Ugly Sweater PDX

PSAA interviewed Claudia Martinez, one of the yarn bombers behind the uglysweaterPDX project. In its second year, uglysweaterPDX yarn bombs Pioneer Square’s bronze art statues with festive ugly sweaters for the holidays.

How did the Ugly Sweater PDX project start? What were the project’s goals?

Our team of knitters this year included Jessica DeVries, Jenny Mosher, Amanda Miller, and myself (Claudia Martinez). Our friend Kyle Stuart, who works for a local branding company called North, wanted to propose a yarn bombing project to Travel Portland. He wanted it to be something that locals and visitors to Portland could enjoy during the holiday season. Problem was, he only knew one crocheter. Luckily, he reached out to his friend Jessica DeVires, who then approached Jenny and me with the idea. I was already familiar with the practice of yarn bombing, so I immediately wanted to join the team. It was an opportunity to what I could normally be doing any Sunday Crafternoon anyways, but on a much grander scale, and more importantly it would be something for the city.

Jessica and Jenny dress up downtown’s deer. [Photo by: Travel Portland]

Did your team face any challenges when trying to make this happen?

I was a little skeptical about the idea of getting paid, and also worried about the longevity of the sweaters. I’ve made art installations before and know that people often remove or take them (just for fun, to keep, or maybe they think they’re trash). The temptation of decorative sweaters would be no exception. As sad as it is to have the sweaters disappear, I’ve come to peace with the idea that if it’s taken, it was such a good piece that people wanted it, or perhaps they actually needed it to stay warm. I knew that if we did this project, we had to be ready for criticisms the possibility of vandalism, but those are things that come with any form of installation art.

Under different (or normal) circumstances something like this could technically be fined as littering, or even theoretically criminal mischief (i.e. interference with private property). Any thoughts on that? What do you think about unauthorized yarn bombing?

I’m a bit biased on this question due to my long-standing affection towards street art. Sometimes you just need to break up the monotony of everyday. The advantage to yarn bombing is that it can be removed with little or no damage to those directly affected by the art. It is the same with wheatpasted art. Any artist will tell you that even their best pieces have at least one villainous critic, so someone’s litter is another’s needed splash of color.

UglySweaterPDX 2014 [Photo by: Gina Murrell]

What were people’s reactions to you putting up these yarn installations? Any memorable interactions?

I was surprised by the amount of positive feedback we received from passersby, both young and old. The older crowds were inspecting the types of knots or stitches used, while the younger people made comments about the time it must have taken to create the pieces. In fact, when one of our first pieces was stolen, some unknown strangers put scarves and gloves on them, as replacement pieces. It was nice to know that our work had touched people so deeply that they made and installed replacement yarn pieces, all just to keep the sentiment alive.

Claudia knits on some leg cozies [Photo by: Jaime Valdez]

It would be great to see publicly-funded yarn art for causes that are for the greater good like this because I really do feel that it reflects well on the city. I was also part of the team that did Bridge for Blankets this past year, a temporary installation on the Broadway Bridge to celebrate its centennial birthday. After, all the blankets were donated to the local homeless shelters and hospitals. Projects like these show that the city wants to support the non-traditional, and it stands behind all sorts of creatives, from traditional painters and muralists, to the lesser-known fabric, yarn, and fiber artists.

Watch a short UglySweaterPDX promo video.

For more photos of this years and last years installations, search #uglysweaterpdx on Instagram and Twitter.

Hanky's Portland Surplus Candy

Check out Hanksy’s new episode of Surplus Candy, featuring PSAA and other members of Portland’s street art community. Filmed in the Spring 2014, the 4th episode of this mini-series highlights the unique and determined artists that call Portland home.

NYC-based artist Hanksy has teamed up with The Hundreds to showcase what American streets have to offer, visiting off-the-beaten path cities like Montreal, Detroit, Philadelphia, and Austin to explore their unique street art and graffiti scenes. The episodes air every other Wednesday on The Hundreds‘ website.

“The Hundreds is pleased to bring you Hanksy’s “Surplus Candy” episode 4 – Portland. Hanksy’s six-part street art odyssey, with the help of Squarespace, has brought him to the streets of Portland to find an art scene that is supposed to be absent. After a scuffle between an ad agency and the city of Portland, a zero tolerance policy for graffiti and murals was put into effect. Though Hanksy soon learns that when art is blocked it just changes courses and flows into a different direction. Portland is a place where street artists have been forced to channel their creativity around the strict laws, ironically pushing street art back to its purest form – underground and out of sight. So much for a city with a non-existent street art scene. (Review from The Hundreds)”

A HUGE shout out to all the local artists involved in this project, and everyone that makes up and supports Portland’s street art and graffiti scenes. Portland’s street art and graffiti scenes are alive and well, if you take time to stop and look. 

Read more about Hanksy’s work and his unique spin on the world of street art here.

JR’s Inside Out Project PDX

Portland has been turned inside out! Alongside the train tracks of inner SE, a group of community members transformed the wall of K+F Coffee Roasters into a people’s public art gallery. One Grand, an art and design gallery in Portland, organized the city’s first JR Inside Out Project. The theme, “Keep Portland Weird.”

Inside Out is a global art project transforming messages of personal identity into works of art. The Steps: Organize a group, choose a theme, apply for the grant, and if accepted, take photos of people who live in the city based on the theme, send them to JR, who prints them out and sends them back. The project culminated with the community coming together to wheatpaste these portraits in public spaces around the city. These massive collages literally put a “human face” on the urban built environment. Projects like this get people to participate in public space in ways they may, or may not, have before.

It was great to see people wheatpasting for the first time, and really enjoying the process of being a part of this community action to alter the aesthesis of the city. One of those people was Anton Legoo, a local interaction designer. Anton spoke about the project’s effect saying, “it helped me to remember that we are all the same person wearing different disguises; hats, glasses, hair styles, facial expressions, social projections, genders, daily routines, hometowns, loves, and life experiences.”

Project organizer, Kali Huebner of the One Grand Gallery, explained that they wanted to bring JR’s Inside Out here to “to celebrate our landscape, our culture, and the individuals and ideas that make and shape this city. The goal was “to honor our appreciation for local business and craft, while bringing the community together to challenge our art scene and continue the discussion of street art and vandalism.”

The installation is on a factory building on SE 14th & Taggart. Located between the railroad tracks, a dead-end road, and the nearby former Brooklyn Skate Spot. This building has been a favorite for local graffiti artists for many years. This is a hidden space “in-between.” It’s a tucked away spot, slightly out of sight from the flow of traffic, a space creative and unmediated creative exchanges between people and their environment can more easily happen without fear of harassment or arrest.

It will be interesting to see how the City reacts to this project and how it evolves over time. Will the building still be a graffiti spot? Is this the start of a wheatpaste wall like Seattle’s Post Alley? Will Portland’s graffiti abatement issue a citation? The Brooklyn neighborhoodis rapidly changing with the new light rail construction surrounding it, so whatever happens, it will only be brief. When the development is complete, graffiti abatement will surely increase and all of this will most likely be wiped ‘clean’ like many other parts of this quickly gentrifying city.

The politics of the space extend past the official legalities, to the unofficial laws of the street. Some in the street and graffiti art community see this project as a mass replication that limits their access to few spaces where it is still somewhat possible to paint without extreme risk of being arrested. Wheatepaste is sometimes looked down upon by graffiti and other street artists because, in some cases, they see it as being less creative (it is not necessarily ‘made by hand’) and daring. Modern printing and copying technology, and the popularity of the OBEY campaign, has popularized this medium over the past few decades. Wheatepaste is also thought to be problematic from a graffiti writer’s perspective because it interferes with the quality of their work. Spray paint will quick wash away if it’s applied over wheatpaste and the texture is difficult to work around. An aerosol piece can paint on over and over again, but once a wheatepaste is applied to a wall, it makes that canvas less desirable for paint interventions and more desirable for more wheatepaste interventions.

To us, all of these forms have equal merit; both have examples that display unquestionable artistic skill and/or social commentary. Take for instance N.O. Bonzo, a local street artist who spends month’s intricately painting home-made paper with home-made ink, creating truly epic wheatpastes. Or, on the other hand, a graffiti writer who refines and plays with their hand-style over decades, constantly is remixing its elements.

We believe that street art, in all its forms, is the defining modern aesthetic of our time and a powerful community organizing tool. In the end, we hope this project makes us question: what does it mean to have an active role in our environments and communities? This project helps show the City of Portland that there are many benefits to allowing more street art and letting people directly participate in their city space. One of the most powerful aspects of Inside Out is that everyone can participate; it is truly the “people’s” art project.

Sow Good Seeds

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Burnside Arts Trust partnered with Portland’s Urban Farm Collective to sow good seeds in the Grand Dekum Garden. Local Portland artists Circleface, N.O. Bonzo, and Dhestoe painted the garden’s garage to celebrate the joyous growth of this garden and infuse the space with lovely art and excitement. These artists dedicated their time to this project because they want to actively promote shared green spaces within our city. “We believe in the power of community gardens to build relationships, beautify urban spaces, and promote positive interactions with nature inside the city,” said a Burnside Arts Trust representative.

The Urban Farm Collective (UFC) maintains 17 community gardens in Portland. UFC is made up of a progressive group of volunteers who use vacant urban land to enrich and support communities, helping people re-imagine the possibilities of these spaces. They aim to educate, build communities, and improve food security. Their gardens are fully supported by local volunteers who care for and maintain them throughout the year. The collective hosts a non-monetized market that trades volunteer hours for garden produce. Surplus crops are donated to the St. Andrews Church food bank.

Please visit the UFC’s website at urbanfarmcollective.com to see the amazing work they do and to get involved with one of their gardens. For more information on the benefits of urban community farming visit communitygarden.org.

Urban residents around the world are reclaiming vacant land; transforming void spaces into fertile places to grow food, relationships, and community. Community gardens re-introduce nature into the city, helping to cultivate a re-enchantment with the natural world and support the psychological well-being of residents. Gardens also promote more sustainable urban development, community resilience and networking, organic food production, environmental protection and awareness. It is not just the physical creation of gardens that is transformative; they also spur new ways of thinking about cities and our right to directly create places around us that nourish our basic human needs – to grow, love, play, sense, connect, and live.

ALL PHOTOS © PSAA

Murals and the Portland Sign Codes

MURALS AND THE PORTLAND CITY SIGN CODE

At one time, artists could paint outdoor murals in Portland with a simple agreement between themselves and the building owner, as is the case in manyother cities in the United States.

In 1998, the City of Portland was thrust into a lengthy and complicated legal battle with AK Media (a company that was later absorbed by Clear Channel).

Thanks to the dedicated efforts of a handful of art advocates who pushed for the art of mural-making to be recognized, in 2005, the Regional Arts & Culture Council (RACC) began its Public Art Mural Program. In 2009, following the closing of the Clear Channel trial, and the judge’s decision (in 2007), the City of Portland’s new mural program was created.

Until those two pathways were forged, community murals were either not painted, or were done without City permission, thereby risking citations and fines for building owners being out of compliance with the City’s sign code.

Both the existing mural programs have certain requirements. The City of Portland’s mural permitting process requires a fee and a neighborhood meeting. RACC is a more comprehensive mural proposal submission and funding opportunity that, if approved, the mural is added to the City’s public art collection, ensuring that the artwork is exempt from the City’s sign code and will be enjoyed by future generations to come.

The existing systems work, and many murals have been painted since the drought of mural art in the late 1990s and early 2000s, however, there are many ways that certain types of artistic expression are still burdened.

It is time that the City of Portland re-evaluates its Original Art Mural Permit process to ensure that it is still effective and could not be further improved.

Buckman Community Mural by Joe Cotter

Contributors: Joanne Oleksiak, Robin Dunitz & Mark Meltzer

Music Millennium Mural

In the spring of 2013, Portland Street Art Alliance and two local artists, The Lost Cause (TLC) and Jon Stommel of Rather Severe, successfully completed a community-funded mural on the backside of Music Millennium (3158 E Burnside). This was PSAA's first project, bringing together the founding team to engage with the community and facilitating art in the streets. 

PSAA and this project started in an unlikely way. The prior winter (2012) TLC and local art shop, Home:bass, launched a very successful fundraising campaign, raising almost 3 times more than what they asked for. Everything was going smoothly until TLC was painting the mural and was approached by Portland Police. The officers interrogated him, asking what he was doing, and if he had a permit. No one knew that in addition to owner-permission, you also need a City of Portland mural permit to legally paint an art mural. The Home:bass shop was no stranger to Portland police, being the frequent target of surveillance, especially during their street art show openings. Due to these complications, the Home:bass mural project fell through when Home:bass's lease was not renewed by the property owner. 

That is when the founding members of PSAA stepped in, Tiffany and Tomas. After a few brainstorming sessions, the team hit the streets canvasing local business to find a new mural space for this project. After approaching about 20 business on Burnside, Stark and Hawthorne, we walked into Music Millennium, the oldest record store in the Pacific Northwest. We were imminently directed to speak to Terry Currier the owner. Terry was very open-minded and excited at the prospect of bringing some color and energy to his blank white wall. Even better, the artists were willing to do this project at no cost Music Millennium, as the crowd-source funding covered most of the costs associated with paint and labor. 

The artist team worked with Terry Currier, the owner of Music Millennium, to create a design that would be reminiscent of the record store’s psychedelic roots. They decided on a colorful Beatles-inspired array of happy characters and swirling patterns. PSAA secured the City of Portland mural permit.

Speaking about his art and the new mural, the The Lost Cause said, “We just want to make people smile and laugh. It was a great experience to paint this mural and get to talk with people of all ages, some neighbors and others coming to the record shop. They liked the characters and bright colors.”

Check out PSAA's video documenting some of the creative process!

ALL PHOTOS © PSAA

Decapitalizing Public Space

Originally published by Partizaning, a participatory urban re-planning and activist organization based in Russia that promotes the idea of art-based DIY activism aimed at rethinking, restructuring and improving urban environments and communities.

An article written by local artist Nina Montenegro and PSAA’s Tiffany Conklin, about the Free the Billboards project that took place in Portland during the summer 2012 and why it’s important to re-claim and re-imagine Portland’s public spaces.

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Street art is as transient as life itself; it often disappears as quickly as it appears. This ephemeral nature gives the work a freedom, spontaneity, and playfulness seldom reached in other, more lasting forms of art.

With street art, a different kind of reality is offered, one in which our physical urban surroundings are not static, but are mold-able by each of us. It encourages dialogue within society about cultural values and norms. It produces shared narratives between people, ideas, and the built environment.

Artists who place their work in the streets engage in a form of grassroots place-making—they construct and invent new types of spaces and social relations, showing that the value spaces have (or don’t have) and the meanings we attached to spaces, are constantly changing—in an endless cycle of creation and destruction.

(Re)Claiming Public Space

We’re often pushed towards a ‘containerist view’ of public spaces, seeing them as inert vessels which we have little influence or control over. Many of our shared spaces are actually ‘pseudo-public spaces’ that are specifically designed to restrict the possibilities of appropriating them to fulfill our needs. They are heavy monitored spaces; CCTV surveillance, motion, and vibration sensors track many activities. In this system, property rights often trump human rights.

The nature of public spaces in modern cities corresponds to an economic mode of life that we’ve embraced—one of reproducibility and repetition—that consistently reproduces and reinforces hierarchical relationships (Lefebvre & Goonewardena 2008). Since many of the values we hold are mediated through the desire to accumulate capital, the spaces we produce often reflect this preoccupation.

These spaces are not really meant to be used by the public. Homeless people are now basically banned from existing in many US cities. Public spaces are designed to control behaviors, protect investments, and ensure smooth circulation through the mechanics of the city.

Unique places are increasingly smoothed over. Every place begins to look like the next. Through the process of re-ification, an imaginary ‘ideal’ of what cities should be is produced by those in power, regurgitated and presented to the public as real. Take for instance the dramatic transformation of the once gritty New York City Times Square into a Disney-fied Main Street USA. These distorted urban mirages are hollow shells of what cities really are: diverse, dirty, melting pots of people and ideas.

The sense of ‘place-lessness’ often felt in these pseudo-public spaces is a result of them not being grounded or connected to the people who occupy them (Massey 2005). Feelings of alienation and disconnectedness are spurred from our disengagement from public spaces.

Additionally, public spaces have not historically been a guaranteed public right—they have been made public because people take the space, making it public (Cresswell 1996). Public space only remains open if citizens ensure its continued access by occupying it and consistently pushing its boundaries. Having access to public space is vital to a healthy democracy because of the functional necessity of having a physical arena to communicate with others and voice dissent.

One way to counter-act this spectacle is through tactical urban interventions. Artists are re-embracing the revolutionary ideas of the Situationists of the 1950s by creating ‘situations’ that take pedestrians off their predictable paths, outside their habits, and jolt them into a new imaginative awareness of the city where space is in a constant state of becoming.

Free the Billboards

Street artists produce artifacts that sit in direct competition with sanctioned public art and commercial advertisements. On average, we’re exposed to 3,000 to 5,000 ads per day. Being constantly confronted by this onslaught of ads pushes us to be passive consumers rather than contributing citizens.

Advertisements are considered normal and acceptable uses of public space because capital interests regulate them. Visual communication amongst community members (i.e., street art, murals, etc.) is illegal unless permitted and paid for. Advertising conglomerates can easily pay to display marketing in our public space. On the other hand, individual citizens are up against complicated bureaucracies, curators, and fees. Therefore, many artists choose to ‘go rogue’ and express themselves in the streets without permission. A number of cities and states are pushing back. Sao Paulo Brazil, Houston Texas, Maine, Vermont, Alaska, and Hawaii have all banned billboards from their public spaces.

Street art stands separate (for the most part) from the commercial sphere. If done without permission, by its very nature, street art confronts mainstream ideas of a well-organized and regulated public sphere. Even if street artists don’t intentionally protest against this system, their public work does spark a new type of awareness in the minds of passersby. The possibilities of the space have been opened up, even if slightly.

In the summer of 2012, Nina Montenegro began Free the Billboards, a project to revive community interaction at the street level in Portland, Oregon USA by facilitating a (re)imagination of public visual space. Imagery and ideas were collected from community members via an online public forum. The public submitted pictures of what they would rather see displayed on their neighborhoods billboards, other than advertisements—artwork they loved, poetry, anything they felt strongly about. The community-contributed images were placed into vintage Portland-made View-Masters, which were then put into hand-crafted recycled brass and steel pedestal stations that were strategically positioned in front of billboards around the city.

The collected images were superimposed over the ads. Pedestrians could peer into the View-Master to see the wall before them with art, gardens, or poetry on it instead of an ad.  The powerful visioning tools acted as a gateway into an augmented reality.

Playing with the Streets

The use of View-Masters also invokes a playful nostalgia, as many of us may remember playing with these toys as children. Play is an important but largely neglected aspect of human experience in the city.

As children, we all explore, touch, and manipulate things. This is how we learn about the reality of objects and the structuring of space (Tuan 1974). When adults play in the city, it is often seen as a controversial waste of time and energy (Stevens 2007). Cities are planned to optimize work and other rational objectives, with leisure space serving well-defined functions. Therefore, spontaneous actions like this challenge the rigorous timetable of bureaucratic and capitalist production (Bonnett 1992).

Playing in public spaces, especially those not designed for it, reveals new realms of possibilities and embraces the space’s embedded use-value. This tactical blending of art, play, and life is a lived critique of rational action, because it discovers new needs and develops new forms of social life illustrating the capacities for social action and expression that the urbanization of society has made possible.

Free the Billboards aims to produce counter-spectacles that interrupt everyday experiences and provoke a reorientation—a temporary liberation from established order. The installations produce an imaginative and autonomous world; one that helps people (re)imagine the urban spaces around them.

The project intends to crack open the status quo, to challenge people to think beyond the current reality and imagine a new one, one of their own making. Instead of our public places being produced for us and controlled by distant bodies for profit, citizens must demand the right to the oeuvre, the right to participate in the creation of their own realities.

ALL PHOTOS © ALEX MILAN TRACY

Alberta Arts District Murals Buffed

ART BASE COMMUNITY MURAL PROJECT FACES FORCED REMOVAL BY THE CITY

Portland is a city that by all appearances is constantly in flux. Nowhere is this more noticeable than in North Portland, where the Alberta Arts District draws thousands of people each month to its Last Thursday, where collectively-inspired permaculture gardens explode into vibrant natural canvases in lots that dandelion weeds and thistle once overwhelmed, where old bike parts and other rusty recycled metals decorate gates and archways, and where purposeful paint sprawls across intersections, bike lanes, and otherwise crushingly quotidian surfaces.

While Alberta Street has drawn ample attention as being a revitalized center for art, commerce, cuisine and cooperatives, commuters and bikers along N Williams Avenue have noticed a steady increase in the level of commitment from the neighborhood and local artists to create a more community-oriented and visually appealing thoroughfare.

Formerly dotted with forbidding, unused lots, strewn with the obligatory broken glass, and tagged with a heavy saturation of graffiti, the stretch now boasts several community gardens, Village Building Convergence’s Boise Eliot public market, and several community mural projects that cover small plywood frames or entire two-story building facades.

One such mural lies at the intersection of Williams and NE Wygant. Formerly the site of an upholstery store, and attached to a residential unit, the building was frequently the target of graffiti artists and the city seemed to neither have the willpower or resources to address the situation. Now a colorful panoply of murals on three sides, the city has stepped in to serve a notice that the murals must be effaced.

Flash back to several months ago, when residents of the house began to dialogue with the graffiti artists by creating their own visual expressions on the building. A local painter/muralist noticed the building and approached the residents about opening up the space for a mural project.

The residents pooled their resources together to rent the empty space – which they likened to an “empty, cold, concrete cave” – and turn the exterior into a display of art, with an interior that would be a “warm, inspiring den of community-building and artistic creation.” A sign was raised on the roof that heralded Portland’s new “Arts Base.”

The property owners gave permission to paint over the drab and defaced walls, and the idea was generated that murals would be painted to feature a “rotating showcase of local talent,” according to outreach communications from the project organizers.

People in the surrounding Humboldt neighborhood were contacted and invited to give their feedback and express any concerns about the project. As the tagging began to subside, all that seemed missing was an interest from the City in funding this graffiti abatement project.

The project continued informally, and several months later, people began to take notice. One resident recalls people constantly coming by to photograph the murals and commenting on how beautiful they looked.

A nearby neighbor came to paint her own mural on the walls. A local group with the moniker “Bike Temple” approached the organizers to rent space in the building. Other individuals seeking studio space for larger projects started to take an interest in the space.

Organizers raised money as they could and supplemented the rest with meager teachers’ pay, with the intention that it could some day be a self-sustaining space. “We’re trying to do something that’s benefiting the community,” says one organizer.

Enter the Portland Police Department’s Graffiti Abatement Office. In a public communication prepared by Program Coordinator Marcia Dennis entitled “How to Read Graffiti and What to Do,” she writes, “Graffiti, by legal definition, is vandalism. (See ORS 164.383 or Portland City Code 14B.80) It is the unauthorized application of markings on someone else’s property, i.e.,WITHOUT PERMISSION.”

The same coordinator has determined that the murals at Williams and Wygant have indeed met the definition of vandalism. A notice was served to the landlords to paint over the murals within ten days.

Property owners who had unquestionably given permission for the murals filed an appeal with the city to delay the repainting, but ended up withdrawing their appeal after poring over restrictive city codes. Many neighbors were surprised, confused, or angry that the residents were now being required to paint over the murals.

An organizer of Arts Base expressed their frustration, “It’s too much for them, too colorful, too loud . . . as long as we can keep it inside it would be great, but it’s hard to do a community art space when you have to keep it inside, when you can’t be loud, can’t amplify music, can’t have murals, can’t have a sign.”

Residents now have two weeks to paint over the murals, and the Graffiti Abatement Office Coordinator is rejecting further appeals, claiming that it is no longer in her “jurisdiction.” Organizers hold out hope that a sympathetic coordinator or specialist in whatever other jurisdiction the case is now in will authorize the mural project, or calls to the City Commissioner from community members might stay the date of execution for the artwork.

UPDATE: (Aug 8th, 2011) The City of Portland has allowed the murals to stay, and plans for new murals are underway. However, the City has found Arts Base to be in violation of city zoning statutes, alleging that the residential space is being used for commercial activities. While the organizers of Arts Base have gone in the red on their venture, they plan on complying with their property managers’ demands that they cease community art activities in the space in order to pass the City’s upcoming inspection.

THIS ARTICLE ORIGINALLY APPEARED IN WATCHDOG INTERNATIONAL POSTED ON JULY 18, 2011 AND ENTITLED: COMMUNITY MURAL PROJECT FACES EFFACEMENT