Graffiti Bridge

Street art exhibit at the Warehouse Gallery mirrors Syracuse public art initiatives

By Kelundra Smith

Street art is everywhere, straddling the line between being a criminalized act of rebellion, and integrating into popular culture.

In September 2010 former Brazilian president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva inaugurated the world’s largest piece of graffiti art—more than 37,000 square feet of a highway wall—honoring children’s rights. Brazil has been called the graffiti capital of the world, and the piece, which shows cartoon-like images of smiling children, flying through clouds and holding hands, reminiscent of the popular 1990s toy Nano Babies, marked a collaboration among artists from Argentina, Brazil and Paraguay.

Disney created a line of Mickey Mouse T-shirts and hoodies with designs that looked like spray paint graffiti. On Oct. 6, Gallery 69 in Tribeca opened the exhibit The Graffiti Art of LA II: From Haring to MOCA, featuring renowned street artist Angel Ortiz’s work. Ortiz served a month in Rikers Island on graffiti charges earlier this year after tagging his “LA ROC” signature in several places in the East Village.

Now street art has made its way to Syracuse University’s Warehouse Gallery in its latest exhibit Colorfornia: New Forms in West Coast Street Art, which runs until Oct. 29. This is the first street art exhibit at the Ware house, but it is a natural fit with the gallery’s curatorial aesthetic. In fall 2010, the Warehouse featured the exhibit Waking Dreams of India by Neil Chowdhury that consisted of photos of advertisements, posters and marquee displays, some surrounded by graffiti, set against the streets of India.

The current exhibit was named Colorfornia because the three featured artists— Apex, Chor Boogie and Jet Martinez—are based in California and use bright colors, metallic paints and glitter extensively in their works. The artists were chosen based on their accomplishments, past collaborations with each other and recognition:

All have been commissioned to paint murals around the world from Switzerland to Mexico. The works that the artists produced—one piece each but of varying sizes--for the Colorfornia exhibit are smaller in scale than their usual pieces, while similar in content.

“If we don’t go out of our neighborhoods we don’t have much to share, you have to go out of where you live,” says Anja Chavez, curator for the Warehouse Gallery. See a review of the exhibit on page 17.

Apex, 33, started spray painting as a kid, tagging his name on buses in San Francisco. Tagging evolved into imagery as he got older, and while he was studying architecture at San Francisco City College, he was inspired to create abstract geometrical forms, by stretching their corners into spiked, crystalline structures, something prevalent in his work.

His piece at the Warehouse follows this tradition of creating architectural landscapes. It occupies the entire front wall, and is on sections of plywood that have been put together to look like they are a part of the gallery’s wall. It has no name; Apex never titles his paintings. The forms conjure images of mist floating on mountain tops and seem to recede into the white wall behind it. Heavy, black strokes outline the crystalline structures while bursts of color intertwine throughout the piece.

Chor Boogie, 37, became intrigued with street art after seeing painted aqueducts as a kid in San Diego. He picked up a can of spray paint when he was 13 and used the streets as his sketch pad, which made him a better artist because of the create-and-go aspect. Chor calls his work “street romantic voodoo,” saying “the eyes are the key to the soul,” which is why he paints a third eye onto a lot of his work.

His pieces at the Warehouse draw upon his biracial identity (black and Italian), juxtaposing two white and three black panels painted with prisms of color. The white panels contain multicolored spirals and streaks of colors that resemble nebula. One of the black panels, “Monolith,” depicts a pregnant woman looking at her belly atop a streak of colors. Another black panel, “Substance,” contains his signature three eyes and a set of lips painted with rainbow colors. All of the panels feature his signature “Boogie birds,” which look like a cross between a penguin and a balloon.

Jet Martinez grew up in Cuernavaca, Mexico, and attended the San Francisco Art Institute where he started painting murals. He is inspired by the narrative paintings of Diego Rivera. “When we would study history in school my visual pictures were his murals,” Martinez says. Like Rivera, he sometimes places political messages in his work, with the intent of uplifting Mexican culture, because of the negative media attention surrounding drug cartels and undocumented immigrants from south of the border.

Still he insists there is room for beauty:

He does not want all of his work to blatantly reflect politics. “Creating beauty is a revolutionary act,” he says, explaining that people sometimes ignore beauty because it lacks scandal.

Martinez, 37, also takes a lot of inspiration from Mexican folk art, and his painting for the Colorfornia exhibit is inspired by designs on amate, a common, decorative Mexican paper stock designed with birds, flowers and other natural images. His piece occupies the gallery’s entire left wall and reaches almost from floor-to-ceiling, and contains big, brightly painted flowers and birds with large talons and open beaks, set against a gray background.

In the space the works create an overwhelming, yet satisfying, burst of color that seem to float off the walls. It is the goal of the artists and the Warehouse Gallery to sell all the pieces in the exhibit, but because the pieces are large, a buyer would need to have high ceilings and long walls to house them. If Chor’s pieces do not sell he plans to ship them back to his home in California. As for Apex and Martinez, they have left the final destination to the Warehouse Gallery’s discretion.

Paint the Town

Street art, graffiti and public art are often used interchangeably, and the differences lie in connotations between legal (public art) and illegal (street art and graffiti).

However, the term “street art” is not always applied to illegal art, as evidenced by the exhibit’s full title: Colorfornia: New Forms in West Coast Street Art. Street art is simply defined as any art developed in a public space, and not all street art is graffiti. The standard definition of graffiti is that it consists of inscriptions, slogans and drawings scratched, scribbled or painted on a wall or other public or private surface.

Apex thinks the negative connotations that accompany street art are rooted in fear. “We are talking about vandalism that is in the form of paint on walls. If someone gets excited and paints on a wall without permission then all the society has to do is paint back over it. It’s just paint. People need to look deeper into our society and ask more questions about how it {painting} operates and affects people.”

Spray painting walks a tightrope between being fine art and public art. “Spray paint does not need a stamp of approval: no degree, no agent. It’s not required for making a mural on the street,” notes Luis Castaneda, an assistant professor in SU’s art history department. However, “if the art is to have an important, symbolic participation in urban planning, then it needs that stamp of {government} approval.”

All of the artists in Colorfornia work on commission, and all of their work is public art. The airbrush style of graffiti, using spray paint to tag buildings, is what has evolved into the street art practice that Apex and Chor’s work resembles.

“I don’t do vandalism,” Chor says. “It’s like a curse, especially when you’re in transition. I grew up in the streets, but I create beautiful masterpieces.” When working on murals in the San Francisco area Chor Boogie likes to get the people there involved in the process. He hands them a spray paint can and tells them to create whatever they want, and uses it as the background for the larger work. He also works in an area of San Diego called Writers Block, a legal spot for kids to paint, where he teaches the fundamentals of spray paint culture. “The streets can be a museum--that’s the free museum,” Chor says.

Martinez is best known for his silhouettes with cityscapes and landscapes painted inside, portraying the “places people carry within themselves.” He is the director of the Clarion Alley Mural Project in San Francisco’s Mission District, where he provides a legal space for street artists to practice their craft. He has also taught art classes on the basics of mural painting in schools where arts education funding has been cut.

“People look forward to your work because it’s something to uplift them,” Apex says. “People that usually don’t have a voice, you do something for them. It starts to move people.”

San Francisco is not the only city using a traditionally criminalized art form for beautification and urban renewal. The Groundswell Community Mural Project in Brooklyn and the Philadelphia Mural Arts Program are examples of cities solving their “vandalism” issues by commissioning artists to paint walls and storefronts. However, most of the murals in these projects do not contain spray-painted street art that could also be labeled graffiti.

“In the case of cities that use public art to reinvigorate or beautify or gentrify, it’s an old idea,” Castaneda says. He specializes in Latin American art, looking at mural art in Mexico, like that of Diego Rivera, and how it was used to create a sense of nationalism after the 1910 to 1920 revolution.

Using art to create a sense of pride motivates the Syracuse Public Art Commission. “Public art allows you to view a place through a different lens,” notes Kate Auwaerter, Syracuse’s public art coordinator. “It generates discussion and sometimes controversy,” However, some artists favor an autonomous approach to painting. Corey Driscoll, deputy director of Syracuse code enforcement, says a dispute exists between code enforcement and the owner of a property at Tully and Wyoming streets, on the Near West Side, because neighbors complained of graffiti on the property. Graffiti citations on private property are handled by code enforcement, and there have been 24 reports in the past six months in Syracuse.

“The property was cited for graffiti, but the owner insists that the paintings are art, not vandalism, and that he allowed people to spray-paint on the side of the building,” Driscoll says.

In these cases, code enforcement turns to Auwaerter to determine what is considered public art. She says the artists were trying to be self-regulating, getting rid of any tagging and maintaining the work themselves. Part of the problem with this property is that it looked neglected, and they are discussing getting the property up to code. “We’re interested in finding a happy medium so artists can practice their crafts in a way that looks intentional to the neighbors,” she says.

Examples of commissioned street art in Syracuse are the painted bridges over West and West Fayette streets and Lipe Art Park on the West Side.

“There are plenty of proven positive benefits in {public art} creating a sense of community,” says Maarten Jacobs, director of the Near Westside Initiative. “Studies show it decreases crime, and creates a sense of ownership and pride.” Jacobs says renowned graffiti artist Steve Powers was purposefully brought in to paint the bridges with paint that lasts 20 years.

Jacobs reached out to the Colorfornia artists about collaborating on mural projects for the West Side, something he hopes will happen once the artists are available to come back to Syracuse. “We’re changing the mural at Lipe Art Park and we just finished renovating a vacant lot with landscaping and art at 617 Tully St.,” he adds.

Other examples of street art around the city are the paintings in the windows of vacant properties on the North Side that were done by Stasya Panova, an SU College of Visual and Performing Arts alumna, and high school students, like the one at 748 N. Salina St.

Dominic Robinson, director of the Northside Urban Partnership, believes good art conveys a sense that people care about a place. He is very conscious of commissioning artists who have talent, experience and take the role of being a public artist seriously. “It’s tricky. On one hand great art has to be personal to the artist, but public art also has to engage people.”

Robinson says on the North Side there is a mix of small beautification projects and larger, permanent ones where he works with the Public Art Commission, and that Northside UP is discussing proposals for a mural project to the PAC, that would involve placing several pieces with a similar theme around the North Side for spring 2012.

Auwaerter says the commission is working on a public art master plan, which involves creating a priority list of public properties that would benefit from art. The airport, areas along the Creekwalk and downtown locations are under consideration. The commission has also approved a couple urban video projects, and a mural, designed by Brett Snyder, an assistant professor of architecture at SU, for the Lemp Jewelers building at 300 S. Warren St.

“The overall image is from far back from the early salt industry,” Auwaerter says of Snyder’s mural to be installed next spring. “But when you move closer it is made of QR codes that {when clicked on with a smartphone} direct you to other cultural venues in the city.”

So as street art continues its walk on hot coals between commission and defiance, Syracuse seems to have found a balance between its artistic and anarchistic qualities. Although there is no way of measuring whether public art in Syracuse is having a positive effect on the quality of life here, Auwaerter believes the amount of interest in having public art installed speaks for itself.

“People are coming up with ideas, and wanting more of it,” she says of public art. “We’re really raising the bar, and we need to find a way of capturing that.”