We blogged about things to do before die in the Polaroid Bucket List. One commenter announced his life long ambition to be featured on JoshSpear.com. While we do have an active “send us a tip” button on the top left of your screen, it caught our eye. We had a look and it’s some really good photography. Zip over to Fillmore Photography to see Michael Chen’s work and take part in your fellow reader’s blistering creativity. Keep up the good work — and you can now tick off “be featured on JoshSpear.com” from your bucket list.

We’ve been talking about a lot of art in politics and war lately. It isn’t an intentional push, but the art collective OBEY (a.k.a. Shepard Fairey) just keeps making amazing stuff. This time its an exhibition, but the exhibition is huge. Over a hundred pieces will be hung on at White Walls in SF to give a large complex look at Shepard Fairey’s body of work.

OBEY has made some really great prints over the years, from peace solider images to the Obama prints. In the new exhibition, Shepard hopes to relate elements of optimism and hope of his Obama prints with his remix of war propaganda. "The difference between this show and previous ones, is that now Obama is in the mix," said Shepard. The exhibition is appropriately titled Duality in Humanity and includes aspects of his message and the contrasting nature of our world. If you are in San Fransisco, the exhibition opens on September 13th at White Walls (and there is an after party you could probably get yourself into).

The head artist and founder of the REAS International, Todd James, has a history of creating comic-like statements of his surroundings. When you find out that he began making art as a kid on the streets of NYC, painting simple shapes and characters, it all begins to make sense. His style has evolved into a sort of Bevis and Butthead dream sequence of a political cartoon. Bombs, blood, boobs and creatures fill his illustrations to make jokes about war, death and modern life. It would be ridiculous artwork if the satire wasn’t so evident. The new exhibition titled Blood & Treasure will be in London’s Lazarides Gallery in Soho starting on Friday and running through the September 26. The exhibition features 20 new paintings and one brand new animation.

Arts and culture magazine, Juxtapoz, has teamed up with urban lifestyle company, Upper Playground, and purveyors of canned, caffeinated alcohol Sparks, to present the second annual Ignite What’s Next Art Tour. Three different venues will showcase live painting by three of the top artists from the world of contemporary art in a multi-city tour. Sam Flores, Alex Pardee and N8 Van Dyke will collaborate on live painting amidst DJ’d tunes for a mash-up of art, music, and culture. The guys will be hitting up Lenny’s Bar in Atlanta on September 13th, Underground Snowboards in Boston on September 20th and The Marquee Theatre on October 3rd and 4th. Juxtapoz understands the diversity of the contemporary art audience and suggests you “mark your calendar, program your Blackberry, or spray paint it on your wall: Ignite What’s Next is back!”

There are official-looking men on the street corners in downtown Denver, and eying them while they whisper top secret information into their pen caps is sort of exciting. However, even men in black lose their mystery, and when that time comes there are more vibrant things worth watching at the Democratic National Convention. Manifest Hope Gallery, for example, is a paint-packed exhibition of over 10,000 square feet of art created in support of hope, change, progress and patriotism. It’s one of the best things to hit the political scene since term limits.

Participating artists include Shepard Fairey, Adrian Tucker, Scot Lefavor, and Sam Flores (among dozens of others), and after hitting up the press unveiling on Sunday, I will say that the gallery lives up to what it wanted to be and more. It’s thrilling enough to go to any one of these artist’s shows, but to go to one of this magnitude, with talent of this significance and a voice of this strength is incredible.

All of the work at the gallery has been donated by the artists to help fund the Obama/Biden campaign, and some of the pieces are up for auction on eBay (but I imagine if you want to score any and all of the art, you can find appropriate contact info on the website. For more info on the gallery, and to find out when you can swing in if you’re in the area, go here.

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Justin Melnick is an avid photographer, digital artist, and has spent time oversees in the Middle East. All of these influences have come together in his latest project, titled Arm Me, Melnick imagines — quite vividly — what Louis Vuitton, Gucci, Pucci, and Chanel would add to standard ammunition. The exhibition starts September 2nd at Gallery 385 in New York City. The outcome is a compelling statement that questions how we — individually and as a nation — spend our money, contrasting the abundance of weaponry with the scarcity of high-end luxury goods and some pretty amazing imagery.

Each week, JoshSpear.com explores the latest projects by top creative professionals in the Behance Network and highlights a few that are pushing the edge of creative industry. Josh Spear also serves as an Adviser and Guest Curator for the Behance Network.

Josh Keyes is a tough artist to put into words.

Initially, "painstaking" seems like the most appropriate term to describe his hyper-realistic paintings– after all, the detail is above the average human being’s level of artistic devotion. What else would describe the process? Focused? Acute? Zoinks? No matter. When words fail in an introduction, we always have the rest of the interview to suss it out.

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The Venice Art Biennial. The Sao Paulo Art Biennial. The Whitney Biennial. The Belo Horizonte International Graffiti Biennial. Wait — hold up. The Belo what-what? New to join the line of art biennials is an event in one of Brazil’s biggest cities, geared specifically for graffiti heads but testament to the country’s support of street artists, which comes at the same time as press is drumming up excitement for the Art Biennal due to set fire to Sao Paulo later this year. The Graffiti Biennial will be a nine-day, history-setting expo (starting August 30) that promises 60 selected graffiti artists including Tinho, most of them Brazilian but a few culled from around the world. Exhibits, seminars and music shows will make up the event. Sao Paulo’s Art Biennial has become one of the most important among its kind in recent years, and if all goes well, the Graffiti Biennial idea could spawn across the world. Doesn’t the “Venice International Graffiti Biennial” have a nice ring to it?

Art exhibits don’t grow on trees. No, a lot of hard work goes into putting them together. Such is the case with the massive Sol Lewitt retrospective opening at MASS MoCa on November 16 of this year. One hundred of the artist’s wall drawings are currently in the process of being re-created on nearly one acre of wall space in an abandoned mill building on the MASS MoCa campus personally chosen by Lewitt prior to his death in 2007. Charged with the monumental task of bringing the works of the multi-floor installation to life are 24 of the senior assistants who worked with Lewitt, as well as a collection of 30 students from Yale University, Williams College, North Adams’s Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts, and a few other schools. To get a unique sneak peak at the progress of the exhibit, you can head over to Hello Beautiful where there’s quite the inside scoop on the whole affair.

If you are a long time reader of JoshSpear.com you'll know that we've raved about Monsieur T a lot. (Monsieur T is the limited edition line of street wear clothes designed by Portland based artists and founded by a French dude, just in case you forgot). We've always loved their T-shirts and followed them through all their clothing lines — now it is time for some art. A new set of fresh prints that you would expect from the T just launched on their site. As expected, they feature Portland based artist and are all limited edition and signed. Now you can style your walls as you would style your wardrobe.

The explosively expressive British illustrator Russ Mills has updated his gallery with new prints. Which is good news. For one, it is always nice to see some new works from great artist such as Russ. Two, new prints to his online store should be coming soon. If you can't wait to get some Russ on your walls then have no fear, he will be taking part in The Rud Propeller Show in Devon beginning this week. He'll be there in person on the 21st (that's Thursday). Buy him out and set up your own online Russ Mills print shop, you'll double your money I promise. As for the rest of us, check out his new illustrations in his gallery.

If you’re wondering what to do tonight, I suggest you run, don’t walk to see the film Man On Wire. In 1974 a young Frenchman named Philippe Petit illegally rigged a wire between New York’s Twin Towers, which were at the time the world’s largest buildings. This beautiful film narrates Petit’s incredible talent of wire walking and the incredible planning which took six and a half years to turn a dream into a reality. Much like a bank heist, it took years of planning to bypass security, plan the rigging, and eventually step out on the wire and become a legend. Dubbed the artistic crime of the century, he spent nearly an hour dancing between the two towers on a wire more than 1,350 above the sidewalks of Manhattan. The story is beautiful, the footage is mind boggling, and the price of the ticket, very worth it. Seriously, this movie was inspiring, funny, and moving — take the family.

"Sure we've never been bears, but that doesn't mean we've never loved one," says Luke Chueh, the man behind some of today's more recognizable pop-surrealist paintings. That's one way that the SF-based artist tries to explain the world's growing affinity for his toy-inspired work, and it may very well be the most significant. Of course, the fact that our eyes are so readily drawn to these paintings has as much to do with the subject’s masochistically demolished appendages as it’s place in our childhoods, but maybe that's why we owe Luke so much credit. Yes, the plots are dismal, but it's the familiar characters that catch our attention — and whether it's the blood or the bunnies that keep it, the fact remains that the canvases of Chueh might represent a unexpected truth. Read on as we chat with Luke about revelations, evolutions, and all the beheadings in between.

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Remember when Michael Jordan retired from basketball to play baseball, only to go back to basketball and win three more championships? That is basically the story of Olimax. A pivotal photographer in the 80s who gave all of his cameras away to work as a music producer, he announced his return to photography a few years back and created the book Possession 78, a series of portraits in South London. The book and project were great, except it took a year to do. Why take a year when you can finish the same work in an afternoon in a pub? For Olimax's new portrait project he wants everyone to come The Victorian pub in London and pose for a photo (professional hair and make up will be available) at 3 p.m. on August 31. The project was originally slated to be 26 portraits based on the alphabet, but because of a growing demand an alphabet soup is a more accurate portrayal. Everyone who shows up will have their photo taken and every photo will be used in the book. Send an email to abcd [at] olimax.com to reserve a time spot — or just show up and enjoy some drinks and have your portrait taken by a landmark photographer.

If a springtime rainbow were to collide in a dark alley with Dan Funderburgh’s latest print, “Gravity’s Rainbow,” it’s a pretty safe bet springtime rainbow would die. His take on the fantastical spectrum of light is a three-color letterpress print comprised of layers of sharp objects such as scissors and cleavers. Funderburgh’s creation is available in two editions at I Am Still Alive, a Brooklyn-based site for socially-minded design. The first edition is a signed and dated open edition on Speckletone Madero recycled archival paper and the second is a numbered limited edition of 26 prints on Rives BFK archival paper. Hurry up and get your hands on one, but watch out for paper cuts.