The Edge Becomes the Center

by DW Gibson

  Just old New Yorkers have that connection with their neighborhoods. There’s no more neighborhoods anymore. Nobody knows each other. It’s true. Look at the church where I had my communion on Twelfth Street. It used to be ten o’clock English, eleven Spanish, twelve Greek and one o’clock would be French or something. But it’s not there no more. They sold it because nobody goes anymore. Now it’s an NYU dorm. They tore down the church but left the steeple up in front of the new building—you see that? Crazy shit.

  To call the New York University dormitory on East Twelfth Street incongruous would be generous—it’s positively schizophrenic, a sight to behold. Completed in 2009, the twenty-six-story high-rise features row after row of rectangular windows and built-in air-conditioning units—it looks more like a communist-era housing block than the latest showpiece for a private institution with a penchant for capital campaigns. The entrance is set back off of the sidewalk, crouched behind pure folly: a steeple attached to a facade that looks more like a stage set than the real thing. This is the outer layer of what was once St. Ann’s Church, the 1847 stone sanctuary that dominated the block for 150 years. Now it offers little more than a whiff of history for the students on their way to the lobby. The church survived denominations and religions for a century and a half, first Protestantism (12th Street Baptist Church, 1847–54) then Judaism (Congregation Emanu-El, 1854–67) and then Catholicism (St. Ann’s 1867–2003). But it could not survive the seductions of twenty-first century gentrification: the Archdiocese of New York sold the property to a developer in 2005 for $15 million and NYU demolished it to make room for the dormitory. Church, though, is not all that has vanished from Raul’s life:

  One of my best friends moved to Georgia. A lot of people have left. They can’t afford to live here. They gotta skedaddle, go down south and get some value for their money. It’s money, man. The bottom line’s the bottom line. You go where you can, in life, right? Wherever you can afford.

  The whole city is expensive. Before there were areas where people of certain classes could live, and now if you don’t got three g’s on you, pal, you’ve gotta get out of here. And people that are from here, they don’t have that kind of loot. That’s what they make in a month. That’s their whole salary.

  I’m an optimist. Look at the bright side and shit. That’s the only way you’ll survive in New York, man. You’re not an optimist and you don’t stay strong, this place will swallow you up. It’s not a nice place sometimes. There are two things you can do now as a New Yorker: be bitter about the past or you can just go with it and appreciate it and be amazed and shocked at the new things that happen in the city. Because I do. Things gotta change, man. Things gotta evolve.

  People go, “Are you from here?”

  “Yeah, I’m from here.”

  “But where were you born?”

  “I was born here.”

  And they grab their friends and they’re like, “Oh shit, check this out, you can’t believe this shit: he was born here!”

  That’s the cool thing, we’ve become the outcasts or the weirdos, the indigenous people.

  I’m New York, you know? New York is not perfect. Nobody’s perfect. I’m the best of it and the worst of it. I do bad things to it and I do good things to it. I’m all of it.

  9.

  Michael De Feo awaits his lunch at a restaurant just east of Grand Central Terminal in Manhattan, and he picks up where Raul left off—at the moment when subway graffiti became street art:

  I did five years at the School for Visual Arts and got a degree in graphic design. But my portfolio review didn’t have a lick of graphic work in it; it was all photos of my street art at the time, this was in ’95. And I wanted to bring my stuff into galleries but bringing my slides as a nineteen-year-old was just not going to work. I began to feel like, “Fuck them.” It got to the point where it was like, “Who gives a shit about them anyway? I’ll do it my own way.” So I started to glue my works onto walls in SoHo. Conceptually I hadn’t even an inkling of what this all meant other than I wanted to get my stuff in front of as broad an audience as I could. And that’s what I began to do.

  Michael is an artist but with his closely cropped brown hair, eyeglasses, and a freshly pressed shirt under his sweater he’s a far cry from the ink-stained hands and T-shirt and jeans of young Raul writing on the trains in the ‘80s. That’s because Michael’s other passion is teaching art to elementary and middle school kids. This explains not just the look, but the posture, the mood: he’s alert and sits up straight.

  I grew up in Rye, about an hour north of the city, and when I was in middle school, seventh grade, I took a class called motors and power, which allowed us to take apart engines and rebuild them. We used tools like drill presses, spot welders, torches, all sorts of shit that today you’d never use—programs like that just don’t exist any more. The teacher, Mr. Goldfarb, he invited in a high school senior who was big into graffiti to spray paint these letters over the slop sinks. They were this classic ’80s bubble letter style: very legible, fun and approachable and balloon-y. He did this and I thought it was fucking awesome. Like, “This is bad ass. This guy is using spray paint in our class!” And he had a copy of Subway Art by Martha Cooper and Henry Chalfant, which came out in ’84 so it’d only been out for a year or two. I flipped through it and it blew my mind. It was like, look at all this awesome stuff that’s going on just twenty-five minutes from my house! It was the first seed: the excitement about people becoming a part of the actual fabric of the city that they live in.

  Michael has a daughter and is quick to identify as a father. He grew up in the suburbs but doesn’t talk about his past defensively, like many self-styled escapees. Indeed, as the details of his physical features and the facts of his life stack up, it becomes harder and harder to picture him practicing his art: plastering urban walls with glue-stained paper or photographs or stenciled images. Michael operates successfully in very different spaces but he’s done a few things that link up his disparate pursuits: he published a children’s book that uses street art to teach the alphabet; and he paints walls in upper class suburbs like Greenwich, Connecticut, where residents have never heard names like Banksy and Shepard Fairey before—at least not until Michael comes along. He spreads the gospel to an audience outside the usual tent.

  I started with works on paper, on blueprints. I used to source my blueprints from a Dumpster on Seventeenth and Broadway. There was an architectural firm that was always filling this Dumpster with blueprints. Not only was the paper free but it created this accidental giant loop of working with paint on these blueprints and then gluing them up in the streets, possibly on the same buildings they were designed for, and conceptually it all started to snap together for me.

  As far as picking locations there are a couple of factors that come into play like visibility, frequency that a spot might get buffed. I’ll avoid some walls if I can tell it’s going to get buffed in a second. It doesn’t always stop me because sometimes it’s worth it to have it up in a spot for a couple days if it’s super visible. I’m attracted to things that are broken, torn, and faded, I like that, but I also put things on sparkly new things, too. It’s kind of different everywhere I go.

  I don’t find many surfaces to put work up anymore. The city is shinier. There’s a lot of glass and metal. I can do that but just take a hose to it once it dries and it’ll come right down. I want something with some tooth to it.

  He laughs.

  I’ve doctored up the glue that I’ve used over the years. I learned something from this guy in Amsterdam when I was putting up work. This guy worked for the city and he was taking the work down behind me. He comes over to me and he’s like, “Hey are you putting stuff up?”

  And I’m like, “Yeah. Sorry.”

  He says, “If you want to make my job really difficult, put sugar in your glue.”

  “Wow. That’s a great idea. Thank you!”

  And since then I’ve done that.

  He laughs.

>   The Dutch are so friendly, so cool. They’re awesome.

  As far as law enforcement is concerned, knock on wood, I’ve never been arrested. I’ve come very close. Not just here but in other parts of the country and other parts of the world. Cops have a bit of an attitude, a lot of them. Some of them don’t. For the most part it’s pretty positive. What works quite nicely is that the aesthetic quality of most of what I do is very approachable. It’s very easy to understand. It’s nonconfrontational. It’s very easy to talk myself out of trouble.

  That’s not hard to imagine. Not only does Michael’s work steer clear of confrontation or aggression—it can be downright bright and inviting: trees and hearts and flowers. Still he does manage to work in the occasional skeleton or set of gnarled teeth. You can find these in the kinds of places that reward a viewer eager to explore beyond the usual sightlines: low to the ground at the base of lampposts, or up near surveillance cameras capturing the traffic and the interaction and evolution of the streets.

  You know the funny thing is that when I first started doing this my dad was very, very old school, more than my mom. They’re both off the boat from Italy. I’m first generation. And in the beginning my dad said, “This is a waste of time. If you get arrested, don’t call me. I hope you get put in jail.” Shit like that. But over the years, he’s changed his tune. Not just because I was getting attention but I think he started to see the larger picture. He saw what my intentions were with my work. And he began to appreciate it. By the time my book came out he was whole hog about it. He would tell his clients about my work. An interesting thing happened where he would say: “He doesn’t do graffiti; he does street art.”

  He laughs.

  And what’s the difference? Maybe the greater population would appreciate what I do over what a tagger would do, perhaps, but aside from public perception they’re both the exact same thing. I didn’t get permission to put this here. Maybe eight times out of ten the owner of the building might like it and leave me alone but it’s the exact same crime: unwelcome imagery. That’s somebody’s private property.

  People are using this “post-graffiti” now. Like post-modernist? Post-graffiti. It’s just something to use to redefine what it is we’re all doing and market it. Whatever. Just let me do what I’m doing. I’m not a street artist. I’m a maker. I’m an artist. I do all sorts of things. I don’t like predetermined definitions of what people think that I do. What I’m doing is my right and the right of anyone else who wants to participate.

  I think people are in their own bubble going from point A to point B. School to work, work to wherever. I think this natural thing about street art is it reawakens people’s awareness of their surroundings. Whether or not you’re looking for it deliberately. It makes the experience of walking around a lot more engaging.

  You know, we’ve gotten so used to advertisements being in front of our faces all of the time and people say nothing about that. That’s really crazy. It’s gotten so bad, a school out west, to raise money they put this vinyl advertising over the kids’ lockers in the hallways. I was talking about this with family over dinner a while ago and the table was divided. I was like, “Are you fucking crazy? So at an earlier age my daughter can worry about her weight and what clothes she wears?” That’s insane. The one place we shouldn’t have advertising is our schools. Keep our kids safe from that bullshit.

  I have some rules that I impose on my work. I would never touch a house of worship or a cemetery. I would never permanently damage someone’s property. All my stuff can be repainted or washed off. Countless times my work is defaced or torn down within minutes—things I’ve worked on in the studio for hours and hours or days and days. You glue them up and go around the corner to take a photo of it and it’s gone. Oh well.

  I’m into ephemeral work, big time. Take it off the pedestal. Eff the galleries, eff advertising, eff that. But it’s a little bit of a contradiction to say that. Because what you do by putting work in the street is advertising yourself. Eventually people are going to find out who you are. And although I do work outside, I happily sell my work to people that want to hang it inside. So, there are some lovely contradictions.

  He smiles.

  I’m a big fan of infiltrating the system. Someone like Kaws. We went to school together and I follow his career. I watched the MTV Video Awards one year because I knew he designed the new moon man. When I saw Justin Timberlake standing in the middle of a Kaws sculpture singing and doing a dance routine, I was like, “Fucking A, this is mind-blowing! He’s totally infiltrated the system!” He’s taken graffiti, which is what he started with, and he’s found every nook and cranny of the culture to stick his shit into. Like a virus. People are like, “Aw, fuck Kaws, he’s a millionaire.” Maybe he is. Who cares? He’s clearly following a path he started twenty years ago.

  With Michael, Shepard Fairey is Shep, Dan Witz, just Dan. He’s been doing a lot of traveling, working in Cabo San Lucas and Belize. On a recent trip to the West Coast “Shep’s team” helped him find all the good spots.

  He takes out his phone to show me pictures of some of his most recent work, a reimagining’s of Manet’s Olympia, another of Caillebotte’s Paris Street; Rainy Day. For the past two decades he has been better known for this:

  I came up with the flower later on and that was kind of an accident. I did a whole wall of imagery and that one really stood out to me. It really leapt off the wall. I made a silk screen of it right away and within hours I had hundreds of prints of different colors. And the next logical step was, well, fuck, I’m going to hang these all over town. I had no idea I’d be doing these twenty years later.

  Eventually I started doing the flowers as a stencil spray as well. In a short period of time I tackled Manhattan pretty well. You couldn’t go a few blocks without seeing my work right on the sidewalk. But I didn’t like the idea that it wasn’t as ephemeral as the paper. So I decided to stick with paper soon after that. It just made more sense for the project—the idea of a flower regrowing, renewing, rebirth, life and death, the cycle of all that.

  I was driving home from work one day and got a message: “Yeah, hi, this is Jody from New York magazine. I love your work and want you on the cover of this week’s magazine. Do you think you could come by Silvercup Studios?”

  I almost drove off the road listening to the voice mail. And I went in the very next morning and I painted—all day long—this giant flower and a couple smaller things, and they were just super supportive. And they invited me back to collaborate a few more times.

  Since then I think New York has become a place that is not particularly welcoming to people who are young, creative, have no money, and want to add to the cultural enrichment of what’s already here. That doesn’t exist anymore. The frequency of street art continues to increase because of the desire of so many people to get some quick fame. To get their work into galleries. It’s become an industry unto itself. A lot of stuff, too, is designed to be successful. You have a PR agent. The more known you get, the more you can afford to have these tools, the more you can afford to travel.

  It’s interesting when value is assigned to it.

  Over the years I’ve had some offers. I’m all ears for stuff. It depends. I’ve listened to a lot of ideas over the years and turned most of it down. The photographer who shot my first New York magazine cover said to me, “This image has all the makings for, like, you could stop working now. Getty will sell it for us in markets around the world forever.” And so he said, “I need your permission.”

  And I said, “I’m not giving it to you.”

  He said, “Listen, just think about it because you’re going to make boatloads of money and you’ll never have to work again.”

  And I said no because of this ambiguity of when people see it. They’ll have an art experience but that art experience will be replaced by a sales pitch. Here’s that Heineken bottle, or here’s that new Apple product, or whatever. And I don’t want that. That’s not what it’s about.


  Someone came up with the idea of launching a satellite into very low orbit and having it fixed over a metropolitan area, say New York, and it would unfurl a web of LED lights so you could then create a logo of your desire that would be equivalent in diameter to a full moon. So how fucked up is this? In the sky—the one space that should be safe to us, that should be completely protected—we’ll put a big fucking logo up there.

  10.

  On my way to Quang Bao’s apartment on the Lower East Side, I turn off Allen Street onto Stanton and see a wall covered by a mural that extols the good times to be had when four friends huddle together to throw back Bushmills. The image has been executed with paint-by-numbers precision. Incidentally, the men depicted are all vaguely thirty-something, vaguely white, vaguely bearded—just like me, and suddenly I’ve arrived at that moment of self-consciousness that Ovid describes as the decent into Hades. I cross the intersection.

  I march north on Clinton Street cum Avenue B, up the middle of the Lower East Side cum East Village known, for some period of time, as Alphabet City, where poverty and violence and art have comingled for decades.

  Quang lives in a two-bedroom apartment just off of Avenue B, on the top floor of a five-floor walk-up. Each flight of stairs is unusually steep, feels longer than the last, and slopes in its own direction. Scaling to the top calls for a moment of solitude in the hall, a chance to steady the breathing before knocking on Quang’s door.

  Art surrounds me as soon as I enter—every wall crowded with canvases and large pieces of paper and slabs of wood covered in spray paint and acrylic and charcoal. A large rectangular birdcage hangs from the wall near the kitchen, housing four conscientious parakeets, who keep their chirping to a calming volume. The second bedroom of the apartment often doubles as Quang’s gallery or incubator called “Second Guest.” If the space is not housing art it is often housing artists; currently there is a painter from Romania installed in the space. Quang, forty-four, is twisting about in his kitchen, heating up noodles while giving the painter advice on subway routes.