Graffiti at the children's musem - now you see, now you don't.
This was no child's play with crayons.
This was genuine, unsolicited graffiti, painted in the darkness of the night on the side of a building belonging to the Greensboro Children's Museum on Church Street downtown.
A "crew," as police call graffiti spreaders, must have worked up a sweat posting three letters in white paint that appeared to be "BTH."
They had to climb the roof of one building, then elevate themselves to reach the wall of a higher connecting building.
Both buildings are on a back street behind the museum's main building.
"It was far from primitive," museum director Tim Goetz says. "Someone put a lot of time into it."
Officer Tim Tepedino, the Greensboro police officer who tracks graffiti painters and who occasionally catches them in the act, says crews seek out places to make their esoteric work obvious.
The museum graffiti could be seen from the platforms next to the railroad tracks behind the Galyon Depot, more than six blocks away. It was easily visible from cars going north on Church Street.
Goetz got no amusement out of the defacing, but he is delighted that despite the large size letters, few people noticed.
Two of his staff members shook their heads Tuesday when he asked if they had seen the letters. They didn't know what he was talking about. He says he received only one call and that was from a reporter.
So, he says, if it was attention the graffiti crew was after, they failed.
Goetz is not delighted, however, about having had to pay someone to come obliterate the letters with black paint. The letters appeared on the morning of the Christmas Parade Dec. 10 - when thousands would be lined up along Church - and were gone by last week.
A city ordinance requires that property owners remove graffiti within 18 days. If not, the city will do the removing and bill the owner the costs.
While gangs sometime use graffiti to signal territory and to tell other gangs to stay away, officer Tepedino doesn't believe the museum letters were gang work.
He says it was probably just a crew of kids looking for something to paint. He defines kids in a crew as 16 to 29 years old. The older members teach the younger ones how to do it.
He says crews nearly always do their work before dawn.
That would seem to indicate they are committed, if they get up that early.
"No, they don't get up early," Tepedino declares, "They've stayed up all night."
He says if the lettering makes no sense to the public, there's a reason.
"The crews are looking for something that no one else has," he says. "They want it to be unique."
Why don't these people use their artistic skills and do art for pay? There's no money in graffiti.
"They aren't artists," Tepedino responds. "That's one of the biggest misconceptions about graffiti - that it's art. It's not art. It's vandalism."
Comments (1)
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Maybe graffiti artists don't do their work for money in traditionally legitimate mediums because there isn't any money in art in general. Maybe they do it for the love and don't care about the money.
And in response to Mr. Tepedino, its both art and vandalism. It is art whether its on a canvas or the side of the building, the only thing that makes it vandalism is a criminal code outlawing the practice. If cities really want to avoid the costs of graffiti removal, as well as the danger of "gang tags" which as far as I can tell are more of a law-enforcement boogeyman than a legitimate problem, then they should create public access walls for displaying this kind of work.
Posted on January 17, 2006 5:31 PM