Street art has gone mainstream. Banksy has his own documentary (2010’s Exit Through the Gift Shop). Shepard Fairey is only slightly less famous than his 2008 portrait of President Obama. And last year the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, organized the first major American museum exhibition devoted to the genre, curated by Jeffrey Deitch, MOCA’s director and formerly one of the world’s most influential art dealers.
Standing inside the L.A. exhibition last year, Tes One — one of Tampa Bay’s most prominent practitioners of art inspired by graffiti and street methodology — wondered, Does this mean it’s over?
Maybe not over, but evolved.
On Saturday, Leave a Message: Urban Art in Florida opens at the Morean Arts Center in St. Petersburg. Co-curated by Tes One and the Morean’s curator of exhibitions, Amanda Cooper, the exhibit pulls together a whopping 20 artists from Tampa, St. Pete, Sarasota, Orlando and elsewhere to illustrate the richness of “urban art” in the state, encompassing graphic design and illustration, and more traditional practices, into a kind of anti-genre.
The artists are a diverse group in visual and technical terms. Jeff Srsic’s oil paintings of skulls hark back to Baroque memento mori, with graffiti-style lettering sometimes layered in, while Pale Horse, aka Chris Parks, uses digital software to design figures like a Chinese dragon that snakes across nine skateboard decks. What they share may be more like an attitude, Tes One says.
“It’s artists who maybe don’t have a formal art career. Rather than making art for gallery shows, they are used to making opportunities to show their art,” he says. “Rather than being asked, they just put it out there.”
While not the story of every artist in the show, Tes One’s biography gives a sense of how such genres and practices meld. At age 15 he scrapped his legal name, Leon Bedore, and formed a graffiti crew with BASK and Ciste, two of the other artists in Leave a Message, while a student at Gibbs High School’s magnet program for the arts in St. Pete. After tagging the wrong wall, he got arrested, briefly frightening his mother into thinking he was headed for a life of crime.
Instead, the experience was a wake-up call for Tes about how he wanted to put his art out into the world. Through college courses and self-education, he ventured into graphic design and illustration and began making work — both commercial and personal — that fused graffiti and street art styles with design smarts. Over the past decade, corporate clients have come calling for his art; one recent project involved creating a series of murals for L’Oréal’s New York headquarters. As a personal project, in March he created a limited edition print of an orange figure in a black hoodie — from the side it resembles a clenched fist of solidarity — to raise money for the legal expenses of Trayvon Martin’s family. The effort earned him a personal “thank you” from Trayvon’s mom.
Among his contributions to Leave a Message is a sculptural homage to street art in the form of a pay phone growing out of a tree trunk — as if crafting a love letter to his teenage years. Every inch of the Bell South box (left, and on the cover of this issue) has some form of stenciled image, sticker or lettering, including a visual shout-out to Fairey, whose “Obey” icon of Andre the Giant appears on the box. On its side Tes plants one of his most iconic images — a human face in profile trailing a cyborg swirl of lines that could be wires or sound waves.
Other artists in the show have similarly hybrid practices. Pale Horse, an illustrator for Hasbro and Wired, also designs for retail products sporting his remixed cultural icons — a geisha with a skull face, Jesus in a luchador mask. Dave Rau, on his own and as part of art collective Red Labor, crafts politically charged images by collaging antique prints and found textures (think, the side of a rusted wall transformed into a really cool pattern in Photoshop). And BASK, who Tes credits with teaching him it was possible to bridge the street and the gallery, has exhibited around the country and found welcome in the world of advertising.
It’s kind of shocking — or just indicative of a very slowly evolving appreciation — that the Morean show marks the first time many of these artists have been exhibited at a major local art institution.
Or not, considering the stigma still attached to graffiti.
Tes, BASK, Akut and Center have been invited by property owners in St. Pete’s emerging Warehouse Arts District to create a pair of murals. In May, the paintings attracted the notice of the city’s graffiti abatement program, raising questions about whether the project could continue. (See Arielle Stevenson’s story from last week.)
In its early stages, Leave a Message had a working title of Tag — a reference to the graffiti practice of lettering one’s name — which the curators ultimately deemed too narrow. Only three artists in the show practice straight graffiti: locals Akut and Center, and Orlando-based Dolla.
Painter Chris Valle is more typical of the expanded vision of urban art put forward by the exhibit. His dense canvases start as classical figure paintings based on images of buff, or lithe, men and women pulled from advertising. The University of Tampa professor says graffiti and street techniques have always been as much a part of his arsenal as traditional drawing and painting, an attitude he hopes to instill in his students.Other artists in Leave a Message include Allen Leper Hampton, Joey Clay, Laura Spencer, Anna Paul, Stephen Palladino, Christian Thomas, Nonstop, Wes Roos, Jansen Smith and Terribly Odd.
This article appears in Jun 7-13, 2012.