Urban Artists Fight for Graffiti

  • Graffiti artist Juan Carlos Noria imagines his artwork as a gift to the community. Artwork provided courtesy of JCN at them-art.com

Graffiti has been a part of urban life since ancient times. There’s also a long history of trying to get rid of it. In many North American cities, civic leaders are experimenting with new ways to eradicate graffiti. But as the Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Karen Kelly reports, urban artists are determined to keep it alive:

Transcript

Graffiti has been a part of urban life since ancient times. There’s also a long history of
trying to get rid of it. In many North American cities, civic leaders are experimenting
with new ways to eradicate graffiti. But as the Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Karen
Kelly reports, urban artists are determined to keep it alive:


About twenty artists, most of them men, spread out on either side of a canvas wall set up
in the middle of a parking lot. They wear baggy jeans, baseball caps and gas masks. The
ground is littered with spray paint cans as they splatter color across the canvas.


(sound up)


The artists build on each other’s ideas. Horizontal purple stripes are transformed into an
exotic bird. Pen and ink drawings peek out beneath layers of orange and brown, slowly
disappearing under the paint. This is Ottawa’s first graffiti fest, organized by
local artist Juan Carlos Noria. He arrives by bicycle, wearing splattered jeans and
carrying two backpacks stuffed with spray paint.


“This is our way of giving back to the city true expression and unfortunately I do agree that some of it
is ugly but it’s like a hammer, you know? It’s a tool for building or destroying.”


Noria is a full-time artist who sells oil paintings and sculptures. But his best known work
might be his graffiti. He creates detailed pen and ink drawings on white paper. Then,
late at night, he glues them to downtown buildings.


His drawings depict the plight of humans in the modern world. One shows a man using
one hand to pour coffee into his mouth, as he pounds a hammer with the other.
Another depicts a person surrounded by bubbles representing thought – about money,
heartbreak, and the passage of time.


For Noria, this sort of unexpected art is comforting in a city that prides itself on
cleanliness.


“My living room isn’t this clean, you know? And a lot of these Ottawa streets are super
clean. In an alley that is vacant, it’s almost like a mark that a human being has been there
and I think that’s important, you know?”


But to many other people, graffiti is a sign of crime, decay and danger. That’s prompted
Ottawa to join other North American cities in introducing a graffiti management policy.
The plan includes a special phone line to report graffiti and tougher fines for those who
are caught.


The city estimates it spends about 250 thousand U.S. dollars cleaning up graffiti on city
property every year.


Paul McCann is head of Ottawa’s surface operations office. He says the biggest problem
is tags – initials or names scrawled in marker.


“I’m not talking about the nice graffiti art that a lot of people appreciate but the problem
is the tagging. Some of it is gang related. It’s not in the right place, it is considered
vandalism if you don’t have permission.”


McCann says there’s been a sharp increase in tagging. And it can make residents, and
tourists, feel unsafe. But he draws a distinction between the taggers and the so-called
serious artists.


While graffiti will never be tolerated in places like the parliament buildings, McCann is
looking for areas where graffiti can flourish, such as skateboard parks. It’s a strategy
that’s been used in other cities, including Toronto and Montreal. And it’s something Juan
Carlos Noria is eager to support.


“Graffiti is a movement of the youth. We must embrace it, say it’s not going to go away
so let’s give them spaces to work in and I think that by offering them these spaces, the
older artists will realize these are gifts, so they will in turn speak to the younger artists and
educate them and that’s what it’s all about.”


For Noria, graffiti offers a public venue to vent his frustration about pollution, capitalism,
and the ubiquity of advertising. Not long after the graffiti fest, one of his works
appeared on the wall of an abandoned theatre. It depicts an angel imagining a beautiful
gift as it sends a spray of paint onto the building.


For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, I’m Karen Kelly in Ottawa.

Gardens Become Sculpture Showcase

  • The Frederik Meijer Gardens and Sculpture Park is an outdoor art museum that aims to blend art and nature. This piece is a work by Italian sculptor Arnaldo Pomodoro. Photo courtesy of the Frederik Meijer Gardens and Sculpture Park.

Recently, a new sculpture park opened in the Great Lakes region. This new outdoor art museum exhibits 24 pieces by acclaimed modern sculptors. Eventually, 80 pieces will be on view and the park is expected to become a regional arts destination. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Tamar Charney has a look at how the sculpture park at the Frederik Meijer Gardens in Grand Rapids mixes art and nature:

Transcript

Recently, a new sculpture park opened in the Great Lakes region.
This new outdoor art museum exhibits 24 pieces by acclaimed modern
sculptors. Eventually 80 pieces will be on view and the park is expected
to become a regional arts destination. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s
Tamar Charney has a look at how the sculpture park at the Frederik Meijer
Gardens in Grand Rapids mixes art and nature:


The pieces in the 30 acres sculpture park are spread out amid hills,
paths, and nooks. There’s an area with stone and bronze works from the
early modern masters like Rodin, Lipchitz, and Henry Moore. In a hollow
there’s an enormous red gardening trowel by Claus Oldenburg and Coosje van
Bruggen. And suspended just inches over a pond is a kinetic or moving
piece by George Rickey. Just downstream from the pond are 15 gigantic
ceramic eggs. A blue robin’s egg, a speckled killdeer’s egg… they are all
enlarged versions of eggs laid by birds you can find at the park. It’s a
work by Carolyn Ottmers, a sculptor from Chicago. She says the sculpture
park meshes the visual arts with the wonders of nature.


“I think in the way they have chosen to arrange the sculptures, and
integrate within the park… created this arena for encounters which for
me is a similar experience echoed when you walk through nature.”


As you move through the park you catch a glimpse of a piece here, a
suggestion of a work there through the trees, around the bend, or across the
pond. Officials with the gardens say the collection is the most
significant one in the Midwest. But it’s not your typical sculpture park,
with formal manicured gardens adorned with sculpture.


“The sculpture is not a decoration of a garden.”


Magdalena Abakanowicz is a sculptor from Poland. Her bronze piece called
“Figure on a Trunk” is a headless, shoeless person. It’s hidden in an alcove
made of young trees. Abakanowicz rails against the idea of art decorating
a garden, but she says nature can create the right space in which to see
sculpture.


“Spaces to contemplate, spaces to meditate, spaces in which we are
confronted to our own scale and the scale of the world.”


These are spaces that change with the weather, the time of day and the
season. Joseph Becherer is the sculpture curator for the Frederik Meijer
Gardens and Sculpture Park. He says it’s the natural setting that may just get more
people interested in looking at art.


“I think there are many, many people… the majority of Americans that are
very intimidated by a traditional museum or gallery but there is something
welcoming, inviting and warm about coming to a garden.”


And some of the things on exhibit in the botanical section of the gardens
can help people understand some of the things on exhibit in the sculpture
section. It’s something Italian sculptor Arnoldo Pomodoro is well aware
of. At the gardens, his piece called “Disk in the Form of a Desert Rose”
sits on a small grassy field next to a waterfall. After the dedication
ceremony, he was strutting around, greeting the people admiring his piece
when he was approached by a young boy with his buddies from school in tow.


Child: “Um, they want to know what the sculpture is supposed to be… like… about.”


Pomodoro: “In the gallery down is a real rose of the desert so the inspiration
comes from this rose which is a stone very beautiful.”


Pomodoro encourages the children to go into the conservatory to see a real desert rose
to start understanding and discovering the connections between art and nature,
and sculpture and the environment.


“You go and see it’s an homage to the nature. Ciao.”


Kids: “Ciao.”


In the coming years, more than 50 new sculptures will be added to the Frederik
Meijer Gardens and Sculpture Park in Grand Rapids.


For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, I’m Tamar Charney.

ARTISTS ‘RE-VISION’ THE GREAT LAKES

  • "Revisioning the Great Lakes" is an exhibit of student art created through field research at the University of Michigan. Photo by Tamar Charney.

People who study the natural world often do field research. They go to learn about plants, animals, and the ecosystems we live in. But scientists aren’t the only ones who can make use of time spent studying the outdoors. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Tamar Charney reports:

Transcript

People who study the natural world often do field research. They go to learn about plants, animals, and the ecosystems we live in. But scientists aren’t the only ones who can make use of time spent studying the outdoors. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Tamar Charney reports.


A group of students from the University of Michigan have stopped spreading sand on the floor and hanging sticks from a gallery ceiling to watch a video….


(video sound of slosh slosh on the trawl line a bass)


The tape is of a trip they took…to sail, to camp, to hike, to learn about the aquatic life in the great lakes….


(video sound of phylo arthro arthrabida crustratia (fade under))


…And to do some field research. But these students aren’t scientists…. they’re artists. And they are in the process of putting together an art exhibit.


“This exhibit is based on a semesters worth of investigation that art class has been pursuing.”


Joe Trumpey is a professor of art at the University of Michigan. He also teaches scientific illustration. And for years he’s been taking those students to the dessert, and even the jungle, to learn in the real world — instead of the classroom — about flora and fauna and the cells and structures they draw. Now he’s bringing this same method to a studio art class – to encourage these students to develop a relationship with the ecosystems of the Great Lakes region.


“Like any interpersonal relationship, a friendship, a marriage, anything you need to spend time and communicate with each other and to sit in a studio and think well I can make this all up in my head and its all fine. I’ve seen it in books. I’ve seen the pictures, but it isn’t the same as being out there and feeling the wind and the smell and the elements and everything else that’s associated with a particular environment.”


But they did more than just experience the land. Gerry Mull is a graduate student in Fine Arts and a member of the class.


“We explored a lot of environmental issues around the Great Lakes, talked to sea grant people and people doing different kinds of about ecological problems with the Great Lakes.


It was only after learning about fisheries, the food chain, the history of the Lake Michigan sand dunes, the economic impact of Great Lakes shipping, and the plants and animals here that the students got down to the business of creating art out of what they learned.


Gerry Moll has hung long pieces of what looks like brown grass from the ceiling. 24 big primitive forms that resemble sturgeon hover over sand he’s spread out on the floor. He says he hopes his piece creates a longing in the people that see it for the huge number of these fish that used to swim in this region.


“A kind of longing, a dream, a vision of something better, of more sturgeon in the Great Lakes, of what its like and how important it is to have these other beings in our lives. And a lot of fields do that but I think art does it in a special way.”


What these students are doing falls loosely under the category of ecological art — there’s a number of branches of this field – There are artists who actually restore the environment – creating fish habitats or cleaning up a Brownfield as their art. Then there are artists like Gerry Mull who are trying to rekindle our concern for nature. The University of Michigan is in the process of developing an art curriculum that focuses on the environment. And the University of Michigan isn’t alone. Environmental issues are popping up in arts schools and art classes of all levels. Don Krug is a professor of art education at Ohio State University.


“I think it is being taught more and more in higher education and I think it finds its way into art education in public schools in terms of units of study but there is a growing interest and I think if you look at universities throughout the United States there are more and more programs addressing these issues.”


Krug along with the Getty Museum has even developed on-line curriculum materials to help teachers get their students involved in creating art that draws on environmental and ecological issues. University of Michigan Art Professor Joe Trumpey says it only makes sense that art would be addressing something as fundamental as the health of our planet.


“The environment is something that all of humankind shares. Contemporary North American Society has moved away from family farms and is spending time outdoors. Long term relationships outdoors mean a weekend here and a weekend there I don’t think is the same sort of relationship as we had 100 years ago. So, for me, to build work that highlights that, and maybe make it become more into the central focus of peoples lives and understanding about where their food comes from and the relationship between them, and the animals, the plants, the land and the air becomes very important.”


And for artists to create meaningful art about the natural world, Joe Trumpey says they are going to have to immerse themselves like a scientist in the field. Studying the ecosystems around us through paint, clay, charcoal, and the other tools of the artist. For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, I’m Tamar Charney.

Artists Ply the Waters

  • “Fritz Seegers and Mary Brodbeck in front of 'Alwita.’ They’ ll sail the wooden boat around Lake Superior this summer.”

This month a rotating group of artists begin circumnavigating Lake Superior in a sailboat. The artists will be painting, photographing, and making sketches of their journey. They’ll also be collecting stories to share with school children after their return. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Tamar Charney caught up with some of the artists before they left: