DAN WITZ WILL INSTALL 15 TO 20 OF HIS SMALL WORKS, SUCH AS THIS ONE IN DETROIT, ON EUGENE WALLS.
and Gallery at 411 West Fourth Avenue shows a huge
battle between tigers and a dragon in a sea of red. It also
has the distinction of being the first to be vandalized
by another tagger. Hua completed his work last month.
Within days it was defaced, or perhaps complemented,
by a late-night spray painter who wrote on the mural; it’s
since been repaired.
The list of commissioned artists also includes local
muralist ILA ROSE . Having seen an announcement of
the project, she demanded from the Eugene Walls steering
committee to know why local artists weren’t included. “I
was kind of disappointed in the lack of local involvement,”
she says. “It would be a really good opportunity for us to
share our work with the visiting artists.”
A bit to her surprise, Rose — whose work has more a
New Age than a guerilla esthetic — was invited to create
her own mural for the project. Rose has done just one
previous mural, on Blair Boulevard between Fifth and
Sixth Avenues. For the Eugene Walls project, she proposes
a large image of a woman with medicinal plants — a
“healer,” she says — along with owl and snake imagery.
Then came a bump. The whole surface of the
2,300-square-foot wall she was initially assigned to paint
was corrugated steel, a difficult surface on which to work
for a two-dimensional image. “I’m just going to approach
it as if it were a flat wall and hope it works out,” she said.
“I said, ‘You’re giving me a really challenging wall.’ They
said, ‘Good luck.’”
Late Tuesday, though, the project decided to give her
a different — and flatter — wall to paint on, also in the
Whiteaker neighborhood.
Eugene Walls will cost the city about $56,000, the city
says, with most of the money going for transportation and
supplies for the artists; funds will come from the Cultural
Services Division and the city parking fund.
Another $20,000 has been raised in donations from
In his four decades of work
as a street artist — Dan Witz
turns 60 this fall — he has
encountered police numerous
times but has never been
arrested. That’s in part
because he realized early on
it was safer to get right
in and right out. It’s also
because he’s an older white
guy and benefits, as he notes,
from profiling.
businesses supplying wall space as blank canvases and
from other donors. Securing enough walls hasn’t been
easy, as the city requires a five-year commitment from
the building owner to maintain the art. That caused one
landlord who had initially agreed to a mural to drop out
of the project.
It also shines the harsh light of irony on a project trying
to institutionalize the raw energy of urban street art on
the walls of a quiet Northwestern town. Marquez revels in
the contradiction. “We’re convincing these artists to come
here and sign our five-page legal documents!” he says.
There are also wilder possibilities. Some of the
artists involved with the Oregon International Sculpture
Symposium partied pretty hard while they were here.
Asked a few years ago about his experience in Eugene,
sculptor John Chamberlain laughed that he couldn’t
remember. “I drank my share and your share and a few
other people’s shares that summer,” he said.
Police were called out one night when Chamberlain, a
friend of Andy Warhol, showed a pornographic film he’d
made as his formal artist presentation at City Hall. (The
cops declined to stop the show.)
Marquez just smiles at the possibilities for turning a
pack of urban street artists loose on the streets of Eugene.
“There is a little bit of irony here,” he says.
Here are some events connected to Eugene Walls:
Eugene Walls kicks off informally on Sunday, July 30,
with Sunday Streets, the city’s occasional celebration of
public space, when downtown streets will be closed off to
traffic from noon to 4 pm.
An artist reception, with the international and local
artists from the mural project, will run from 6:30 to 8:30
pm Wednesday, Aug. 2, at the Jordan Schnitzer Museum
of Art on the UO campus.
Finally, Lane Arts Council’s First Friday ArtWalk
will feature a walking tour of murals starting at 5:30
pm Friday, Aug. 4. Guided by Paul Godin of the mural
project, the tour begins at the corner of West Broadway
and Charnelton Street and will feature short talks by
participating artists.
The intersection of West Broadway and Charnelton Street
will be closed that evening for two concerts. Tony Glausi and
band will play from 6 to 7:30 pm, and Portland-based Chanti
Darling will play from 8 to 10 pm. ■
eugeneweekly.com • July 20, 2017
13