Taggers put on notice
While sitting in my booth at the LA Art Show I looked up and noticed a man young man in his late 20’s in a fashion challenged suit and tie staring at my wide screen monitor of the many photos of the processes of graffiti removal from the freeway mural Jim Morphesis Monument. He asked me why I thought there was no good quality graffiti art in this art expo. We went back and forth with a few ideas and then I asked him if he was an artist.
He had been a tagger in his younger years but he was way over that now. In fact, he was sorry and knows it was wrong. He’s doing some artwork with graffiti art style. He had never heard the term “aerosol art.” He even dropped MCLA’s name as an organization for whom he was doing art.
Then he mentioned, nodding at the monitor, that he knew all about what’s been happening with this mural on the freeway. He said he knew the taggers in town and that there are a couple of “older guys” that are kind of like the God Fathers of tagging. He said they liked the clean up efforts we’re doing to make the mural visible again. After the second time the mural got tagged (after our cleaning), he said, “these older guys put it out over the Internet, on Facebook and stuff, that if anyone hits this mural again, they will hunt them down and make them pay for the disrespect.”
Wohoa! In fact, its been three weeks now… we’ll see.
FACL's booth at the LA Art Show
Questions? Call Scott Haskins 805 570 4140 mobile anytime
Want to donate to help keep graffiti off the murals? Contact Isabel Rojas-Williams at www.muralconservancy.org
I love murals! They add so much life to a neighborhood. I recently moved out of an area that would never tolerate such things on buildings due to it being a rather ritzy tourist town. I never felt comfortable there and neither did my husband since we are both artists. Now, we live in the city of Napa itself which is also somewhat of a tourist town but is also definitely not ritzy overall. There are a few interesting murals as well. Things are really shifting in Napa and a lot more artists, musicians and other creative types are here as compared to 15 years ago when I lived here before.
An absolutely breath-taking mural! Magnificent, really!