Director's Notes: 213 - Murals

In the mid ‘00s, I was walking from the 2/3 station to a friend’s apartment in Flatbush, Brooklyn. I passed several buildings that had been tagged many times over. The walls of these stores and brownstones had patchworks of colorful initials and phrases. The kind of stuff that had been whitewashed off the buildings in Williamsburg and Astoria and Park Slope.

It’s interesting the way we value street art. Or art in general. We like our art to be in the right place at the right time. Art is supposed to match its surroundings, to accentuate them. And when that art has a public face, not behind the walls of a home or museum, we expect it to be pleasant, to reflect our community pride.

But I think someone’s name in graffiti is an expression of community pride. It’s not to say I appreciate all graffiti. It’s only to say that I appreciate it ubiquity in an urban area. I appreciate it on the sides of shipping crates I see on freight trains. But if someone came to my very rural house and spray painted their name onto my wood siding, I’d probably be a bit annoyed.

Let’s flip it around now, though. Public art isn’t just about the community’s appreciation of the artist, though. It’s also about the artist’s appreciation of the community. We paint what we love, even if that love isn’t purely romanticized. Deep down there’s a love of those city buildings an artist must have to spend their time and resources on tagging them.

So back to Flatbush in the mid-00s. I noticed that amidst the brownstones, the brick walkups, and the small shops and bodegas, there was a condo building. It looked a few years old - still very new relative to the neighborhood, but old enough to look lived-in. It was 4 stories tall with big picture windows facing the street, spacious patio decks, and what looked to be a roof garden/patio sort of deal. This condo had a huge, light gray wall unattached to any building.

A blank canvas for any street artist to do their work. And some had. But the stuff on that condo wall was low-level beginner shit. Someone spray painted their initials in red. No outline. No fancy script. Just a plain old “J.M.” in normal print. Someone else had drawn a frowny face. But again nothing more interesting that what you or I could do.

And it occurred to me that the street artists didn’t want their art on that building. THAT building did not belong here. Many decades from now, it might. But right now, it does not. The only people who thought to put any art on it were probably just kids with a spray can, not actual street artists. Not anyone with a need for visual expression, with a true love for how art and community go together.

-Jeffrey Cranor
Sept 1, 2022