street museum (shepherd got privilege)

Street Museum : Shepherd Fairey's work alongside Pittsburgh artists' wheatpastes, 14th & E. Carson St. (Beehive corner) South Side

I’ve enjoyed finding Shepherd Fairey’s work in its tapestried bits and pieces around Pittsburgh. They are familiar friends, these images and icons. When I was an undergrad in Wisconsin in the 90′s we talked about the whole, send away for the Obey the Giant stickers and things and how genius it was. Someone had stuck one to either a parking sign or something near the hot glass studio. I looked at it alot when I sat outside, smoking, cooling off. He got other people to spread his imagery for him. That’s cool.

Street Museum : check Fairey's note at back of the streetlight

It is beautiful. Like the pretty boy who gets chicks easy and never develops his character … I kiss those pictures when I find them, in my imagination. But I liked it better in the museum I saw it in, in Boston, last year. Now Mr. Fairey’s glossy varnished gloriousness fans out with its peacock-perfectness against the red brickwork of Pittsburgh’s south side. I miss the stretcher bars; I want to see it as painting, for in its perfectness the screenprints have become paintings.

I’m most interested in the local work, the fresh stuff I get to see evolve and change day by day, moving and changing as much as I am as I move around the city. Discovering their vocabulary as they discover it, as they argue with landlords and others for their patch of canvas.

Shepherd got privilege. His work is still here, is still crisp and clear and clean, unbothered. This nags at me, rubs up against watching Ladyboy‘s wheatpastes degrade and be pulled down and erased. I liked those strange flying crystals and characters he made! Whoever’s doing the ASVP images are making fun straight-up re-appropriated screened images.

I truly miss Juicy’s angels, those spraypainted stencils, little sticker things I found ’round Squirrel Hill & other bits of the east end. Reves got it right every once in a while but worked streets that I didn’t walk so often. Rumor has it KIDS died; at least one other street artist now works Whole Foods.

I have my suspicions who’s pasting ASVP but hold my tongue and enjoy watching them pop up and be torn down.

Street Museum : local wheatpastes

Shepherd made this a street museum. He’s taken and defined the space; everyone else has responded to his shape. There are a few marks, if you look close, on his stuff. The ASVP is hung square right up against. Right museum-like. And it hasn’t been disturbed.

Street Museum : the image I'm actually interested in

This crazy thing, this misprinted face wheatpasted onto the electrics box is the most compelling image for me. Caught on its way to disappearing, the image barely made it to the paper to begin with. And what about the painted over sticker to its right?

Below, Google Maps gives us our gallery prior-to. I think this was shot in the summer of 2009; at least, that’s Google’s copyright hangin’ in the screenshot for timing’s purposes. You’ll notice, too, something was erased from that transformer box I like so much. That’s the way it is here, ordinarily, for the locals. Shepherd got privilege. Don’t think I didn’t notice.