Graffiti is moving out of the shadows and into the light, insofar as the police will let it. The turf-tagging traditionally associated with street gangs, and quickly painted over by law enforcement, has evolved into a serious art form with stylized fonts, bold use of color and multi-layered symbolic imagery. Quite often it’s painted over again anyway, but two exhibits in Willimantic and Hartford give graffiti its due, and respect to its artists.
Akus Gallery
The Akus Gallery, in Shafer Hall on the campus of Eastern Connecticut State University in Willimantic, is alive with color. Interim director Roxanne Deojay secured boards to the gallery’s white walls, brought a group of graffiti artists into the gallery and gave them each a canvas.
Jahmane “Jah” West, who has one of his “graffikollages” currently on exhibit at City Lights Gallery in Bridgeport, uses similar imagery in his wall-sized graffiti creation. It mixes raw, choppy color swatches with photographs of women and racially tinged imagery.
He also incorporates a series of words — perspective, scribble, outline, tag, making, Rust-oleum — that evoke graffiti culture. All of the Akus artists use those words, in various permutations, to tie their works together. West said the artists don’t use their real names, going by Dooley-O, Pacer, Geli, E.S. and Revenge. They are members of the Fairfield County-based Die Crew, a loose-knit graffiti group.
Dooley-O’s work is a vivid standout, using bold, sharply delineated sweeps of color, painted over with a calligraphy-like geometric pattern.
Jah is a teacher and artist in residence at Westport Arts Center, but his artistic sensibilities developed in a place that seems half a world away from tony Westport: on the streets of the Bronx.
“In the early ’80s I would ride the train from Connecticut back and forth to New York. There is a lot of graffiti on the streets, intricately thought-out graffiti. Graffiti was the art element of hip-hop culture,” he said. “I was 10. I would see art and not be into it, but seeing graffiti in that environment made me want to do it. It made art more real.”
The exhibit, “Aerosol Evolution,” will be up until April 6. easternct.edu.
Ducks on the Ave.
William Bowden is not an artist. He’s a freelance art historian. When chronicling graffiti he finds in Hartford and thereabouts, the Wallingford photographer has to act fast, because as soon as a piece of street art is seen, the clock is ticking on how long it will be there.
“Graffiti has a very short life span before it’s painted over again,” Bowden said. “I wanted to create an archive for old graffiti. This is the only place it exists anymore.”
Bowden set up a website, graffiti-icons.com. Twenty photographs from that website are on exhibit in an unusual place, Ducks on the Ave., a duckpin bowling alley at 572 Farmington Ave. in Hartford. At the end of March, the exhibit will move a few doors down to Venom Vintage, a vintage-clothing store at 11 Whitney St., where Japanalia used to be.
Bowden first started noticing graffiti when helping a friend with some truck driving, which gave him a high vantage point to see streets and their surroundings. He was struck by the beauty of the artwork, and was sad when it disappeared.
He travels all over the state — Hartford, Milford, Bridgeport, New Haven, Southington — when he knows interesting graffiti is to be seen.
“A lot of people consider this vandalism, but it’s not,” he said. “If they make graffiti in public, it’s because all they want is a place to practice, like any artists. They need to practice a lot. A huge open wall, where else are you going to find one?”
