New York graffiti tour turns the illicit underground into accessible art
Meet the street artist who gives tours around the city as part of a
group that’s found success showing the legal side of what some consider
urban blight
Leaf is a graffiti artist, instructor and tour guide in Manhattan.
Photograph: Simon Leigh for the Guardian
It’s
a blistery March afternoon and I am standing in a huddle of around 40
St John’s University freshmen outside of a high end coffee shop on the
Lower East Side. We are all waiting for Leaf, our graffiti guide for the
day from Graff Tours, a company that specializes in graffiti how-to
workshops and tours of notable graffiti art.
Leaf is one of several instructors at the company: he’s a tall, thin
young man with dark black plastic-frame glasses, a silver grill over his
top teeth and tattooed letters spelling out “Brooklyn” over the
knuckles of his hands. Today, he’s wearing a spray paint-splattered
parka against the cold. He greets the students’ professor warmly – this
field trip is part of the school’s Introduction to New York
City class – and starts leading the group down streets with city
sanctioned graffiti art installations and especially tagged-up
buildings.
A graffiti class held by an instructor called Leaf in Manhattan in March. Photograph: Simon Leigh for the Guardian
Our tour group winds its way through the Lower East Side, stopping at
notable murals and tags, each of which Leaf patiently explains in
detail. The tags over there are called a “throwie” because you can just
throw them up. The weird looking bubble-letters that flow like a Dali
painting, those are called “wild style” – but that term isn’t cool, Leaf
tells the class, because it’s not the 1980s anymore.
Next we admire a beautifully executed six-storey mural of a yellow
creature on the side of a building, by artists from Brazil. The legally
sanctioned mural will be obscured in a few months, Leaf explains, as the
luxury rental building that will replace the gas station next to it
rises up. Don’t feel too bad for the talented Brazilians, though; this
mural may soon be lost to glass and steel, but they recently had a show
in Chelsea.
Standing in front of a fading Invader mosaic, Leaf explains some of the practicalities of life as a modern day graffiti artist. Everyone uses e-commerce platform Big Cartel, which he describes as “Shopify [a more mainstream competitor] for criminals,” to sell their work. The really big artists like Katsu, who once tagged the perimeter of the White House (in a digitally enhanced prank
video), have their own apps for sale through iTunes. Groups of graffiti
artists who work together may be called crews or gangs, but they are
not actual gang members, Leaf explains, in case there is any doubt.
Leaf’s graffiti class in Manhattan, where he explained life as a modern artist. Photograph: Simon Leigh for the Guardian
Make sure to bring your permission slip
Many still think of graffiti as illicit, but these days, with so much
work commissioned to decorate gates of bodegas and stores, it’s easy to
get away with, Leaf says. If you’re spraying a bodega gate and the
police approach you, you simply have to show them a “permission slip”
that the bodega owner wrote for you, he explains, and most times the
police won’t even bother reading it.
There are other ways to avoid detection: see those letters? Leaf asks
the group, pointing to huge fuzzy writing several storeys up the side
of a brick building. That’s done by filling a fire extinguisher with
water and paint, and then getting it re-pressurized at a gas station, he
explains to the students with a grin.
Recently used spray paint cans look suspicious to the police, he
says, but having a used fire extinguisher on you is not a crime.
Street art in New York City on Leaf’s walking tour. Photograph: Simon Leigh for the Guardian
“I’ve only been arrested once”
Hearing the words “permission slip” and graffiti in the same sentence
is a jarring reminder of how different the city has become since the
days when graffiti seemed to cover every surface in the 1970s. “I’ve
only been arrested once in my life,” Leaf tells me sheepishly, glancing
down at the ground.
Leaf grew up in a small town an hour outside Buffalo, New York, where
he was inspired to explore graffiti by his father, himself an artist.
Leaf remembers the exact moment when his father pulled over during a
road trip to show him an old train car covered in graffiti when Leaf was
16 years old. Leaf decided he wanted to pursue the art form then and
there, but he waited until he got to Brooklyn, four years later.
In his small home town, it would have been very easy to figure out
among the town’s few teenagers was throwing up tags. His nom de paint
can, Leaf, was also inspired by his move to the city. “Leaf, because New
York City is a concrete jungle and I am putting leaves all over it,” he
explains with another shy smile.
By now, we have made our way back to the canvas hung up over a fence
in First Green Cultural Park, where the students will get to draw their
first tags. Blue latex gloves are given out to protect fingers from the
paint and Leaf, who keeps his already paint covered winter gloves on,
demonstrates how to change the flow of the paint, fill in and shade
letters and use color to full effect. Soon the air is filled with the
noxious fumes from the paint and the laughter of college freshmen.
Students wear gloves to protect their fingers from the spray paint. Photograph: Simon Leigh for the Guardian
The abandoned factory and the painted rooftop
Gabe Schoenberg, the founder of Graff Tours, had worked as a tour
guide on double-decker buses in New York City while in college, and
helped an uncle who ran a Queens-based tour company, so starting a tour
company of his own seemed like a logical next step. The company merely
toured notable graffiti at first, but the business took off when
Schoenberg added graffiti classes to the mix.
Schoenberg started trying to meet artists around the same time that developers demolished Queens art venue 5Pointz,
an abandoned factory that had become an ever evolving, sprawling
graffiti canvas. Schoenberg had already spent time trawling galleries
that specialized in graffiti in an effort to meet artists; now, he
offered them access to the roof of the building where he was renting his
apartment. The arrangement didn’t last – the building’s superintendent
asked him to paint over it – but while it did, the makeshift roof
gallery allowed Schoenberg to meet more graffiti artists and win their
trust.
The first group graffiti workshop Graff Tours ran was for Vans, the
shoe company, in Los Angeles. More corporate requests came in, and now,
in addition to university students, Graff Tours has taught the art of
graffiti as a team-building exercise to employees of Facebook, Instagram
and Google. Schoenberg hopes to eventually expand the business from NYC
to Los Angeles and Philadelphia, where he already does occasional
events.
Graff Tours now does graffiti tours, classes and team-building exercises. Photograph: Simon Leigh for the Guardian
A legal, family-friendly version of what was once seen as a symptom
of urban blight may seem like a strange formula for success, but in an
age where Banksy’s work sells at
Sotheby’s, graffiti has become another form of accessible art. “To me,
graffiti will always be illegal,” says Schoenberg. When it comes to
graffiti, “you need the sneaking around to give it that energy.”
G
......Credit THEGUARDIAN
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