‘Work of Art’ recap: Street art and graffiti in Brooklyn

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‘Work of Art’ on Bravo hit the streets in Wednesday’s episode, challenging the remaining contestants to create works of street art on the side of an industrial-looking building in Brooklyn. This week’s guest judge was artist Lee Quiñones, who got started in the subway graffiti movement during the 1970s.

In keeping with the week’s theme, Simon de Pury, who serves as a mentor to the contestants, traded in his trademark designer suits for jeans and a casual jacket. (He also arrived to the set via subway, or at least was shown exiting a subway station.) Contestants were divided into teams of two and assigned an outdoor wall to transform as they saw fit.

The one contender who might have dominated the challenge, the street artist Tewz, was, unfortunately, eliminated earlier in the season.

Dusty and Young paired up and had trouble finding inspiration beyond a set of wooden stairs that would eventually serve as an interactive gateway to their work. Eventually, they settled on a piece that spoke to fatherhood and involved the artists’ personal experiences of losing and becoming fathers.

The artist known as the Sucklord teamed with Sarah to create a relief maze. Lola and Michelle bonded over their project involving lewd images of felines sporting colorful genitalia. The pair seemed to take pleasure in antagonizing the ultra-serious Kymia, who created a work about the immigrant experience with the show’s other Sarah.

The mean-girl antics reached a climax during the judging portion of the show when Lola placed custom stickers over Kymia and Sarah’s work before it was unveiled. Lola justified her actions by invoking the anarchic spirit of street art, though she later conceded that Kymia’s anger was justified.

(Spoiler alert: Stop reading now if you don’t want to know who won and who was eliminated in the episode.) In the end, Dusty and Young took first place, which included sharing a $30,000 award. The win adds to Young’s impressive showings this season, making him the one to beat for the big prize.

The round’s loser was the Sucklord, who had had a number of close calls with elimination in previous episodes. The judges found his relief maze to be uninspired and dull, especially considering his rebellious and humorous work in the past.

In his departure, the Sucklord evoked the famous words of Obi-Wan Kenobi from ‘Star Wars’: ‘If you strike me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.’

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-- David Ng