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Art
from the Outside In
Local
Graffiti artists bring visual vibrancy to city neighborhoods—and,
reflecting a national trend are starting to show their work
in museums and galleries
 By
John Brodeur
Art by Stain
Photos by John Whipple
At
first glance, Stain looks like a pretty normal guy. He works
for a media company, where he is able to put his design and
printing expertise to work. His work has shown in a number
of prestigious galleries. He’s sought after by bands to do
design work for posters or new CD releases. And yet he requested
that we not use his real name for this story because he has
a certain lifelong hobby that some (read: law enforcement)
would consider illegal: graffiti.
“I
started doing graffiti when I was about 11 years old—right
around 1984—when the movie Beat Street came out,” says
Stain. “People in my neighborhood were breakdancing, and that
was kind of popular, but the graffiti thing hadn’t caught
on yet where I was living.
“A
lot of the kids I grew up with were into graffiti. We would
all paint together and things like that. Over time, I stuck
with it because it wasn’t just something to do anymore. It
became a form of art therapy for me to paint—either inside
or outside, on canvas or wood or whatever, on a train or on
a wall. It became a form of self-expression and therapy, not
just something you did for fun.”
Graffiti, also called street art, has become as much a part
of the urban landscape as a skyscraper or a one-way street.
Since the late ’60s, graffiti artists have been using the
streets as a forum for expression, both personal and political.
In the early 1980s, when graffiti became popular in mainstream
culture through its association with the hiphop movement,
a whole generation of artists was born.
While the faces and places may have changed over the years,
what drives street artists and taggers—the traditional name-
or logo-based graffitists—has remained largely the same. Stain
says, “I think the main motivation for anything like that
is to get yourself out there, to be known. To tell the world
that, yeah, I am somebody. Even though I’m not on TV, I’m
not famous, I may not be wealthy, I’m gonna make myself known
by doing this.”
For Scout, Stain’s partner in crime, so to speak, the purpose
of street art is more communal. “In my mind and in my heart,
[I am] trying to add a little touch of color or . . . beauty
to a building that is decaying or falling down or otherwise
neglected. I’m trying to reclaim those spaces of the city
that have been forgotten about, and express the fact that
somebody does care about them. I want to give people who live
in those areas something pleasant to look at as they walk
to work or school.”
Another local artist, who tags under the name Uneek, says,
“Graffiti is an addiction, you think about it all day, every
day. For me, the graffiti world has been a springboard to
explore the worlds of photography, graphic design, and to
get out there and explore and appreciate the city you live
in. After almost 15 years of writing now my motivation is
pretty much the same. I love giving to the street. I love
the way the art interacts with the environment, it’s the thought
of brightening up somebody’s day with something unexpected.”
Whatever the motivation is for the individual artist—careerism,
antiauthoritarianism, neighborhood beautification, or an egomaniacal
territorial-pissing match—graffiti has gained a certain amount
of mainstream acceptance as a honest-to-god art form.
Things
came full-circle for Stain around 1998 when he took to stenciling,
a style that was used as a form of street communication in
his hometown of Baltimore throughout the late 1970s and early
’80s. When he and his family relocated to the Capital Region
about three years ago, he quickly hooked up with Scout. “We
hit it off right away because we had the same interests—music
interests and art interests,” says Stain. “We started going
out and painting together. I’d come up with ideas and he’d
come up with ideas and we’d just work together.”
 Scout
did a lot of tagging when he was young, and learned to screen-print
in his teens. “Graphically, I was always doing stuff like
that,” he says. “Designing record covers and flyers is where
I got interested and sort of thinking about things graphically.
I had kind of put graffiti on hold and didn’t do anything
until I started working with Stain. [Stain] is the one who
sort of reawakened me to all of that stuff. He’s just immensely
talented and . . . took me under his wing and showed me a
lot of things. He was the one who showed me stenciling, and
because it is a lot like screen-printing . . . my eyes had
already been trained to look at images and see how to separate
colors, how to use underlay, how to use black to trap everything.”
Stenciling is a fairly simple process, Stain reveals. “I find
an image that I like. I adjust the contrast so it’s easier
for me to work from. I lay a piece of clear plastic over the
top of it, and I start cutting away. I cut my first outline,
my black color first, and I cut all the subsequent colors
after that and fill them in one by one.” One of Stain and
Scout’s first joint efforts was the Free School Neighborhood
Project, during which they stenciled vibrant images of local
children onto the plywood-covered windows of abandoned buildings
throughout the Mansion neighborhood in downtown Albany. In
his book Stencil Pirates, Chicago-based artist Josh
MacPhee called their efforts “stenciling as civic duty.”
Scout explains, “I was living down there at the time. [Stain]
and I decided to pick this area and try to saturate it; to
make an impression, something tangible you could feel as you
walked around that neighborhood.” Of the dozen-or-so pieces
they created for the project, only six or seven are still
visible. While these pieces have fared better than most urban
graffiti (the city of Chicago, for instance, typically removes
graffiti in less than 48 hours), one wonders why any artists
would subject their work to an inherently temporary environment.
“Albany
is a hard city to keep artwork up in,” says Uneek. “They do
a good job keeping this ‘All America City’ clean; we just
try to pick neighborhoods that might appreciate our contribution.”
“Life
is temporary,” says Stain. “No matter what you do or where
it’s at, it’s gonna go eventually, sooner or later. Sometimes
it goes quicker than other things, and sometimes [it] lasts
a really long time. Even though there’s a risk involved, there’s
really a risk involved in everything you do, and if your heart
is really into something, it doesn’t matter how long it lasts.
The act of creativity is more important than the longevity
of the product that you put out.”
But the fact of the matter is that their product is graffiti,
and graffiti equals vandalism in the eyes of the law, regardless
of artistic merit or social relevance. Like Stain, Scout is
a family man, so avoiding the authorities is extremely important
for him. “We sort of have to be extra cautious at our advanced
stages . . . because I certainly know that cops wouldn’t take
kindly to a couple of 30-year-old men with children [doing
graffiti],” he says. But he doesn’t plan on stopping anytime
soon. “If it was all permissible, I don’t think it would be
as appealing.” He also points out that by painting on plywood,
as they did for the Free School project, “if somebody really
did have a problem with it, it could be removed fairly easily.”
Stain (who’s been arrested twice, the first time at age 11)
and Scout (never arrested, at least not for graffiti) also
continue to practice in other forms of street art, including
wheat pasting—in which flyers or photographs are almost literally
wallpapered to a target object—to keep their palate broad.
“Stencils are somewhat limited graphically, using aerosol
or other paints, but wheat paste can really be anything,”
says Scout. “I actually do topography and letter forms. I
don’t do any wild-style graffiti pieces, but I still do paint
a lot on the street with what we call roll-downs, just straight-letter
text that I use rollers and foam brushes for. I still do a
lot of that down here on train tracks or bridges.”
 Stain
adds, “I do the stenciling and tagging and stuff still. One
thing that’s changed is people are doing more wheat pasting
and roll-downs and things like that. It’s not what is considered
‘traditional’ graffiti. . . . I think it’s kind of branched
out more, and that’s why there are so many more people into
it now. It’s not just a spray can and lettering. Now people
are wheat pasting and stenciling, gluing shit up, bolting
signs to signposts.”
They both mention several local artists, including Slack and
Uneek, as well as New York City artist Swoon, as some of their
favorites. “[Swoon] really kind of combined stenciling and
wheat pasting,” says Scout. “She will make these really elaborate,
intricate paper cutouts that kind of look like stencils, but
she will then wheat paste these cutouts onto walls. . . .
Whatever background is on the wall [shows up] through the
holes. She is one artist that has in a lot of ways started
this new technique that nobody was doing before, and her images
are beautiful.”
As
authorities have stepped up anti-graffiti measures in many
urban centers, many artists have found new forums for their
craft, and networks have formed around and between the artists.
Web sites like www.graffitinet.com, www.bomb ingscience.com
and www.stencilarchive.org offer extensive archives of photography,
while sites like www.wildartmedia.com and www.puregraffiti.com
sell supplies like specialized spray-can nozzles, markers,
and paints.
Stain and Scout have had their work featured in several graffiti-themed
books, including the aforementioned Stencil Pirates,
Tristan Manco’s Stencil Graffiti and the upcoming 376-page
hard-bound Graffiti World by Nicholas Ganz (with help
from Manco), which is expected to be one of the most comprehensive
collections of street art ever. Even more impressively, their
work has been shown in large-scale gallery exhibitions like
last year’s anti-death-penalty-themed Artists’ Reflections
on Crime and Punishment at Skidmore College’s Tang Teaching
Museum, and the current MASS MoCA show titled The Interventionists:
Art in the Social Sphere. They also have had a number
of showings at smaller galleries as far away as Germany and
Australia.
Jean-Michel Basquiat first gained recognition through New
York’s late-1970s graffiti scene—could a legitimate, full-scale
gallery career be far behind for Stain and Scout?
“I’ve
sold quite a bit of stuff, and I think that is the nature
of the work, because it is so graphically oriented,” Scout
says, then adds, “I don’t really have any aspiration to do
any design work or corporate work. I’ve done a few little
things, but I like the purity of just creating these paintings
and putting them out in public, and not having any pressures
regarding design aesthetics. I kind of like it being what
it is for me.”
Stain has a similar take. “I am always humbled at the fact
that people would pay hard-earned money for my work. There’s
a lot of great work out there for free, but there’s no telling
how long it will last, so I guess there’s some benefit to
showing in galleries. I have a family and car payments and
a mortgage payment, so I can’t swing it yet as a full-time
artist, but whatever I bring in on the side has been very
helpful.”
jbrodeur@metroland.net
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