Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Mambo (artist)

The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was no consensus. Beeblebrox (talk) 22:24, 27 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Mambo (artist)[edit]

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I don't see how this meets WP:ARTIST. Looks more like WP:PROMO by single-purpose account Parvatee (talk · contribs). --bender235 (talk) 14:59, 12 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This debate has been included in the list of Visual arts-related deletion discussions. -- • Gene93k (talk) 14:57, 15 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Note: This debate has been included in the list of People-related deletion discussions. -- • Gene93k (talk) 14:57, 15 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Comment. I'll wait to see if anyone else turns up further sources, or can more closely scrutinize the ones I've found, and compare to policy. The creator of the article should have done all this, of course, but evidently wasn't aware of the necessity... I spent maybe ninety minutes and couldn't see anything that unequivocally meets WP:ARTIST, but want to give time for possible further developments before !voting. (1) Amazon has the 2005 book about him, "Alias MAMBO", but lists the subject himself as the author. The book was published by what appears, at my first inspection, to be a tiny publisher with a gallery, or perhaps a gallery with a captive publishing arm, Kitchen93. ( This was the most substantial information I saw about this publisher. ) Some additional investigation is probably in order to determine the nature of this book more precisely. (2) There was one hit I found for a NY Times article, but it barely mentions our subject; just the briefest reference. (3) There was this article, in French, that mentions the subject, but seemingly only in passing. My French is very poor, but the article appears also only to include a mention of the subject. Perhaps someone who's fluent could take a look? (4) There's a Chicago Tribune article that seems to me to be the most unequivocal source I've seen re a claim toward possible notability. Its online access is somewhat convoluted. Here's a free abstract, and here's page one of an alternate, non-paywall access route to the same article, but it's chopped up into five pages with (evidently) no single-page view available; the subsequent pages can be accessed sequentially, however. The article is about the five-member group of artists our subject works with, named "La Force Alphabetick" or just "La Force", for short, and about the man himself, of course, as one of the five members, in the context of the group's creation of a mural in Chicago. This will need closer review ( I have no more time for it today, and can't promise I'll get back to this; this kind of art isn't really my "thing" at all ) to judge how it contributes to notability, but here's everything this Chicago Tribune article has to say about "Mambo" directly (as opposed to what it has to say about the other group members, the way they work together, etc) along with some excerpts that may speak to his notability indirectly:

La Force Alphabetick began in the late '80s as a collective of graffiti artists painting illegally on the Metro, the Paris subway. And to this day, they keep the single-word monikers common to graffiti artists. The mural bears no French last names; instead one finds "Sib," a k a Sebastian de Dehn; "Mambo" (Flavien de Marigny); "Spirit" (Emmanuel Garcias); and "Rico" (Eric Gassan) ... [snip] ... As the collective aged, it evolved from strictly spray paint to acrylics, gouache, oil. Today, says Mambo, "our only objective is colors." ... [snip] ...DZine (pronounced "design"), a 24-year-old South Side native whose spray-can art has been exhibited in local galleries as well as in Europe, met La Force in summer 1992, when both exhibited at a government show in Paris' Porte de Clichy. In February, they first worked together, painting what they call "non-permission" pieces in Paris.... In May, DZine brought La Force to Chicago to work with him on a mural at Roberto Clemente High School, and to meet with the Chicago Public Art Group and discuss doing a publicly funded mural here. Widely recognized as a key proponent for muralism's rebirth in the '70s, CPAG was founded by Weber and fellow wall-painter William Walker, pulling off projects in more than 100 Chicago neighborhoods... CPAG director Jon Pounds says the originality of La Force's murals drew him immediately, because "their work was remarkably different from other work in the States, not like the wild-style or cartoonish work common to spray-can art." And he appreciated La Force's commitment to collaboration, both with one another and with the communities around their mural sites... [snip] ... Thus Weber entered the picture, years after he and DZine first discussed doing a project together.Weber has painted murals in Chicago for more than a quarter-century, to the point where he has lost track of all the projects. He guesses he has "20 to 30 extant murals, though many have been covered up by now." ... [snip] ... Then came the call. Midway through the project, Ald. Tom Allen (38th) phoned Bill Southwick, the youth center's executive director, and demanded that work on the mural stop immediately. "All of a sudden I started getting a lot of phone calls objecting to the mural," Allen said. "Graffiti is a hot-button issue in any neighborhood. I explained that this is not graffiti, but any kind of painting on a wall is pretty volatile." ... [snip] ... La Force was used to that stigma, confusing gangbangers' territorial scrawls with artists' murals. "There are many taggers in Paris," Spirit explains, "and people tend to assimilate graffiti, thugs, tags and their own nightmares." ...After a day and a half, the muralists resumed work, having assuaged the locals. But conflicts over design continued. Just as the mural neared completion, youth center administrators demanded that the artists redo a frieze of images at ground level, painted by Mambo in classic graffiti-style. Mambo was livid... [snip] ... DZine felt trapped in the middle. "I thought that the change was ridiculous. But as the lead artist I had to consider that the center had contributed money toward the work, and gave us fairly complete creative control," he says... "Yet here was Mambo, who comes from France, where the government gives artists money and total creative control for murals. So Mambo felt that artistically speaking, he was being raped." ... Nevertheless, the frieze disappeared, which cost them two days' work, cutting it close to the time La Force had left before returning to Paris... [snip]... "There are still a lot of people who don't like it and don't want it," Allen said. "I'm not sure why they painted it. Many people said (that) if this is their art project, let them do it inside." ... Does that bother La Force? "We want to provoke people," Spirit says. "The piece was scary in that it had no faces, with arms going in all directions. To whom do these arms belong?

Somewhat strangely, none of these foregoing sources seem to be indexed by the behemoth proprietary databases ProQuest, GeneralOneFile, and the many other news indexing databases I checked; those databases returned no hits at all across multiple search strings for this subject. None of these had any hits, and, in combination with the other proprietary databases I checked, there wasn't a single hit for this artist. I don't have a good idea how much press "street artist", ie former (?) graffiti artists need to have before they merit inclusion here. I do know that it's considered a viable art form by a great many people, though. Closer analysis of these sources, and of any others that can be found, seems called for in this case. Recruiting an art critic or art historian who knows this area of art would be helpful here, if we have any such domain experts on Wikipedia who could be asked for assistance. A very rough presentation here; I'm pressed for time just now.

If anyone wants to take the time to refactor this, perhaps to collapse the long excerpt from the Chicago Tribune, or move some of it to article talk, please feel free. I may come back by in a day or two and try to do that myself if I can find the time, but I'm out of that (time) for this right now. I'd very strongly suggest that the article's creator take the preliminary work I've done here and incorporate it into the article appropriately, as soon as possible, since doing so might help save it from deletion. Does anyone know how the article rescue squad works? Maybe some of the volunteers there could assist the article's creator in that effort. In haste, – OhioStandard (talk) 22:48, 18 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Quick addition: I see that the single-purpose account user who created this article is no longer active, so no help there. – OhioStandard (talk) 22:59, 18 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion so a clearer consensus may be reached.
Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks, Ron Ritzman (talk) 01:33, 19 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Keep. I've thought more about this, and although I don't have any additional time to devote to researching notability, I'm going to !vote to keep. It's my impression that although "street art" isn't especially well followed or accepted by mainstream culture, that this artist has nevertheless recieved a significant amount of coverage for the genre he works in. I'd be open to reversing my position on this, however, if anyone who feels strongly that this should be deleted is willing to take the time to perform a careful analysis of notability, expanding on the "hints" I gave above, and perhaps organizing that so it's more easily taken in and understood by editors who don't want the tl'dr version. – OhioStandard (talk) 13:43, 24 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.