Monsters of Folk was coming to the Orpheum Theatre last fall, but Charlie Levy didn't have the cash to buy a billboard. So the Tucson-based music promoter hired a friend to paint a mural.
Claire Lawton
Tucson artist Joe Pagac drives up to Phoenix (almost) every First Friday to paint a 40-by-15-foot rotating mural outside eye lounge gallery on Roosevelt Street.
Claire Lawton
Bobby Castaneda's tagname, RESIST, on a light pole on the corner of Roosevelt and Second streets.
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They made it a happening. On the First Friday in October, an artist named Joe Pagac balanced on a small, makeshift scaffold outside the west wall of eye lounge, a gallery near Fifth and Roosevelt streets. Small crowds gathered all night to take pictures and ask questions as the 29-year old painter from Tucson hastily followed his design.
It took Pagac three hours to paint 15-foot high portraits of each of the four members of Monsters of Folk, along with their names in white below each face.
Aesthetically, the response to the piece was mixed. It was called out for its elementary style, four basic colors and poor lettering. But Charlie Levy says his phone kept buzzing with positive messages — "How cool is it to see a mural going up on Roosevelt?"
The idea of a mural painted for a live audience stuck. And every First Friday since then (with a few breaks over the summer), Pagac's packed the trunk of his car with a few buckets of paint and rollers, made the two-hour drive up to Phoenix, and painted over his own work.
After Monsters of Folk, Pagac tossed up a detailed portrait of Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova of the Swell Season (November) and of members of Sonic Youth (December). In March, he painted a dark, creepy Nosferatu building a sandcastle for the RJD2 show and a landscape with the floating band members of Album Leaf in April. His latest — painted the First Friday in July — was a scene of three snowmen tossing a pink snow-suited boy in the air to promote The National's October show at the Marquee Theatre. Pagac is paid $300 per mural, which just about covers the amount of paint it takes to cover the wall and gas it takes to get to Phoenix, the artist says.
More than anything, the murals are conversation starters and trendsetters. Right now, in downtown Phoenix, murals are damn trendy. And like any good fad, they've spawned a backlash.
On July 12, a Phoenix artist named Bobby Castañeda posted a photo on Facebook.
The sky was almost too dark for taking clear pictures, but Castañeda managed to get a dark shot: "SB1070" was scrawled in red spray paint across the stomachs of two large snowmen.
Castañeda — whose reputation as both artist and troublemaker was well established before this — is passionate about a lot of things. His tag (or assumed street art name) is RESIST, often followed by his current cause. This year it happens to be Arizona Senate Bill 1070.
It also happened to wreck Pagac's mural.And it let Phoenix visualize a question that's been challenging other cities for a while now: Is it cool to make art on top of someone else's art and call that art?
This isn't personal, not in the way you might think. Joe Pagac and Bobby Castañeda say they've never met. They've only exchanged comments on Facebook. (Castañeda says he didn't even know Pagac was the mural's artist until after he "friended" him and read his comments.)
And this is not just a question about the west-facing wall of eye lounge. In the year or so since Pagac and Levy started their campaign, the mural scene here has exploded. It's hard to find a wall in the Roosevelt neighborhood that doesn't have some kind of mural. Most of them literally appear overnight and some are up for only a few weeks before they're "buffed out" (street-art code for "cleaned up," by the walls' owners or the city, if the murals are done on city property) or replaced. Many, like Pagac's, are done for hire.
These murals are proving irresistible to taggers like Bobby Castañeda — artists who had already claimed the streets as their canvases, long before murals got trendy. In their world, there's no hesitation to spray, mark, paste, or drill — the higher the stakes and visibility, the greater the payoff.
And it's where those who call themselves fine artists, mural artists, graffiti artists, taggers, writers, and burners (and whatever other names so many seem to disagree upon) bump into each other that the lines of culture, aesthetic, history, and legality blur.
Pagac's mural isn't the only place RESIST has popped up lately. The capital letters have been scrawled on light poles, business walls, and the backs of street signs down Roosevelt and throughout Phoenix. Castañeda has become the local poster child for the big "art over art" question that's echoing in major American mural cities like Los Angeles, Philadelphia, New York, and, finally, Phoenix, where murals are as hot as the walls they're going up on.
For now, anyway, there aren't any easy answers.
"Look, I'm all for people voicing their opinions," Joe Pagac says. "I'm not really sure why it had to be done on my mural or why the person couldn't at least have been a little more creative with it. It sucks to hear that something you made has been damaged . . . I've come to just accept it."
