hosne of Thinkspace was enlisted by event director Jasper Wong to curate an exhibit for the participants'paintings at the Honolulu Museum of Art School, titled Pow! Wow! Exploring the New Contemporary Art Movement.

According to the artist himself, much of his early work was inspired by a sense of looming environmental calamity. In 2011, he stated that, "I wanted to express this strange unlocatable feeling of fear about the end of the world - my generation’s zeitgeist of global warming."

In March 2011 Gaia had two solo exhibitions in Chicago co-organized by Maxwell-Colette Gallery and Pawnworks, which included a large-scale installation in the Art Loop at Adams and State.

In May 2011, the Jonathan Levine Gallery in New York City presented Succession, a solo exhibition of Gaia's work.

In September 2011, Gaia was commissioned to create a mural for Wynwood Doors for Art Basel/Miami. He chose to do a portrait of Henry Flagler, a railroad magnate who established the historically black neighborhood Overtown in central Miami.

In 2008, The New York Times announced that "among the names you’ll see again and again these days is Gaia...he’s an artist-of-the-moment, and prints of his that were for sale at a recent exhibition at Ad Hoc Art in Bushwick sold out."

After graduating from high school in June 2007, Gaia moved to Baltimore and studied for four years at the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA), where he broadened his iconography. For example, he included images of his grandfather, or a rooster holding the head of St. John the Baptist. He graduated in 2011 from MICA.

Gaia (born 1988 in New York City) is an American street artist, who has receiving significant museum showings and critical recognition. He is Baltimore-based. Over the last several years he has been creating large-scale murals worldwide to engage the community where he works in a dialogue by using historical and sociological references to these neighborhoods.

Born as Andrew Pisacane in 1988 in New York City and raised in the Upper East Side neighborhood. His artist name is derived from the Greek designation for "earth goddess," and early in his career he used animal imagery to underscore his interest in bringing nature to urban landscapes. In 2007, while still in high school in New York, Gaia started wheat-pasting prints of his linoleum blocks in Bushwick, Williamsburg and Chelsea. His images included children, whose features gave them an other-worldly quality. His animals included a horse and boar, both endowed with human hands and torsos. He participated in several successful shows in Bushwick at Ad Hoc Art.

After returning from Australia Gaia will be heading to Greenville, SC where he has been commissioned to create a mural for an event called Year of Altruism coinciding with the 75th anniversary of Kristallnacht usually seen as the beginning of the Holocaust. The proposed design, with references to textile mills and a landscape with lilies, is meant to recognize the generosity of the altruistic people involved in the textile industry.

Gaia headed overseas again for the next project which was also monumental. The Biblioteca Nacional de Colombia in Bogotà was celebrating the 50th anniversary of publication of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's prize winning novel One Hundred Years of Solitude. Gaia collaborated on the mammoth five story interior triptych in the central hall with Guache.

Between these grueling mural projects of epic proportions, a new hotel the Sagamore Pendry in Gaia's hometown (on those rare occasions when he's not traveling to some far-flung exotic destination) of Baltimore commissioned the muralist to create a painting on canvas for their posh lobby lounge. The 10' x 12' canvas titled "The Hardest Needle to Thread" that Gaia delivered now hangs in Kevin Plank's $60 million brainchild and depicts a piece of Baltimore history with the image of Francis Scott Key and the hands of two women (one white and the other black) sewing the flag which flew over Fort McHenry during the War of 1812.