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About Street roots. (Portland, OR) 1998-current | View Entire Issue (Sept. 8, 2017)
Street Roots September 8-14, 2017 News Page 5 STICKERS, fro m page 4 and now nearly everyone has an Instagram account. Skam has more than 18,000 followers on nstagram, taking the lead among Portland paste-up artists. He and Kitska gave Street Roots a tour of their home studio and let us tag along as they stickered Northeast Alberta Street on a recent August night. They are both in their 30s and hold professional day jobs. They asked , we not reveal their real names or certain personal details, given the illegality of their artwork. As we chatted in the couple’s living room, Skam was busy cutting out Mike Pence and Donald Trump stickers with scissors. They’re intricately stenciled and silkscreen- printed zombie heads with upside-down crosses on their foreheads - a throwback to the religious zealots he grew up around in small-town North Dakota. I ve been labeled as a political whore artist,” he said, “or political gore.” It s easy to see this hobby has become a lifestyle for Skam and Kitska. In a corner of their house by their kitchen, dozens of large vinyl rolls are propped against the wall, all fetched from dumpsters behind signage stores and purchased at Scrap PDX, a nonprofit that sells reused materials for arts and crafts. Freshly printed stickers cover a makeshift table that spreads across the length of their living room, and an eclectic collection of art covers nearly every inch of their walls. The couple enjoy cutting stickers out of the vinyl sheets Skam has printed as they sit together watching horror movies or documentaries. Sometimes they go on “sticker dates,” which usually entail bar hopping and sticker bombing along the way. In their studio, located in the garage, file cabinets full of stencils, a full silk-screening setup, shelf upon shelf of spray paint cans and other artist materials pack the space. Hand-drawn characters, stickers and signatures left behind by dozens of visiting and local street artists decorate every surfnco Skam has been creating art since he was a teenager, taking classes in junior high and later creating abstract paintings with ice and requires multiple trips downtown to drop off paperwork and pick up signage. You can’t apply for the permit online. And while the current fee is $50, in the past it’s been more than $1,000, making it a barrier to many artists. Portland also lacks any sort of “free wall,” Conklin said. These are designated areas where street artists are allowed to practice their craft without fear of prosecution. Most larger cities offer these legal graffiti areas to artists, although they require resources for monitoring. There are seven such walls in the Seattle area, for example, according to online legal graffiti wall locator legal-walls.net. Another factor was Portland Police Bureau’s graffiti abatement squad. The bureau had dedicated two full-time officers to investigating graffiti artists. They built felony cases, kicked down doors and made P H O T O B Y E M IL Y G R E E N arrests. Skam creates a Donald Trump zombie poster in his home studio, which he shares with Kitska. One of the two graffiti investigators, Officer Anthony Zanetti, penned a letter to Mr. Say, who turned in his stickers for a Portland City Council in 2012 that read: of female paste-up artists, covering their tattoo gun awhile back. “The most significant sign of our success stickers and posters with misogynistic has been the gradual decrease in graffiti But Skam has been a driving force behind messaging. It’s no wonder he’s been cast written by our embedded, ‘old school’ Portland’s rise in sticker fame, although you out from the community. ‘graffiti’ vandals and their ‘crews.’ The won’t hear it from him; he’s quick to credit Graffiti artists are also known to tag over veteran writers that inspired a new crop of the entire community with putting Portland paste-ups. Some see stickers up and coming ‘taggers’ over the on the map. and posters as a lower art last six years, have dwindled over He and fellow artist Rx Skulls were the form because they believe the last eight months due to ONLINE backbone behind the Sticker Nerds shows, it’s less risky to quickly slap arrests and prosecutions. The For links to the starting in Salem in 2010, and then in up a poster than it is to to n e o f t h e g ra ffiti s c e n e h e r e in social media pages create art with paint. Today, Portland in 2011 and 2014. Artists from P o r tla n d is m u c h m o r e r e s e r v e d , of all artists how ever, th e r e a re few around the world sent in thousands of w ith m a n y w r ite r s in t h e stic k e rs fo r th e s e w ell-atten d ed ev en ts. “Skam really p u sh e d th e sc e n e q u ite early in te r m s of m ak in g h is ow n stic k e rs an d doing all that hand-cut, wood-cut block printing,” Conklin said. “Rx Skulls started after him, but Rx has been an amazing community resource. He is really highly skilled with the way he does his vinyl printouts and has some amazing machinery. He quit a really great job to do this full time, now that he has so many other artists that want to use his (printing) services. He has quite a production going on - like, worldwide.” Rx Skulls is known for - you guessed it - skull designs. His friends say he found sticker-making therapeutic after a battle with brain cancer. He also has an online snow. store, complete with patches, pins, But then he found out about culture bandanas and stickers. jamming, and he was hooked. Culture Other prominent Portland paste-up jamming is art used to send, typically, an artists worth checking out include Voxx anti-consumer message. It can take the form Romana, Dead Red, Wokeface, of a logo parody or a spin on a corporate Kristadaggermouth, Satan’s Spawn and catch phrase. Dr. Scott, just to name a few. You can find He picked up a book on culture jamming all of them on Instagram. and discovered that some artists were using stencils to spray their art on sidewalks and hile stickers can be found all over the sides of buildings. It inspired him to Portland, several specific walls around figure out how to make his own stencils. the city have become magnets for pasted-up “I had more success with putting my stuff poster art, such as the wall near Northeast on the streets than I ever did in a gallery,” 17th Avenue and Alberta Street, behind the W he said. And doing so has grown his brand. He sells T-shirts and hoodies online, along with stickers and posters. Bacon Skateboards recently began featuring his work on four of their boards, and a Los Angeles production company is considering Skam and Kitska for a paid reality TV show or documentary, to be determined at a later Skam moved to Portland in 2007, when there were only about three paste-up artists plastering the town - him, Nasty Nate an Alberta Free Hutch, or on the north-facing side of Interurban, a bar on Mississippi Avenue. These walls are often the staging grounds for ongoing feuds among street artists, with layers upon layers of posters, stickers and spray paint covering up previous layers of the same. Skam’s anti-Trump and Pence effigies have become the target of a few so-called alt- righters who keep covering up or otherwise destroying his work, he said. Another tagger regularly targets the work P o rtla n d graffiti a rtis ts w ho have d ev elo p ed th e ir a r t b ey o n d r u d im e n ta ry tagging. T h e re a re se v era l re a s o n s mentioned in this article, go to news.streetroots.org/ stickerart. for this stagnation in Portland’s graffiti scene and the rise of stickers, stencils and posters in its place. Conklin’s organization, the Portland Street Art Alliance, is a nonprofit that began as an advocacy group in 2012 to help artists understand Portland’s restrictive mural laws. In most cities, all artists need to do to legally paint a mural is get the property owner’s permission, but in Portland they need a permit. The permit process is lengthy and arduous and c o m m u n ity d is tr u s tfu l o f e a c h other and fearful of arrest.” P o r tla n d C ity Council had also cracked down on graffiti by passing a series of anti-graffiti measures still in place today, including a law requiring stores that sell spray paint or paint pens to check identification and record the names of anyone who purchases those items. “That urge to put art into the street is going to be there whether we like it or not. It’s always been there throughout civilization, so once you start repressing one, something else is going to come up. I think that really pushed the sticker scene up and away,” Conklin said. “And then of course our weather. When it’s wet, you can’t paint.” Skam said he’d heard he was on the graffiti officers’ radar a few years ago but never got busted. Anytime he’s had a run-in with police since, he’s been able to talk his way out of a citation. Today, Portland’s street artists don’t have too much to fear. Sgt. Chris Burley, a Portland police spokesperson, said the Graffiti Investigation Unit has not operated since 2015 due to staffing shortages. “The Police Bureau at this time does not track taggers, tagger crews or people posting stickers unless there exists an extraordinary reason to do so,” Burley said in an email. Because many sticker artists sell their stickers online or trade them with artists in other parts of the world, authorities would a r t by k it s k a See STICKERS, page 11 ' j
