Fresh Loaf

STIMULATE THIS: 'Stan,' from Matt Haffner's Serial City project

Earlier last month, critic Jonathan Jones of The Guardian joined several other journalists and arts aficionados in calling for a stimulus for public art in his native UK. But instead of simply parroting what we’ve already heard, Jones makes an inspired, though unorthodox spin on the argument: Why not fund genres outside of the mainstream, including graffiti?

We are primed as a nation for public art. All over Britain, a huge variety of imagery has been erected in the boom years. There must be more funding for public art, not less – but obviously the money can’t just go to famous individual artists. Instead, it has to be redirected to provide creative work for the young unemployed. And so, the state should pay the young to graffiti our streets.

(Let’s not forget that the UK is the home of Banksy, arguably the world’s most daring street artist, whose work now fetches record prices at international auctions.)

Atlantans feel strongly about their graffiti — both for and against. Mara Shalhoup’s story in CL last summer, for instance, received a lot more comments than you’d expect. Local artists such as Matt Haffner (featured on the cover of The Atlantan’s Arts and Power issue in December) work in traditional fine art circles as well as on the street. And Haffner is no stranger to grant funding: His work was chosen for ACP’s very first public art project. So, could you imagine seeing new, large-scale graffiti works by Haffner or other Atlantans — financed by grant money?

Of course the funds wouldn’t necessarily come from tax dollars. Last week’s groundbreaking Artadia announcement shows that there are still foundations out there willing to invest in Atlanta art. Coupled with ACP’s public art announcement, I wonder: Have foundations like Artadia considered street art as a grant-worthy alternative?

(Photo courtesy Wooster Collective)

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The week after two taggers and the man who attacked them reached a peaceful resolution over the highly charged issue of how much graffiti is too much in Cabbagetown, tensions in the neighborhood flared again.

This time, it was Atlanta police who cracked down.

At around 2:30 a.m. this morning, muralists with an out-of-state art collective called Trust Your Struggle were putting up a mural in the Krog Street tunnel when four patrol cars responded. Police put an abrupt end to their painting, according to witness Dawn Smith.

About an hour earlier, the artists, who had come to Atlanta to do a free commissioned mural at West End’s Omenala-Griot Afrocentric Museum, arrived with Smith at the Cabbgetown bar 97 Estoria. At the bar, Smith and several other patrons mentioned that the muralists should paint something in the tunnel, which is widely perceived by graffiti artists and Cabbagetown residents as a “free space” for graffiti-styled murals.

“Neighbors, people from Estoria all gathered around” to watch them paint, Smith says.

Within 15 minutes, Smith says, the cops arrived. “They proceeded to harass and threaten to arrest people,” she says. “It was really this tense standoff.”

(more…)

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After this week’s story about the tensions between Cabbagetown residents and local graffiti artists went to press, we learned that the man ticketed by police for hiding in a tree and pouncing on two taggers has made amends with them.

The man, Rodney Bowman, was ticketed for disorderly conduct after he jumped from the tree at 2:30 a.m. one Sunday morning and surprised Joshua Ward and Jesse Jaeger, who were about to spray-paint a railroad wall near the Krog Street Tunnel. Bowman punched Ward in the face, then pulled one of the sparkplugs from Jaeger’s truck in an attempt to keep them from fleeing.

The police also ticketed Ward and Jaeger, for defacing a public building.

All the three men went to court on Monday and said they didn’t want to push the case, so the judge dropped the charges.

“We shook hands, all three of us did,” Bowman told CL. “And I told them that they are welcome to come back and speak with our [neighborhood] association to put their artwork on the wall. And I hope that they do come back and do that.”

As for Jaeger, Bowman said: “I even offered to buy him a set of sparkplugs.”

In an email, Ward wrote that he was pleased with how it all turned out:

“Rodney apologized to me for what he did and now wants us to get a lot of graffiti writers to actually paint murals on the wall, haha things actually turned out to be pretty cool.”

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The AJC reports today on a man who hid in a tree near the Krog Street tunnel over the weekend and ambushed two young graffiti artists. The man, 43-year-old Rodney Bowman, apparently flipped out and punched one of the “vandals” twice in the face, a police report states.

One of the men, 21-year-old Jesse Jaeger, is an artist who’s exhibited at Youngblood Gallery who participated in a group show curated by Travis Smith and hosted by Young Blood Gallery last year. Both Jaegar and Joshua Ward, 19, were ticketed for defacing a building. Bowman was ticketed for disorderly conduct.

According to the story:

When an officer arrived, Bowman told him that “he had been watching the area closely” and “jumped out of the tree” to confront the vandals, the report said.

The story’s photo caption describes the Krog tunnel as the city’s “scariest” free art gallery — an alarmist characterization, to be sure, but not nearly so off-mark as calling Krog an “eyesore,” which the AJC did last year.

(Photo courtesy “Shaft’s bigscore” from CL’s Flickr group)

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