The Barnstormers are a unique, ever-changing collective of artists, designers, and friends, headed by former North Carolinian David Ellis, who attended the North Carolina School of the Arts' high school program before moving to Brooklyn in 1989. In 1999, Ellis returned to his home town for a visit and began to lead a group (as many as 30 people from the US and Japan), to create large-scale, wild-style, collective murals on a series of old barns, tractor-trailers, shacks, and farm equipment in Cameron, North Carolina, just east of Raleigh.
 

Some of the members included: Chuck Webster, Martin Mazorra, Sasu, Kami, Madsaki, Che Jen, Jose Parla, Chris Mendoza, Mike Houston, Alex Lebedev, Mike Ming, Swoon, Daikon, South, Maya Hayuk, Kiku Yamaguchi, David Ellis, Yuri Shimojo, Kenji Hirata, and Rostarr.

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For an in-depth article on this project, click HERE.

According to Ellis, their journeys south have had a major impact on their work as they continue to interpret and communicate the visual, cultural, and spiritual awakenings from their projects here. The group were one of the first to carefully documents their activity by producing time-lapse films of their extended painting performances where one artist paints a large wall or floor area, (with an image captured every seven seconds onto a camera hard drive), followed by the next artist who paints directly overtop, covering what was there, followed by the next artist.  Before our eyes, these graphically arresting painted strokes become altered or even obliterated in the group process, constantly flowing like water or music. 
 

For their SECCA debut and their first major museum exhibition, the group presented an all-out array of painting, sculpture, music, and invention-unlike anything ever exhibited in the museum's extensive galleries. Front and center was a complete old tobacco barn, painstakingly dismantled, transported in parts, and rebuilt in the museum. The barn received an evolving mural over the course of the show as members of The Barnstormers visit the area (all hours of the day or night). After the exhibition closed, the barn was relocated to its original site with all the paintings intact. All of the activities associated with the barn (its dismantling in Cameron, the re-building in the museum, all the painting that took place during the run of the show, its dismantling at the end, and its rebuilding back on its original site, was all captured via their time-lapse filming, resulting in the movie 360 degrees. VIEW IT HERE: 
 

The group created six major works including the Hive Mind Soundsystem, a hill-billy wall of sound, consisting of 150 speaker cabinets made from cast off refrigerators, TVs, car tires, tables, washing machines, and more; all fitted with new audio speaker components, wired for the sound that blasted through the galleries. The speakers were stacked high on three hand-built wheeled wooden wagons, headed by a 1952 International Harvester Tractor.