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A conversation with Steve Powers about graffiti, sign painting, urban marketing and con games
Slought is pleased to announce "Love Letter," a conversation with artist Steve Powers on Wednesday, September 23, 2009 from 7-9pm.
"Love Letter" is literally a love letter painted on the walls facing the Market elevated train in West Philadelphia. 40 local and international artists will paint the walls in August 2009 and the "letter" will be completed September 12th. The project will encompass 50 painted walls between 63rd and 45th street on Market Street, and a sign school and shop that will provide training for area youth and free signage for businesses on the Market Street corridor. The project, painted in consultation with business and building owners, is in part Mr. Powers's homage to Darryl McCray, known as Cornbread, a legendary Philadelphia graffiti artist who began painting messages of love on walls in the late 1960s to impress his girlfriend.
With this project, The City of Philadelphia Mural Arts Program celebrates a quarter century of mural making, art education, and prevention and rehabilitation. Founded in 1984, it was initially developed to provide alternatives to young people who were engaged in graffiti and other minor crimes, redirecting their energies into making art that would enhance their communities. Today, over 3,000 murals have been completed throughout Philadelphia. More than 100 communities are involved each year, including nearly 2,000 youth as well as inmates at the State Correctional Institute at Graterford, the sixth-largest maximum-security prison in the country.
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Steve Powers was born and raised in Philadelphia, then moved to New York in 1994. After stints as publisher of On The Go magazine, author of the book The Art of Getting Over about the history of graffiti, and full-time graffiti writer as "ESPO" ("Exterior Surface Painting Outreach"), Powers began his studio practice in 1998. He has since shown his work at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, Deitch Projects, New York, the 2001 Venice Biennale, Alleged Annex, Los Angeles, the 2002 Liverpool Biennial and had a solo show at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art in 2007.
His body of work reflects a fascination with graffiti, sign painting, urban marketing and con games of all shapes and sizes. In 2004, Powers and Creative Time organized The Dreamland Artist Club, a project that revitalized a New York landmark by painting signs and rides in Coney Island. In 2007, he was awarded the Fulbright grant with which he used to create murals in Dublin and Belfast with the assistance of local teenagers.
"One day in the mid-90's it all got buffed brown. Nobody remembers when exactly, but it happened, efficiently, completely permanently. I find it interesting that no one noticed that a hundred full color walls suddenly went brown. That was always the problem with graffiti, for all it's efforts to communicate, most people don't understand it and if people don't understand, they don't take ownership, and your name gets taken down like a campaign poster in December. In our fame-addled America it's easy to understand the motivation to write your name, a lot harder to appreciate the unreadable result. So in creating Love Letter, thinking about the medium of marking that made me the artist I am today, thinking about the amazing West Philadelphia that gave me the inspiration to do it, and finally the commuters that ride the train, I'm looking to make colors and words happen on these rooftops and walls in a way that people will take ownership of the work. So if the buffman comes back around, people will shout him down."
-- Steve Powers