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
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