once you see it. And it is all around you.
Some surfaces would seem to be left alone. Church walls, for example. Or cars. But everything else is fair game, and especially popular are store gates, the kind that get opened in the morning and pulled down at night.
Every surface is game.
You’ll find mailboxes.
Dumpsters.
Houses.
Even lightpoles.
Self expression. It’s such a powerful human urge.
A lot of these look as if they were spraypainted by the same person, but I’m sure I’m missing the subtleties.
I happen to like the metallic images.
The runic ones.
Indulge me. When I looked on the Grand Concoure in about a four block radius, I found so many striking examples.
And my favorite, I guess.
Washington Square Arch in the West Village has chronic problems with graffiti. It was tagged one night amongst general mayhem, and by the next morning they had removed the anti-cop slogans, leaving “ghost graffiti” that would only be finally removed from the porous, delicate stone at a later date.
In the Bronx, nothing gets removed.
You start to see color everywhere, even where it’s ungraffitied.
Utility markouts are really a kind of graffit. You’ll notice them on every sidewalk. Yellow means gas. Don’t dig too near or you might get blown up. Red, electric.
Some fundamental graffiti history. A while back there was a huge warehouse called 5 Pointz in Queens – it was constructed in 1892 as a factory that built water meters — that served as the canvas for dozens of graffiti artists as well has leasing studios to artists inside.
We visited, and something amazing was that after a certain viewing period one artist would cover over the work of another artist with his own work. Just wipe it away. That was the accepted method of showing as much good stuff as could be shown. Very democratic.
I was wearing a cast on my foot at the time and I asked the artist named King Bee if he would tag it.
Fast forward and of course something so impossibly cool could not last. The owner of the structure announced that he was razing 5 Pointz to put up a residential complex, and all the artists would have to leave. He had the walls whitewashed overnight. Even a plea from Banksy could not save the brilliant assortment of aerosol art. The developer got payback – a judge made him pay 6.7 million in damages to 21 artists.
The Royal “King Bee,” born Alfredo Bennett the guy who decorated my cast, grew up in this part of the Bronx and honed his aerosol chops here, in fact. His way of “giving back” was to furnish extravagant murals at 17-50 Grand Concourse and other Bronx locations. His oeuvre, which includes madly stinging bees, is something to admire. I like it better than the paintings of some of the genteel artists venerated by collectors and museums. George Seurat, for example, or Rubens.
There is a difference between the iconic murals of George Floyd – found now in cities including Houston, Philadelphia, Portland and Los Angeles, Miami Chicago as well as Minneapolis, and so often defaced by white nationalists – and the personal idiom of the streets.
But they both require paint and skill – perhaps some just need a taller ladder.
Jean Zimmerman 