FLEDGLING SOUTHEAST Portland gallery the Railyard had big plans for their July 4 show, Special Delivery: Two dozen Bay Area artists created “street-art inspired” pieces on canvasses, panels, and straight on the walls of their warehouse gallery. But while the opening brought a large crowd to the former brewing building on SE 23rd and Holgate, it also brought the attention of Portland Police Bureau’s graffiti abatement team. Alarmed that the art show could be linked to illegal graffiti citywide, several police officers attended the opening and worked with the Railyard’s landlord to evict the gallery last week.
The incident illustrates a conflict that Portland, and cities across the country, are dealing with: Mainstream art communities increasingly view some graffiti as modern art, but outside of gallery walls, all graffiti is still a crime.
On the morning of Tuesday, August 23, gallery owner Todd Durham says Railyard’s landlord, the city’s two graffiti abatement officers, and a locksmith showed up at the warehouse, told Durham his lease was moot, and gave the five businesses that share the space a week to move out.
“Our officers became aware that this warehouse and those that rented it hosted prolific taggers from California to come to Portland,” writes Portland Police Bureau spokesman Lieutenant Robert King, via email. “They tagged inside and outside the warehouse and our officers believe tagged at other locations around the city.”
“They specifically kicked us out because they didn’t like our art,” says Durham, who says that the intention of the show was in part to kickstart a “mural district” around the industrial area.
Police also targeted a sister gallery hosting a show by one of the Special Delivery artists, Chris Moon.
Serre Murphy, owner of Samo Lives gallery on SE 39th and Gladstone, says graffiti abatement police officer Anthony Zanetti showed up to Moon’s July 4 art opening and said the gallery would be fined $500 for a large painting on its outer wall. Murphy admits he didn’t go through the proper city process to get the painting approved, but contests the idea that it’s bad for the neighborhood.
“We haven’t done any tagging. All we’ve done is beautiful artwork. Some people may not like it, but it’s beautiful artwork,” says Murphy, who adds that he is planning to paint over the mural to stay out of trouble with the police.
Portland has taken an increasingly hard line against graffiti in recent years. In 2007, the city council passed a rule requiring stores to record the name and identification of every person who purchases spray paint. This year, the city put $409,000 in one-time funding into its graffiti abatement program and increased the police’s graffiti squad from one officer to two. At the time of the Special Delivery show, the neighborhood around the Railyard was under police watch as a graffiti “hot spot.”
The Office of Neighborhood Involvement and the police target graffiti because they believe it could be connected to gangs and also contributes to other, more serious crimes in areas that look uncared for.
Portland’s crime map database doesn’t separate out graffiti from other vandalism crimes, but Inner Southeast Portland has the highest reports of vandalism of any neighborhood in the city, with 556 incidents so far this year.
Railyard neighbor and furniture maker Brian Gualtieri says there has been graffiti on the former brewery building for years.
“The last time the landlord got graffiti removed was five years ago,” says Gualtieri.
Durham says the gallery did paint on the outside of the building when they moved in, but they consider the works to be murals meant to rebuff graffiti writers who tag the warehouse’s roof.
“The cops think we’re trying to promote graffiti. That’s the opposite of what we’re trying to do,” says Durham.
The Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art dealt with similar issues this summer as it hosted the most popular show in its history, Art in the Streets. The street art showcase attracted over 201,000 museumgoers, but also the ire of LA police, who say the show led to an uptick in graffiti
Portland State University professor Hunter Shobe says Portland’s zero tolerance approach to graffiti is typical of American cities, though graffiti is becoming increasingly viewed as legitimate art. Street artist Shepard Fairey, for example, designed Barack Obama’s most iconic campaign poster.
“On the one hand there seems to be increased attention on trying to crack down on this,” says Shobe. “But you see increased acceptance of street art within the art world and more gallery shows.”
Tagging gangs coming up all the way from CA just to vandalize in Portland? This logic right here shows you just how fucking stupid these cops are.
Defacing public or private property without permission is a crime no matter how artful someone believes it to be. If you keep it in a gallery more power to you; but as soon as it’s outside the gallery on something that isn’t yours you deserve to be arrested, prosecuted, and responsible for the damages. Pretty simple concept eh?
I consider myself to be a “Graffiti” artist, however, I keep my art on skateboard decks, canvasses, and sheet metal. I am angered and saddened by the fact that the Railyard gallery’s July 4 show, Special Delivery, got the gallery a one-way ticket out of their warehouse space. It absolutely astonishes me that, instead of fighting graffiti as it is on the STREETS, these officers had nothing better to do than target a publicized event, housed WITHIN a building, and accuse the artists and gallery owners of being involved in illegal art done elsewhere on public property. I ask: WHERE IS THE PROOF???? Where are the photographs backing up the link between the artists and the illegal pieces???
It is high time for illegal street art, and MODERN GRAFFITI-STYLED art to be defined and divided. Modern art changes, grows, developes, ebbs, and flows. Police Bureaus nation-wide need to accept the fact that illegal graffiti, gang-related or otherwise, is what they have a right to fight against, NOT Graffiti-Inspired art shown in a gallery. Galleries are for artistic expression and dissemination, and regardless of the art style, it is done legally and does not deface public property. At most, they should have fined the gallery for the piece on the outside walls, and moved along. There are much more stringent issues that the Police could be focusing on, rather than squashing a form of artistic expression and freedom of speech
Is the gallery responsible for the actions of an artist outside of the gallery? What if we showed an artists work and they left the gallery and shoplifted? Should I be kicked out of the building? We did not do anything wrong, but we were targeted by the graffiti abatement hit squad …Why?….because of a legal art show. They did not like the art…..These artists all had permission to paint on my walls inside the building and above my roll-up door. If some one illegally painted elsewhere find them. Why would the graffiti squad be on site to serve an illegal eviction? They made a major mistake. They harassed our landlord with calls weekly. Saying she was going to be fined for any graffiti in the city if she doesn’t kick us out. We were then told the “city” wants our walls to be painted …inside… the building??? This doesn’t even make sense………
So I guess this is all ok. No this country has turned most things upside down and backwards these days. America has awakened and this shit won’t last much longer. The cigerett Nazis, the cell phone Nazis, wildlife inviromental Nazis, you don’t speeks up until they come after you. The problem as history shows is nobody speaks up until they come after you, the only thing is nobody is left to help you because they are all gone and you didn’t stand up to help them, freedom disapears for us all when you let them take it away from a few, and few more, and a few more, pretty soon they come for you
@ #5, its a bloody good thing there are no spelling Nazi’s:)
@ #6, It’s a bloody good thing there are no grammar Nazis, either. 😉
yes, if they can get away with this, it is like saying a landlord has grounds to evict anyone for doing something illegal outside his or her home. thats fucking scary and ridiculous. what if bob runs a red light? now he is also homeless because he broke the law out on the street. is that what its going to come to? i mean really, think how stupid that sounds, but if there are no lines drawn then when is it going to stop?
It won’t stop. There will be no lines drawn. It will be a gradual slope towards a police-state.
^^ We already live in a police-state. Wake up people
Lucien Lionel Chenier Charged With Spray Painting His Name On Grand Canyon
http://www.nationalparkstraveler.com/2011/…
Graffitti art and tagging are two different animals, there needs to be more legit locations for the art part.
The more we support murals, the more effort, love, time and attention muralists can devote to their pieces, resulting in large-format works of art (witness SE 8th & Ankeny). As an added benefit, when artists generally have access to walls, they tend to respect those few spaces we declare off-limits (witness Buenos Aires and San Francisco).
Repression results in all spaces being covered with hurried ugly scrawls wherever taggers think they can get away with it, breaking and entering, injuries from the inevitable accidents (falls, dropping things on others), and diversion of resources from addressing actual harms. The fact that the city seems more concerned with there being nothing interesting painted on a bridge than on making sure no one has to seek shelter from the elements under that same bridge puts our priorities in a very shameful light, indeed.
Since we will have graffiti in any case, it seems obvious that the best course is the one that allows everyone to have what they need. Artists get space to create, the general public gets stimulating art, and landholders get respect for their property. Conversely, it seems obviously stupid to spend time/money on making the problem worse.
This is some petition-worthy stuff right here. If PPD can’t sufficiently link the illegal graffiti to the perfectly legal art-show inside, they have no right to chase these tenants out of their building. I wonder if there’s a pro bono attorney who would be willing to take this matter to court. This sets a really shitty precedent and a bad example for a city that thrives on art. I don’t like to think about where this might go in future.
Is this enough of a legal issue for the ACLU to get involved?
Dogs pee to mark their territory. Humans alter a mundane environment to make you look again and form a second opinion of what you would otherwise have passed up. Both may be illegal but the latter is beneficial to society. To bad for the police who are charged with upholding the law because it only takes a couple of seconds to pee, but art can take hours.
People are too attached to surfaces… everything in life is temporary. Street art, or as I like to call it, city beautification, is one way of celebrating the imperminance of life. At least that’s what my eyes are doing when I stuble upon clever graffiti. I would recommend watching “Next: A Primer in Urban Painting” if you would like to see a fresh perspective on this. This quote by Mr. Leary at the beginning of the film gave me a small orgasm:
“The twenty first century is going to be global –
it’s going to break down all the national
and geographic borders.
And it’s going to be timeless,
in the sense of the enormous spectrum
of information that the world will be
sharing.
We are also going to discover our youth
in the twenty-first century.
When I say it’s going to be global and timeless, I mean that it’s going to be
sending out signals
that will be recognized
by anyone on the planet earth right now,
and also for those who think back
to the beginning of cave art
when young Paleoliths
were putting art on walls”
– Timothy Leary
BTW the “Art in the Streets” show @MOCA was frieking amazing! I think I only blinked a few times. It was quite interactive, with lots of videos, history, and relics related to street art. There was a huge turnout…
I guess this makes Estacada GRAFITTI CAPITAL OF THE WORLD!
Fascist cops being fascists, nothing new here, though it’s still revolting and they’re doing this while being paid with our tax dollars. Great!