"In 'Phantom Sightings,' the artists are primarily from Southern California, Texas, and New York," Cochran says. "I felt very strongly there should be a platform for local artists. That was initially when I started talking to Hector. This work, I certainly hope it will encourage especially younger people to come in and see the museum in a different way."
Cochran said she appreciated the "rawness" and "energy" of the work, particularly a piece by Ruiz, DOSE, and two other local artists, Lalo Cota and Mykil ZEPata, which serves as a sort of allegory of Mexican migration across the brutal Sonoran Desert. In it, coyotes, the sun, religion, and capitalism conspire against indigenous people and the undocumented.
Jamie Peachey
Works in progress by Ruiz and DOSE.
Stephen Lemons
DOSEs homage to Keith Haring at Scottsdales Bentley Gallery in February of this year.
Related Content
More About
"As soon as I saw it, I knew that I would love to have it [for the show]," Cochran enthused. She said she had no reservations about using art that included a graffiti artist who expresses himself illegally on the street. She also pointed out that the museum had featured graffiti once before, in the 2007 exhibit, Graffiti Art in Fashion.
"I think those who only see graffiti art as illegal probably have a very traditional mindset," she said. "That's been superseded by the way in which contemporary culture has moved forward. If you look at the influence of it on design, on music, it's there. We can stick our heads in the sand and say this is all bad, all illegal, but I don't think that's a particularly progressive way of looking at it."
"Locals Only" continues at the Phoenix Art Museum through October 25. Then the Ruiz-DOSE collaboration will get another boost from a show that Bentley Calverley's planning for early November. It will take place at both her Scottsdale location and at Bentley Projects in downtown Phoenix.
With so much attention, DOSE may be poised for acceptance by the art establishment and collectors, but is Phoenix ready for a crossover artist who continues to engage in illegal graffiti?
It's not that Phoenix lacks writers who've obtained fame. Box-car graffiti artist KAPER is known by graf-heads nationally for his work. Roger Gastman's 2006 art book Freight Train Graffiti featured KAPER, among the many spray-can immortals of the genre. (KAPER was the subject of a 2002 New Times cover story, "America's Ogre of Train Bombing," by Brendan Joel Kelley.)
And then there's Phoenix's El Mac, whose aerosol art can be painfully beautiful and channels the talents of Old World masters. The July 12, 2007 cover of LA Weekly was a photo of a wall-size image of the Buddha on which Mac collaborated with L.A. artist RETNA. The photo illustrated a story about L.A.'s successful Seventh Letter Crew, of which El Mac's a member. He has murals up, mostly on legal walls around Phoenix, and he travels internationally to showcase his art, from Barcelona to Mexico City. El Mac does any non-legal stuff mostly out of town.
Not so with DOSE, for whom Phoenix is a canvas. Also, unlike El Mac, DOSE's work is brutal and uncompromising in its street aesthetic. In other words, it's the sort of graffiti that Graffiti Busters loves to buff.
William Hogans, who heads Graffiti Busters, says the program costs Phoenix taxpayers $2.1 million annually. During the 2007-08 fiscal year, 95,000 sites in Phoenix were painted over or buffed. And Hogans claims that Graffiti Busters has found that even legal walls, such as those at Miranda's Custom Cars and at graffiti alley at 18th Street and McDowell, increase the prevalence of graffiti elsewhere, rather than stifle it.
He says the price to the public of graffiti is far higher when the costs to private businesses and utilities, such as the Salt River Project, are included. Added up, Hogans claims, graffiti costs the local public $6 million annually.
"In addition, we find by talking to the Realtors," states Hogans, "that graffiti, once applied to someone's property, can reduce that property value 15 to 20 percent. It deters individuals who want to be investors in that community from investing."
Hogans cites an emotional component to graffiti, as well. Residents, he says, sometimes worry that graffiti suggests gang activity or that they're being targeted, even though it's usually just a writer getting his name up.
On the law enforcement side, the Phoenix Police Department has a five-cop graffiti detail. Three of the officers work graffiti full time, while the other two incorporate catching graffiti writers into other duties. Detective Diane Rowe says 500 people — most of whom were juveniles — were arrested last year for doing graffiti.
Rowe estimated that about 10 percent of those arrests were directly related to gang activity. About 25 percent were "tag-bangers," who sometimes pull a gun or a knife to defend their turf. The remaining 65 percent were considered non-violent.
"They're just out there to show their art, or what they believe is their art," said Rowe. "Some are artistic. That's probably about 5 percent of the stuff we see."
Neither Hogans nor Rowe were familiar with DOSE, but Rowe said she picked up a few hits on DOSE on the online database of graffiti images maintained by Graffiti Busters. (The two agencies share information on graffiti vandals.)