Kenny Scharf , Haring & others The two artists collaborated to turn the wall into an iconic destination for illegal street art, which lasted for decades. (
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Keith Haring:The pop artist painted his iconic stick figures on the wall illegally. “It was an eyesore” and a “garbage dump” before, he said. (
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Os Gemeos: bAfter the re-creation of Haring’s mural in 2008, Portuguese twins “Os Gemeos” were the first to be legally commissioned to display their work. (
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Shepard Fairey:In April, the “Obey” artist used the wall to promote his “May Day” show at Deitch Projects. It was “bombed,” then torn apart by vandals. (William Farrington)
Barry McGee & Josh Lazcano:Five months later, “Twist” and “Amaze” tagged the wall with names of graff writers past and present. It was left unbombed. (
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Unnamed friend of McGee:In November, McGee commissioned a friend to extinguish his wall with a giant tribute to Dash Snow, aka Sace, who died in 2009. (
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The aftermath of last month’s blizzard, chaos abounded: Streets went unplowed, garbage towered over sidewalks, New Yorkers were homebound, city officials lost their jobs. And graffiti writers “bombed” the city’s most high-profile piece of public art.
Under cover of snow, the taggers defaced Kenny Scharf’s colorful mural on the corner of Houston Street and the Bowery, “throwing up” their tags — Remo, Same, Ate, Shaun, Post — leaving giant, silver scrawls on the bottom half of the whimsical collage of brightly colored faces. The graffiti gang, known as BTB (Big Time Bombers), took advantage of the empty streets to quickly “rag” a work that took Scharf five days to complete.
“It really hurt me,” Scharf tells The Post. “It was a big diss.”
Among graffiti artists, the wall is a concrete metaphor for the battle between art and vandalism, professionals and outlaws. The commissioned pieces created there over the past three years — by Shepard Fairey, Barry McGee and Scharf, among others — stop passersby in their tracks with their beauty. People pose for photos in front of them. Cars slow to see them. They pull people out of their daily routines at one of the busiest intersections in the city. But the graff writers don’t care how cool the murals are. It’s a turf war.
“Don’t get me wrong. I thought it was nice,” says 30-year-old Bronx native Remo of the Scharf mural “bombing.” “I even took a picture of myself in front of it. My girl got mad at me for going over it. [But] that’s my wall — I’ve been doing it for years.”
In the unwritten law of graffiti culture, writing on top of another artist’s work is the ultimate sign of domination and disrespect. The underground keeps track of who’s marked what and where. The more visible the tag, the more notoriety the artist gets. And right now, Houston and the Bowery is the city’s most prominent street canvas.
Scharf, who lives in Los Angeles, quickly dispatched a local friend to repair the damage. But when a second snowstorm came on Jan. 11, BTB was back with their spray cans and street ethos.
Scharf plans to repaint the piece himself today, but it’s a Sisyphean task.
“If it gets hit once, it’s all downhill after that,” Scharf says. “If there’s another blizzard, they’ll just do it again.”
Yet Scharf’s headaches pale in comparison to the venom unleashed last year on a previous mural by Shepard Fairey, the artist who designed the iconic blue-and-red “Hope” poster of Barack Obama. In April, Fairey installed a massive ad for his upcoming “May Day” show at Deitch Projects.
It wasn’t even complete before a tagger named NAW hit it. Critics faulted Fairey for pre-fabricating his poster-mural. Graff writers relentlessly bombed the piece and then began actually destroying it by tearing gaping holes in the plywood wall that had been constructed for the poster.
“Shepard Fairey is controversial because he started out as a street artist and he’s done more commercial work recently,” says Jeremiah Moss, of the Vanishing New York blog. “He wasn’t even going up there and painting — it was all pre-designed in his studio.”
As a gesture of goodwill, the wall’s owner, real estate mogul Tony Goldman, asked graffiti writer Barry McGee, of San Fransisco, to paint the next mural. McGee, who goes by the street name “Twist,” filled the wall with red tags of famous graffiti writers. They asked a local writer, Chino, to help out and give the mural New York flavor.
“It was a peace offering after what happened with Shepard Fairey,” says Kathy Grayson, of the Hole Gallery, which along with Jeffrey Deitch has helped Goldman curate the wall.
And it worked. Out of respect for the names on the wall, the mural was left alone. Ironically, regular folks were inspired to write their names in pen, adding their contribution to the piece.
But, it turns out, not everyone wanted peace.
“I’m more into all-out anarchy. I was hoping someone would have gone over my work,” says McGee. “That’s real street.”
Scharf’s mural was next. He told the underground culture website Animal that he thought his wall would be respected: “I’m not Shepard Fairey. Not to knock him or anything, but I’m not putting up wallpaper made safely in a studio.”
His mural remained pristine for a month. Then the snowstorm hit.
Snowstorms, says Remo, are “that big wave the surfers wait for, like in California or wherever. You don’t get that opportunity much.”
“We had that adrenaline, we were in the street doing whatever we want,” he says.
Mark Schiller, who runs the Web site Wooster Collective, says the muralists should take the tagging as a compliment.
“The bigger the artist that does the wall, the bigger the spotlight will be on the person who destroys it. No one will notice a tag on a blank wall,” Schiller says. “It’s a very fine line being walked with the Bowery wall. There’s an ecosystem being fed there.”
The ecosystem goes back to 1982, when Keith Haring illegally covered it with his signature stick figures in DayGlo oranges, greens and pinks. Within weeks, Haring’s work was tagged, and he felt much like Scharf does today: “Personally hurt by it.”
The final straw came when someone scrawled a $9,999 price tag on Haring’s mural in response to an article in which Haring said he had yet to sell a piece for more than $10,000.
After that, Haring painted over the original work in silver and vowed never to do another East Village mural. But the 1982 mural lived on. In 2008, to celebrate what would’ve been the 50th birthday of the late Haring, Goldman and Deitch recreated the original DayGlo painting, to public delight.
Goldman, meanwhile, installed surveillance cameras beside the mural this month. “I’m gonna be the last man standing there,” he says. “I’m a street guy, too. I can feel what happens behind me. I got eyes in the back of my head.”
Remo says he and his crew will continue to bomb whatever goes on the wall, cameras or no.
“If it’s not my crew, or someone I respect, I’m going over it,” he says.
When asked what he would like to see on the wall, Remo pauses.
“I want to see a bunch of New York graffiti writers on that wall. It would be cool if everybody could get together and do a bunch of fill-ins,” he said. “Put up our stamp. That’s who we are.”
Goldman says he loves the idea. “That would be my pleasure,” he says.
And if anyone dares write over that?
“They know,” Remo says, “what could happen.”