The Art Newspaper

The Simpsons take to the streets

By The Art Newspaper. From In The Frame
Published online: 22 February 2012

Shepard Fairey and other street artists on The Simpsons

Those street artists might think they're the bad boys, but they're nothing compared to Bartholomew JoJo Simpson and Millhouse Mussolini Van Houten. Shepard Fairey, Kenny Scharf, Ron English and Robbie Conal are set to meet some real grade-school punks—aka Bart and Millhouse from the long-running cartoon The Simpsons—when they play their own voices on the 4 March episode “Exit Through the Kwik-E-Mart”. It's not creator Matt Groening's first nod to street art: Banksy conceived an opening sequence for a 2010 episode that saw Korean animators toiling in sweatshop conditions. And Banksy also left his mark on a wall in New Orleans in a piece that had a more regular looking boy writing on a blackboard “I must not copy what I see on The Simpsons”, a take on the show's title credits. Last year, Simon Rodia's Watts Towers made an appearance on the show and Jasper Johns played himself in 1999.