steve powers

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A Love Letter to the City

By: Maria Popova

How artist Steve Powers made sign painting the voice of the community and the shared narrative of urban life.

Every city needs a love letter. Some arepoetic, some photographic, somecartographic, some illustrated, and someprivate. But few come close to the beautiful and heartening typographic murals artist Stephen Powers has been painting in cities around the world for over a decade, working closely with the local community to give breathtaking visual voice to a neighborhood’s narrative. As a longtime fan of his work, which I first encountered in the Brain Pickingsbirthplace of West Philadelphia years ago and which appeared in Sign Painters, I’m thrilled for the release of A Love Letter to the City (public library) — a magnificent monograph from Princeton Architectural Press, in which Powers takes us through the creative process and cultural context of his murals spanning Brooklyn, Syracuse, Coney Island, Philadelphia, Dublin, Belfast, São Paolo, and Johannesburg, based on a combination of Powers’s own ideas and overheard snippets, fragmentary thoughts, and everyday aspirations from members of each local community.

What makes Powers’s work so singular is that it lives at the uncommon intersection of street art and community activism, subverting the conventions of both. It appears where street art ordinarily would, but it isn’t illicitly done under the radar of civic authority — rather, Powers is commissioned by public art organizations or the city itself; it’s the work of a single artist, but he open-sources the creative process to engage the local community in constructing a collaborative point of view.

In the foreword, Peter Eleey, curator of MoMA’s PS1, captures the unusual result beautifully:

His murals humanize the anonymity of urban landscape.

[…]

Powers is a traveling salesman for the social media age, in which the things we can’t find, say, or share online often turn out to be the very goods we need. And so he heads out on foot, knocking on doors, putting up ladders, and rolling out paint. The world’s a big place, but as he would point out, on the road most traveled, there is no reason to ever leave home unless you are making the road better. Look for the man in the yellow raincoat hawking something at the corner of “Above” and “Beyond.”

Steve Powers and his son, Philadelphia

Powers, who came from the world of street art, reflects on how he came into his singular style as he contemplated the challenges of the graffiti genre of urban art in his early twenties:

The problem with graffiti [was that] for all its efforts to communicate, most people don’t understand it, and if people don’t understand, they don’t take ownership.

Aware of this ownership disconnect, Powers found himself longing for a new communication medium that would both honor the traditions of street art and resonate with the community whose walls it graced — walls that would become not barriers but gateways to understanding. He found his answer in Coney Island:

There I found a middle ground between the graffiti I spoke fluently and the painting language I could speak only well enough to order a beer. So I ordered a beer and made paintings that looked like Coney Island signage, except I stripped out the commercial and inlaid emotional content. The resulting art was visually clear and direct, unflinchingly confronting the complexities of love and life in a way I avoided in my everyday living. Coney Island was both sandbox and toolbox, a place where I learned to make effective paintings, perform effective community service, and be an effective carny making cash in the summer sun — all useful skills when it was time to make sign painting the voice of the community, the way Stay High had once made graffiti “The Voice Of The Ghetto.”

At the same time, Powers was noticing that some of Coney Island’s most beautiful hand-painted signs were being replaced by sterile vinyl lettering. So he began offering his services as a sign painter, for free. But even that seemingly simple and altruistic aspiration became a lesson in community context:

In Coney Island, “FREE” means a scam, so I had no takers until Dick Zigun, a mayoral presence in the neighborhood, vouched for me, and I got my first job painting letters on the back of the Eldorado Arcade.

Soon, Powers caught the attention of legendary public arts organization Creative Time — who were also behind Trevor Paglen’s The Last Pictures — who offered patronage to transform his grassroots Coney Island work into a full-blown collaborative art project. Together with 40 other artists brought in by Creative Time, Powers and the team painted some sixty signs around the neighborhood.

In 2007, Powers received a Fulbright scholarship, which he used to paint signs and murals in neighborhoods around Dublin and Belfast. Arts programmer Ed Carroll reflects on Powers’s work in Ireland:

Steve’s distinctive practice draws out the narratives of street life, its people and places. You see it in the Fulbright work in Francis Street, Dublin, and Shankill Road, Belfast. Call Me, We Need to Talk, Hope This Finds You Well, and Worth Less are all fragments of exchanges among strangers, yet somehow intimate, too. The Fulbright project conceals a longer story from the creative community bench. This story is a testament to friendship and the time it takes to create a local ecology for a little epiphany of beauty.

In Ireland, Powers painted one of his murals on a wall facing a row of houses, which he observed for half an hour looking “for any sign of life” as kids from the local school marched by. At last, as a mother peeked out from one of the houses, Powers asked her what he should paint. “Tell them to play nice,” she answered. And so he did:

But one of Powers’s most charming signs in Ireland, painted at Dublin’s Tivoli Theater, is a wink to the biological factlet that pigeons mate for life and, as Powers puts it, “make sure they pick a partner they can coo with”:

Powers, who had grown up in the rough neighborhood of West Philadelphia himself and returned to the community to paint 25 years later, reflects on working with Jane Golden of the city’s famed Mural Arts Program:

At my first meeting with Mural Arts’ Jane Golden as Pew grantees, I laid out my vision for the look and feel of the project. Jane stopped me and said, “You mean it’s going to be all words? No pictures?” I dug in. “No pictures.” Jane crossed her arms like she was tying her oxfords and, once tight, told me, “You have to sell the idea to the residents of West Philly, one community meeting at a time.” I could feel the fear building in me, but I remained cool and asked, “How many meetings?” We had about nine months before we were to start painting. Jane thought ten meetings would do it. She then assigned me a handler who also had disconnected roots in the community, and together we started planning meetings.

Jane’s methodology is flawless: go into a community, tell people you are going to paint a wall, take suggestions from everybody, work up a sketch, go back to the community, show it to everybody, make changes based on the suggestions, then paint the wall. The art is secondary to bringing the community together and getting everyone to agree on something. The wall stands as testimony to a unified community, even if the artwork is completely boring.

In Syracuse, the project quickly became a testament to the power of process over product, learning ground for improvisation:

A Love Letter to Syracuse is meant to be from Syracuse to Syracuse. We found, as we were painting, that the love letter is also dedicated to industry: to the trains that pass over the bridges, to the act of painting hot steel in the summer, to collaboration, to polite drivers, and, especially, to improvisation. After painting the two West Street bridges, we realized the design I created for one of the sides of the West Fayette Street bridge would be unreadable from most angles and impossible to paint without blocking off traffic completely. So we had to rework it on the spot. We did what any good signwriter would and worked with the architecture of the bridge to make the words fit with grace and ease. The result is different from our original design, but it serves the words and Syracuse well.

One of my favorite murals is a beautiful long poem, which Powers painted in my neighborhood in Brooklyn:

He contemplates how this particular project, painted around an old Macy’s department store in the facade space between the floors, embodies his general approach:

When I go into a community, I try to find visual cues that are already there and introduce them into the work.

Many consider it an homage to or a riff off Jay Z’s “99 Problems,” but Powers says this wasn’t his intention and adds mischievously:

It’s not, but the thought has crossed my mind about ninety-nine times.

The full text of the poem reads:

YOU TAKE ANY TRAIN
MEET ME DOWNTOWN FOR A FEW EVERY STREET CARRIES US HOME
BORN BUSY AS A BROOKLYN BOUND B I AM MADE TO LEAVE
I AM MADE TO RETURN
HOME
ONWARD UPWARD
I WAS NURTURED HERE I COP FUTURES HERE
LIFE IS A FIGHT FOR LIFE AIDAN SEEGER IS HERE
FROM NINETY-NINE TO NINETY-NINE AND FROM NINE TO NINE
WE COULD SHARE NINETY-NINE STARES ENDURE NINETY-NINE CARES
SAY NINETY-NINE SWEARS
AND BE FINE NINETY-NINE PERCENT OF THE TIME
I AM NINETY-NINE PERCENT SURE THIS LOVE WE SHARE IS 99.9999999999999999999% PURE

I GREW UP IN YOUR ARMS, RAISED TO TAKE FLIGHTS OWNING THE GROUND I HELD STEEPED IN YOUR STORIES
I AM UP WAITING FOR YOU

DOLLAR HERE DOLLAR THERE

HUNDRED HUSTLERS HUSTLE FOR HUNDREDS
SLEEPLESS ENTREPRENEUR TURNS A BUCK INTO FOUR
BARKERS CALL ME TO SHOP AT STORES SOME ARE SELLING ROCKETS
SOME ARE CHECKING POCKETS
SOME ARE ON THE DOCKET
I WALK UP THE BLOCK, MONEY IN SOCK PAST PITFALLS THAT FACE ME
TO BUY CLOTHES AT MACY’S
Dave at The End of Sixth Grade c. 1980

TURN TO ME
I SEE ETERNITY

EUPHORIA
IS YOU FOR ME

Another Powers gem in my neighborhood, across from The New York Transit Museum, titled Train to Always:

A Love Letter to the City is impossibly moving in its entirety, at once a rare glimpse into the mind of an artist with an uncommon point of a view and gripping testament to the power of art as a common language that brings a community together. Complement it with the bittersweet Sign Painters, where Powers’s work appears, and with Candy Chang’s Before I Die, one of the best art books of 2013, which explores a different facet of the same immutable longing for blending the public and the private in urban space.

benjamin degan

benjamin paints using his oil thickly so loads of texture i find the ripple series particulary beauitufl . and he clearly thinks of a spectrum of colours within each particular painting, his colour choice is stunning.


http://www.benjamindegen.com/index.html

hazel dooney

ok new discovery and im so thankful for this one. HAZEL DOONEY. an australian artist whos paintings are filled with strong sexual and political imagery. my personal favies are those large enamel on canvas or timber that challenge media driven stereotypes of women. i like the dangerous career babes series and fighting self vs self girls.


Dooney, 34, has had bipolar disorder since she was 16. Despite that, by 2007 she was selling her trademark hyper-coloured enamel paintings for more than $20,000 through Christie's in London. And she was the only female artist under 30 with work held by the famous auction house. This year she was supposed to have three big shows of new work in Melbourne, Sydney and Los Angeles, but in April admitted herself to a psychiatric hospital.Her father died and she was creatively stuck. She had also published an extraordinarily brutal and cathartic essay called Broken detailing the ''manipulative paedophile'' high school teacher who seduced her in year 11 and introduced her to drugs. This, she says, ended in depression and an eating disorder.

ily stockman

As a color, pink has often been looked down on as “too girly”.  Tomboys scoff at wearing anything close to that shade.  ”Serious” businesswomen wear suits of black, navy or grey, not pink.  Real men don’t wear pink.  As a painter, Lily Stockman embraces the power of pink.  Pink is the color symbolizing the fight against breast cancer.  Pink is power, baby.

Pink Mughal

Pink also figures prominently in Jaipur aka The Pink City ( the capital of Rajasthan, India ), where Stockman found herself living and painting for the past year.  Rather than painting iconic Indian architecture, she instead focused her brush on industrial and agricultural structures such as silos and grain elevators.

Bubble Steel

Stockman grew up on her family’s farm in rural New Jersey, so perhaps it is no surprise that she chose to focus on the agriculture of India.  But the subject matter isn’t the only thing that makes these paintings so interesting.  The simplification of the forms, coupled with the unexpected use of such a happy color work in contradiction to our notions of what modern India is like– busy, bustling, dirty, impoverished.

Full Humidity

Inspired by the bougainvillea blooming all over Rajahastan, vibrant pinks and fuschias of saris and turbans and the walls of The Pink City itself, Stockman takes these mundane, ordinary structures and empowers them with blasts of color.

Punjabi Remix

Her bubble-like lines, swirly forms and fresh, unaffected forms remind me of the early work of Georgia O’Keeffe, another artist who tapped into the power of pink and made it her own.  Quite a legacy of feminine power she left us, but it looks like Lily Stockman is well on her way to leaving one of her own.

Check out Lily’s website for more of her “Agro Pop” series from India, as well as other work.  She also writes a wonderful, witty blog full of artistic, culinary and literary goodness at BigBANG Studio.

alfred gescheidt

Nowadays almost every picture you see in an official publication has probably been photoshopped to some extent, even if it’s just to get rid of the shadows or raise the overall brightness of the photograph rather than the wacky stuff we all know you can do with Photoshop. But before Photoshop was even invented a photographer called Alfred Gescheidt was creating images that are very similar to the kind of stuff we see photoshopped now – and they’re arguably way better than what we see today too.

Alfred Gescheidt was born in New York in 1926 and after serving in the Navy during World War II he decided he wanted to become a photographer. Although he initially began taking ‘regular’ photos of life on the street and beaches of America which featured in Time magazine in the 1950′s, he soon became more interested in creating bizarre images which he liked to call photomontages.

Alfred created the images through his own trickery and imagination with the camera and it’s really amazing how he managed to do all this when photoshop wasn’t even available and all he had with his sheer will and creativity. At the time, other photographers were left baffled at how he could produce the images that he did and some are still unsure just what he did to achieve.

As you might expect, Alfred’s penchant for the unusual and bizarre led to him being quite a hit in the world of advertising in the 1960′s and he created numerous campaign, book, magazine and album covers. Alfred died peacefully in New York City on January 22nd 2012 and although he may no longer be with us, his spirt lives on in his iconic photography that you can see below and on the following pages. It’s a shame that we won’t be able to see more stuff like this now that Photoshop exists.

☛ More Photoshop: Photoshop + Olympic Divers = A Whole Lot Of Fun 

john wesley

i dont know how i came across this artist but i have taken my paintings in a whole new direction after being exposed to his simple flat almost comic like paintings.

For over forty years, John Wesley has created an unrelenting and remarkably singular body of work whose subject is no less than the American psyche. While many artists of his generation have used the popular image to explore the cultural landscape, Wesley has employed a comic strip-style and a compositional rigor to make deeply personal, often hermetic paintings that strike at the core of our most primal fears, joys, and desires. Wesley was a featured artist in Parkett issue 62. His work is included in numerous Museum collections, and has been the subject of recent one-person exhibitions at PS1/MoMA, Fogg Art Museum, Stedlijk Museum, DAAD, Portikus, and The Museen Haus Lange, Krefeld, Germany. A permanent collection of his work is installed at the Chinati Foundation, Marfa, Texas. He was the 2005 recipient of the Skowhegan Medal for Artistic Achievement in Painting.