Posted on

See if it Sticks, Feb. 25

see-if-it-sticks-feb-25-flyer

Back in December, I started cutting circles. Dozens and dozens of tiny circles that made up half tone images of money. I cut out the easy one first: Tom Jefferson off of the $2 bill. I took the other two to South Carolina and managed to cut out the buffalo off of the buffalo nickle. My sister and niece helped cut a few dozen of the circles out. The last piece proved to test my bounds of sanity as well as a cramped index finger. I finally cut out the liberty head half dollar a few weeks ago.

All the while Todd Hanson has been holed up in his rotting Noe Valley bungalow madly cutting anything that comes to mind. He’s only been cutting stencils for a year or so but has already become a master at it. He practices on magazine ads but has begun to really just cut what he imagines. So he has developed a truly unique style that I like very much.

Sabrina Enrique from Density on Valencia St. emailed me months ago asking about my having a show at her store. She started selling my book too. I had to include Todd. We met Sabrina at her store and talked about the Mission, art, and stencils. She had a great Michael Kushner show up when we stopped by. After agreeing to set up an exhibit, Todd and I both kept asking Scott Williams, the SF king of cut paper, to be part of the show. He finally relented. So as the show loomed, I had to think up a name that wasn’t a lame stencil cliche.

Todd and I began to throw ideas around. We started to meet up and stencil USPS stickers and would try to think up title ideas in between wearing respirators. Ana came over one day and worked on her Love Aqui hearts. None of the title ideas really worked that day. On the second sticker jam, as I was getting on my bike, I threw out some more title ideas to Todd. “Well, I guess we’ll see if any of them stick.” I paused, and let that last word hang in my brain. “Hmm, how about ‘see if it sticks?'” It sort of connected with Todd, who now had a 25th title idea to mull over.

Over the week, I kept mentioning “see if it sticks” to friends. It consistently got chuckles and smiles. I wrote out some punish sentences about sticking stencils and sticky art. Then I realized that Todd and I had made stickers to give away at the show.

So…. “See If It Sticks” will open Feb. 25 at Density. Still working out the time. You’ll probably find the time on FaceBook anyway! I think we might serve peanut butter and lemon squares. Or possibly honey and crackers. Might as well run the idea in the ground. Oh… the initials of the show – SIIS – sound like a the propelling pigment of a spraypaint can.

Nice!

Posted on

Photos featured in Vienna zine

During my 2008/9 Stencil Nation book tour, I set up an event with Matteo Grieder at his art space Zeitvertrieb in Vienna, Austria. Matteo was nervous about the turnout (a common anxiety during my European tour), but I had Pod and Austrian artist Dieter Puntigam backing me up with live VJ and DJing. A nice crowd came for my presentation, bought books, ate and drank, and made a great scene for the event. Matteo was surprised and happy with the results.

A month ago, Matteo approached me with a request for photo submissions to his fun art zine “Artyfucked”. It is mostly a sketch zine, but he also features street art from cities around the world. Issue #8 features my stencil photos (the cream of the crop) from SF. They mostly cover 2011’s greatest hits. He also put them all in an online album.

Support a great project and buy a copy of “Artyfucked” today!

Posted on

Sign Painting now in business

Spent the past week down on Folsom St., in the fog up on a ladder, painting a sign with Chris Benfield. Justin Fraser just changed his business name from digipop to Mission Web Works. We finished the first sign on the Folsom St. facade today, so I took some photos of the work. Chris and I already have another job lead. Justin asked me “what’s your sign business name?” hmm. After several hours of brainstorming while up ladders, Chris and I were still undecided. Two women walked by and one looked up at us and said “You sure do have steady hands!”

So Steady Hands it is. Ready to stencil and pounce our way through the Bay.

[u] well, Chris googled Steady Hands and a guy in Walnut Creek has that name. So we’re still working on a name. Stay tuned….

Posted on

SF Weekly Promotes My Tour

Original blog post here.

Graffiti Guru Offers Street Art Tours

By Caroline Chen
published: Tue., Jun. 21 2011 @ 3:00PM

Howzegraffiti1.jpg
art by Get Up, Upper Haight St.

​No matter how cool you are, there’s still a pretty good chance that the only thing you know about street art is sometimes you come across it, and sometimes it’s amazing. Who did it? What’s behind it? Where can you see more? Who knows?

We do. Or, we know who knows: stencil artist Russell Howze. He’s the author of Stencil Nation, and he offers a three-hour, small-group tour called Scout for Street Art. Howze just started giving these tours two weeks ago, and promises to provide “expert explanations, stories, and background for most of the art that constantly changes on the streets.” And he’s not joking about the “expert” part.

RusellHowzebiopic.jpg
Russell Howze

​Howze has dedicated his life to street art, especially stencils, and he knows a lot about the S.F. street art scene. “I have this particular affinity for San Francisco street art,” Howze says, “especially Mission district — there’s something really special and magical about it.”

Originally from Greenville, S.C., Howze has lived in San Francisco since 1997. Since he saw his first stencil in 1990 in Clemson, S.C., Howze has been photographing the public art in places around the world. In 2002 he created an online stencil archive, which features tens of thousands of photos of stencils. Stencil Nation, published in 2008, is the paperback extension of his site, documenting 350 artists in 28 countries.

Howze does not have a fixed schedule for his tour — you can just sign up by yourself or in a group ($37) per person and state your preferred times. The tour is run through Vayable, a company that draws on locals to give their own tours. Anyone can sign up to offer a tour, and Vayable acts as the conduit, handling bookings and payments. Vayable operates worldwide, and as one might expect, it offers numerous S.F. tours, including horseback riding on Ocean Beach, a used bookstore crawl, and a potentially perilous “Whiskey on Wheels” tour.

Vayable hosts a mixer called “A Vayable Idea” on Wednesday at 7 p.m. at Galeria de la Raza, where Howze will start the night with a 10-minute talk, “The Present Future of Street Art.” The event is free, but you can register here.

Posted on

A Vayable Idea (Wed); Banksy Tour (Sat)

Join me Wednesday on 24th St. when I speak for only 10 minutes at A Vayable Idea

Join me Satuday with TransportedSF for the Banksy Tour.  I will guide you through the six remaining Banksy pieces via a biodeisel bus (drinking and fun allowed).

Some thoughts about Street Art Tourism in SF

Sometime around 2002, when an article about “The Mission School” of public art appeared in the SF Bay Guardian, the alleys where I wandered to photograph stencil art. Of course, this was around the time Banksy was becoming a sensation, Melbourne, Australia’s walls were exploding with public art, and Tristan Manco released his book “Stencil Graffiti.” As books began to get published, websites like MySpace and Flickr began to allow massive photo and info sharing, and digital cameras became cheap and easy to use, people started noticing that I was taking photographs of the sidewalk (and other strange locations). People started asking me questions about the art. Then I eventually saw people taking their own photographs. Prior to about 2005, very few people documented what was now being called street art. But this began to change. Like me, people were traveling around the world to see the art, the exhibits, and the freshest city walls. One of the pillars of street art entailed that artists had to travel and put their art up all over the world. It was only a matter of time before this all went mainstream.

When Banksy wandered through the USA about two years ago, there was a frenzy of Tweets and posts sharing the locations and art he left behind. I jumped into the frenzy and saw many other people wandering San Francisco to snap up photos of the fresh work. A few who scooped Banksy’s visit ended up on TV, and the blogosphere many cities ate up his art (and the eventual removal of much of it). In my mind, the sensation had arrived. Irionically, Banksy was promoting his documentary that looked at the hollow sensation of art’s next greatest thing.

I wasn’t surprised when I was asked to speak as an expert for a Banksy tour in May. With only six pieces remaining (well, one is totally destroyed but still possibly relevant), and a law in the books where drinking alcohol on a bus is legal, there was a good combination for a fun Saturday afternoon. The tour sold out, and we all had a great time. I know that Precita Eyes gives mural tours, and Chris Carlsson gives FoundSF tours, both of whome fill in gaps where the mainstream double-decker buses never tread. Antenna Theater developed the Magic Bus as a multimedia bus show, but demand was so high, they turned it into an ongoing “tour”. There are other tours that I probably do not know about, and some, like the Barbary Coast, Dashiell Hammett, and Beat Generation tours are a bit more mainstream. Jeremy Novy has an exhibit titled “A History of Queer Street Art” which is closing just in time for Pride Weekend. I am sure that people here for Pride are going to this exhibit and then looking for the illegal art afterwards.

Prior to the Banksy tour, I had wondered how many people came to San Francisco to seek out the painted alleys and walls. As street art became a topic of LA tabloids (“Is Banksy going to appear at the Oscars???” “The Art in the Streets show is causing more graffiti!” ) and Shepard Fairey became a household name, I saw the back streets of San Francisco turn into photo opportunities. Back when I visited Melbourne, Australia in 2008, their official tour brochure boasted that tens of thousands of tourists came to the city to see the painted laneways. As I visited the Citylights gallery just off Hosier Lane, I saw Japanese tourists snapping photos, a newlywed couple posing in front of the walls, and even a school group of young children looking at the art. This was only in maybe an hour of visiting the area!

As San Francisco spends $22 million a year to erase graffiti and street art, these changes beg the question “just how much money is the City making from all the graffiti and street art?” The best way to find out would probably be a funded study of underground and subculture tourist trends. If two people stood at both ends of Clarion Alley on a Saturday, and asked a small list of questions, I assume that the results would be surprising for the bureaucrats that only see vandalism. Then there are the stores that cater to the culture of street art. Upper Playground reigns supreme in the Haight. 1AM holds it down in SoMa. White Walls makes the illegal walls quasi-legal with their top shelf legal walls.

This is what I hope to talk about Wednesday night A Vayable Idea. This is a start up dot com that allows people to purchase tours from everyday people who love their cities. I’ve already done a few tours through Vayable and they’ve been great. My tourists have been curious about all the art that they see around them. I try my best to answer all their questions and show them the best spots. There are skateboard tours on Vayable, available in SF. There’s another underground tourist source that is understudyed. Our hills are famous for skating down. So I’m putting the word out: Who is catering to alt-tourism and why isn’t San Francisco paying attention? I’m crious to see what happens. Hope you come by and visit so that I can hear what you think about it all.

Posted on

Stencils, Shadows, and Death

The Tower of Transformation is an Installation/Interactive portable art piece for the Burning Man 2011 theme-Rites of Passage. Based on a Balinese cremation tower in form and intent, it will be modified for presentation in Black Rock City

In place of traditional Balinese gold leaf designs, the tower will be covered in stencils by contemporary street artists from Bali, Java, the U.S. and Europe. It will also contain a contemporary shadow puppet theater

Participants will be invited to join the Tower in procession around Burning Man, adding their sentiments about the Rites of Passage in their own experience to the piece through writing on or artistic modification to the tower.

Posted on

GIVE

what more can i say today. found this stencil on the bike ride home from Alcatraz.

sf-soma-give

Posted on

Nov. 5 :: Mission Muralismo de Young Finale

Hope to see you all at the last Mission Muralismo event at the de Young Friday Nights series.

This one will be special, honoring local stencilist Michael Roman, who has cut some amazing Chicano-themed stencils over the years.

::: Details :::

WHO: Cultural Encounters: Friday Nights at the de Young

WHAT: Grand Finale of Mission Muralismo’s Year-Long Series

WHEN: November 5 (plus special Bonus Sunday, November 7)

WHERE: de Young Museum, Golden Gate Park, San Francisco

COST: Programs are free of charge

INFO: www.deyoungmuseum.org and www.MISSIONMURALISMO.com
Continue reading “Nov. 5 :: Mission Muralismo de Young Finale”

Posted on

My Summer Vacation(s) : Pics

Posted on

Stencil Whirlwind :: Banksy Frenzy

Whew, what a spin I’m in at the moment. Friday afternoon, after a carnival gig in the Mission, I headed over to the de Young museum to speak with Renee about my stencil bit for the Mission Muralismo event coming up Friday, May 7. The theme is “Preachers and Pranksters,” so I guess that stencils fit nicely somewhere in both of those angles. Their political bent preaches messages, and some of the more notorious street artists throw up the stencils in prankish ways.

The Mission Muralismo team has had three or four events at the de Young over just as many months. They’ve found that they book speakers for 20 minute talks and end up going over their short allotted time, much to the chagrin of the rest of the lineup. So they approached me with the idea to NOT speak about stencils. I offered to create a stencil making station, but they didn’t like the idea of putting me outside and away from all the action (Marcus Shelby will perform his jazz composition about famous preacher Martin Luther King, Jr., RIGO will introduce the speakers, including the Billboard Liberation Front). So I worked out a second idea with them: I’ll sit in a booth and cut a stencil before the speakers begin. I’ll hang samples of stencils behind me, and then photos of Mission District-based stencils will run in the auditorium. So I met with Renee from the de Young and we worked out most of the details. I love cutting stencils in public, so it’ll be a fun, quick bit.

I got home after that and got a call from Laura telling me that there was a Banksy stencil on the wall above the Amnesia Bar. What? Looked in my email after that call and found a video of a definite Banksy stencil at Commercial and Grant in Chinatown. What!? I dropped all plans, hopped on my bike, and hauled ass down to Chinatown first, thinking “this one’s on the street and will get buffed soon!” I found the location by pausing the emailed video and seeing “CIAL” on the concrete curb. Got there and found people already photographing the stencil. A huge Hummer was parked in front of it, so I began the shoot by contemplating climbing on the huge SUV.

Glad I didn’t. Maybe five minutes passed and the owner of the SUV got in and drove away. With this lucky parking space opening up, I had a great straight-on angle for snapping up pics. I chatted up some men as they snapped up pics, and one said he knew the bakery owner’s son (the Chinatown piece is on the outside wall of a bakery). The son said that Banksy paid his parents $50 to spray the stencil. A piece of paper has Chinese writing on it, with a hand-written note asking to please not paint over the Banksy art. A friend from Taiwan translated the Chinese for me, apparently written via an online English>Chinese translation tool. The sign said: “Please don’t erase this graffiti. It’s said that police are  investigating this case. You can erase by the end of next week, end of April.”

 

Back on the bike and straight down Market St. I was wondering where else in the City Banksy had hit. They could be anywhere! The Luggage Store Gallery door happened to be open. I have been needing to meet with Luggage Store Art Director Laurie Lazer so that I could get a copy of “Stencil Nation” to her, which I didn’t have due to running out to snap pics. I went inside anyway, to show her the flicks and to see if she had any leads on Banksy. She had none, though heard that he may have wandered into the gallery the day before. She’d just sold a Banksy panel, cut in two, to raise funds for the gallery, and said that he knew about this. After promising to meet with her next week, I went to Amnesia Bar for the second piece.

People were already snapping photos. After getting some photos, I met up with Christine Marie, and wandered in to an empty Amnesia Bar at happy hour. We both sorta knew Shawn the owner, and he sorta remembered us. I asked him for some time up on the roof, and he said he’d have to make a phone call. I told him that he’d be doing the City, and the street art world, a great service if he let me up there to snap some pics for the Stencil Archive.

Woke up Saturday morning and got an email from Shawn soon after breakfast. He was offering rooftop access for a small group of videographers and photographers, for 30 minutes only. Amnesia Bar has a testy neighbor, who had to give permission to have some people up near his windows next door, which I understand. As I prepared to hit the Mission again, word online said that there was a large rat on 9th St. at Howard in SoMa. Another spot! Where else could these pieces keep popping up? I packed my laptop for this trip, with the plan of stopping off in a cafe to quickly post the rooftop photos.

I got there early and the bar’s manager climbed up onto the roof with me. Two rickety ladders led us up there, and a French videographer was winding things up on the hot, white roof. While up there, I met Mike Cuffe from Warholian.com. He’d broken the story on the web, and was now spending his Saturday following a list of locations to shoot. I also spoke to a nieghbor, who waved a copy of “Wall and Piece” at us and told me he was devastated that he’d missed Banksy in action right outside his own back door. Cuffe had tipped me off about a fourth piece on the side of Cafe Prague on Sycamore at Mission St., so I shared that with the grateful neighbor. After thanking the Amnesia folks downstairs, I biked over to Sycamore.

When I showed up to the Cafe Prague piece, a van blocked the art work on the brown, graffiti’d wall. Damn! Time to get creative again in order to snap the Native American sitting on the ground holding a staff with an real “No Trespassing” sign on the top. Just as I started snapping pics, a young couple came up and unlocked the van. “Are you all leaving?” I asked. “I am,” the woman said. She pulled out, and I had another magic parking space to stand in to get perfect shots of the art! Twice in under 24 hours? What luck.

A blog post had an incorrect location, so people were at Dolores Park looking for the work, but people were finding out the real location via phones with online social connections. I chatted with folks, passed out cards, and watched the frenzy. San Francisco openly loves technology. Online chatter seemed to be frantically discussing these pieces as movie promotions, and so people were tweeting, FaceBooking, and blogging away pics and text about the Banksy easter eggs across San Francisco. Being the most obsessed stencil photographer in the City, I left Sycamore and went to a cafe on Valencia to try to scoop everyone with the rooftop pics and the No Trespassing pics.

As I sipped iced tea on a sunny April day, I posted my best shots on FaceBook and Flickr. I put them in all the stencil and street art groups on Flickr, and spread them around on FaceBook. I then put them on Stencil Archive. After having scooped the first pics, I’m sure Warholian.com has major traffic, but it seemed that my corner of Stencil Nation was scooped by yours truly.

Ah, to be wound up in a spiral of Banksy mania, screaming like a rabid teenybopper Beatles fan. You’d think Obama was in town, speaking to the starry-eyed masses, who in turn wrote and posted every last detail of their experience on the Internet social sites. Call me a sucker, but I know that street art can quickly disapear, so snapping pics must happen asap. (Blogs are reporting that Banksy’s fresh piece in LA has already been taken down by professional art experts.)

Back on the bike to head to SoMa to snap the rat. Once I grabbed some photos (not much of a crowd there), I spoke to some of the local store employees about rooftop access. Struck out on four locations and got a nibble on a fifth. Sent emails to the manager tonight and after two bounces, found another email address for him online. Fingers crossed.

Came back tonight to see that a fifth and sixth stencil has been documented. Warholian.com either held back on the Erie at Mission (near 14th St.) piece or found out after I saw him at Amnesia. He has since posted flicker pics of that one, which has a bird on a tree. The other piece is the same large rat from SoMa, with a different punchline. So back down to the Mission I go tomorrow to snap up the Erie piece.

With the flights screwed up between USA and Europe, I wonder if Banksy is going to just stay in North America and tear shit up while he cools his heels during the flight ban? I also wonder if he got my email telling him that CELLspace is fair game? And finally, I wonder who he’s with and where he’s staying? I have theories, but it’s all fantastical and just plain fanboyish. When I said years ago that I as a Certified Stencil Geek, I wasn’t kidding!

Let the frenzy continue….

Posted on

5 Feb. : Mission Muralismo at the de Young

Please join us for the next Mission Muralismo@deYoung celebrating the artists and themes of Street Art San Francisco: Mission Muralismo.  FREE  Bring your posse. Great Carnaval Music and Dancing. Art. Talk.Costumes galore.
No glitter,please, otherwise come to your Carnaval fancy.

CULTURAL ENCOUNTERS:
FRIDAY NIGHTS @ THE DE YOUNG MUSEUM   FEB 5 2010 5-8:30 pm
IN PARTNERSHIP WITH PRECITA EYES PRESENTS:

MISSION MURALISMO YEAR-LONG SERIES
Following an extraordinary fall kickoff that honored hundreds of Mission artists,
the de Young continues the First Friday Mission Muralismo series offering an enriching schedule of themed programs that celebrate the internationally recognized Mission District arts community. An exciting array of Mission artists, writers, performers and luminaries presenting talks and performances, sharing their art, insights, musings, experiences and perspectives about the work that has put the Mission District on the global arts map.¡CARNAVAL!
Continue reading “5 Feb. : Mission Muralismo at the de Young”