Graffiti News

A Graffiti artists uses spray paint outside of Alphabeta Shop in the Greenpoint neighborhood of Brooklyn. Alphabeta sells graffiti culture merchandise such as spray paint, masks, retro boom boxes, etc. Local elected officials have expressed strong concerns about any support towards graffiti related activities. Shot on July 1, 2008 and published in amNewYork on July 2, 2008.

The spray paint is barely dry on Brooklyn’s new graffiti-art supply store, but street artists — and a fiercely critical councilman — are already clashing.

The store, Alphabeta in Greenpoint, proudly embraces graffiti culture and even offers artists a space for their work. But any mention of graffiti among some New Yorkers conjures searing images of a city in economic and social despair. A store that glorifies graffiti, says Councilman Peter Vallone Jr., (D- Astoria), is the equivalent of creating a criminal supply shop.

“I am determining what if any steps to take against it,” said the councilman, who has spent his career drafting some of the toughest vandalism laws in the nation. “Maybe I should work to get a police camera outside [the store].”

Of course, Alphabeta is not the only shop that sells spray paint and other items associated with graffiti, but none appears as proud of the culture.Leif McIlwaine, 24, a Utah native who owns Alphabeta, said his store is “a professional graffiti arts supply store and gallery.”

Like any new business, McIlwaine needs attention, but knows not all of it will be positive. The association of spray paint with vandalism isn’t lost on him: “It’s controversial.”

The store already has the attention of the city’s graffiti artists, including Raymond Cross, a partner at Ad Hoc Art, a studio and gallery space in Williamsburg.

Cross, 32 a master of fine arts from Pratt Institute, is originally from Virginia and has a more romantic view of graffiti’s past.

“If you look at that time, the late-’70s and the ’80s,” Cross said. “It was a cultural explosion.”

Vallone is a world removed from the graffiti culture flourishing in Brooklyn today, with the growth of galleries and studios that promote the street art. His anti-graffiti stance dates to growing up in the 1970s, a time everyone remembers as the height of graffiti and crime.

But Alphabeta is a legitimate store, according to McIlwaine, who with no prior business experience navigated the city’s permitting process and financed the startup with about $100,000 in inheritance money.

The store is about 800 square feet with a 5,000-square-foot, indoor-outdoor gallery, which will be used for shows and as a space for graffiti artists to paint. The store also sells graffiti-culture accessories: boom boxes and throwback sneakers.

McIlwaine said he will be careful not to sell spray paint to minors. He is trying to build a clientele of professional graffiti artists, not vandals.

Vallone doesn’t buy it: “How naïve does he think we are? There is not enough of any legal graffiti to support a store.”

Cross said he’d be shopping at the store, and he won’t be involved in any illegal activity.

“I’m too old to jump off buildings and run from police,” he said. “I just want to do my art inside.”

A canvas of the neighborhood didn’t draw much outrage yesterday.

“So long as it is a retail business, I’m OK,” said Christine Onorati, owner of Word Books on Franklin Street. “It’s a pretty artistic neighborhood.”

Simone Herbin contributed to this report.

[Via:AmNews]

Los Angeles judge drops Hollywood drug case after video contradicts police testimony.

In echoes of Rampart scandal, defense attorney says officers planted cocaine on man accused of being a gang member. On surveillance tape produced at trial, one officer tells another: ‘Be creative in your writing.’

A Los Angeles judge abruptly ended a trial and exonerated a man of possessing cocaine Monday after a courtroom confrontation in which a defense attorney produced a surprise video of his client’s arrest that sharply contradicted the testimony of two police officers.

Superior Court Judge Monica Bachner dismissed charges against Guillermo Alarcon Jr., a grocery store worker, after prosecutors reviewed the tape and acknowledged that it was inconsistent with the officers’ sworn testimony.Los Angeles Police Department officials said they had launched an internal affairs investigation of the officers. Additionally, prosecutors said they would refer the matter to a division within the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office that investigates police misconduct cases.

During the trial, which began Friday, the officers told jurors that they had chased Alarcon, 29, into his Hollywood apartment building last year and seen him throw away a black object. They testified that one of the officers picked up the object a few feet from where Alarcon was standing and discovered powder and crack cocaine inside.

But footage from the grainy video, which Alarcon’s attorney said came from an apartment building surveillance camera, shows that it took the two officers more than 20 minutes to find the drugs. They were also aided by other officers in their search.

The quality of the tape, a copy of which was obtained by The Times, is poor and it is difficult to clearly hear what is being said. But at one point, an officer seems to make a reference to the arrest report that needed to be filled out.

“Be creative in your writing,” the officer appears to tell another after the discovery.

“Oh yeah, don’t worry, sin duda [no doubt],” comes the reply.

[Read More]

MANCHESTER – State Police filed felony charges yesterday afternoon against two area they say spray painted graffiti on bridges and noise barriers along Interstate 293.

Derek Gagnon of Goffstown, 20, and Justin Frost of Manchester, 19, did what Sgt. Chris Wagner said was thousands of dollars in damage to the highway structures. The defendants faced arraignment this morning in Manchester District Court on felony criminal mischief charges.

The two were similarly arrested at 3 a.m. June 19 on charges of spray-painting several Manchester buildings: Athens restaurant, TJ’s sports bar, The Elm Street Shop, La Cage Boutique, The Beauty Salon and Greg’s Place. State Trooper Marc Beaudoin, stationed in Milford, started an investigation the next day to link the two men to wider acts of graffiti.

According to Manchester Capt. Richard Valenti, the pair are among the city’s most prolific vandals. Authorities caught them June 19 allegedly with aerosol cans and hands wet with paint after a Verizon Center security guard spotted them on a surveillance camera. According to police, their alleged signature tags, “DKRANE” and “Hostyle Fam,” are widespread.

Both men pleaded innocent last month. Tracy Degges, a member of the mayor’s anti-graffiti task force, called the June bust a “big one” at the time.

“I mean, these guys’ tags are all over our city,” she said.

Gagnon pleaded no contest to unrelated charges last month of unauthorized use of a vehicle and resisting arrest. He received a one-year jail sentence with 11 months suspended.

Frost was charged with unrelated crimes last month as well: a stop sign violation, speeding, conduct in public and failure to appear in court on a charge of driving after revocation.

Not Guilty Vol.3, part 1

Who’s up from Carl Weston on Vimeo.

This is basically a test of the Flip Video Ultra camera..I just walked a few blocks from were I live..As you can see ACC crew is kinda up around were I stay..Most of these throwies are kinda old…

Spray paint and nozzles used by Tats Cru while creating painted canvases to be displayed in the windows of Lord & Taylor. (Photo: David Gonzalez/The New York Times)

Biz Markie’s “Just A Friend” from 1989 echoed through Tats Cru’s South Bronx studio, where a hazy cloud of spray paint hung in the air. As the grafffiti artists worked on a mural, they’d stop, lean back to gauge their progress, and then lean in close to do fills and lines.

Now after years of doing walls, they are finally doing windows. Next month their graffiti paintings will be the backdrop to Lord & Taylor’s windows along Fifth Avenue, following in the footsteps of other artists like Red Grooms and Larry Rivers whose work has appeared at the flagship store.

Every now and then a crew member would hum along to the Biz’s rap. “You, you got what I nee-eed, but you say he’s just a friend,” the Biz sang in his famous off-key delivery. “But you say he’s just a friend!”

The music was from a time when the group’s work was a bit more renegade, bringing with it the adrenaline-rush risk of run-ins with the vandal squad. But the crew has long since become the city’s undisputed mural kings whose pieces grace buildings, buses, record covers, movie sets and even a Broadway stage.

“Getting our work on Fifth Avenue is like a gallery show for us,” said Hector Nazario, one of the group’s founding members whose nom-de-graf is Nicer. “How often do we get to put our work legally on Fifth Avenue? I mean, yo, we could have always put it there before. Whether it would have stayed or we got arrested is another question.”

The idea to enlist the South Bronx crew originated with several Lord and Taylor executives who have been scouting established and emerging artists as collaborators for their store windows. One of them knew of Tats through the ex-girlfriend of one of the muralists. In pretty short order, the go-ahead was given.

The crew is preparing the canvases for the 11 windows in their Hunts Point studio, before installing them and putting on the finishing touches at the store in early July. They are working off designs provided by the store – of cityscapes and skyscrapers – and adding their own touches and colors on canvases that are as large as 10 by 15 feet.

“Instead of DKNY on one building, we’ll put a big Tats, and the color’s will be more fun,” said Wilfredo Feleciano, known as Bio. “On one side they want us to do silhouettes. But instead of blond-looking women, we’ll have some with poofy Afros, more ethnic.”

He has only been by the store once, he said, stopping when he saw a crowd one December. “Oh wow,” he said. “They hooked up the windows for Christmas.” His colleague Nicer joked about how they still can’t afford to shop there. And for all the aerosol spray that envelops them when they work, they were surprised when they first entered the store. “Yo,” Nicer said. “Soon as you walk in they’re spraying perfume everywhere!”

Five members of the crew worked in the panels on Thursday, including Sotero “BG 183” Ortiz, and Raoul and David Perre, twin brothers from Germany known as How and Nosm. They were painting a Brooklyn Bridge scene where the arches were shaped like spray paint cans. “This bridge was built by a German,” said How. “This is my interpretation.”

Had he ever done windows before? “Yeah,” he joked. “We painted over them.”

Nicer climbed up a ladder, making up for lost time after missing a day for his son’s grammar school graduation. While he and his crew think they could have been paid more, the exposure was unbeatable. “It’s always good to be asked to do stuff outside of your normal circle,” he said.

But he has been doing this kind of work long enough not to be fazed by anything.

“One week we will be working at a mansion in Connecticut where the driveway was so long they had sheep on the grass, and the next week we’ll be painting at a bodega on Southern Boulevard,” he said. “There is such a huge contrast, it doesn’t even surprise us anymore.”

Well, almost never.

“When we were at this mansion, they had a horse barn,” he said. “This woman told us ‘That’s where the horse sleeps, but he’s at camp.’ At camp, yo! The horse was at camp.”

As Nicer recounted their job painting a van at the mansion, How stopped for a break. Like the others, he has in the past put his tag on trains and walls while evading police officers. And while he may be legit now, his smile when he talks about outsmarting one particular officer betrays a wilder side. When the officer retired from the force, he celebrated by painting a train.

“They asked us at the store if we were excited about the windows,” How said. He shrugged. “After trains, what’s exciting?”

A graffiti artist who was given Scotland’s longest ever jail term for vandalism has had his sentence quashed.

Gary Shields, 21, from Glasgow, admitted spray-painting train carriages and stations across Scotland, causing thousands of pounds worth of damage.

He had been sentenced to 28 months in prison at Ayr Sheriff Court.

Appeal judges said they would impose a new sentence in six weeks. That is likely to involve community service and some form of compensation.

After appearing at the Court of Criminal Appeal in Edinburgh, Shields said he was “quite happy” with the outcome.

He added: “I thought the sentence was a bit harsh.”

Shields was jailed earlier this year after admitting seven offences carried out in Elderslie, Prestwick, Helensburgh, Shawlands, Yoker and Langside, in Glasgow, when he appeared at Ayr Sheriff Court.

Sheriff Colin Miller decided he had to jail him and said: “The damage done was considerable, not to say the offence caused to the public by vandalism of this nature.”

The sheriff said the prison sentence was intended to send out a message to others.

Shields served almost two months of the prison term before being freed on interim liberation pending an appeal in the case.

His counsel Moira MacKenzie told the court she was not seeking to minimise Shields’ conduct but argued that the sheriff had “overstated the gravity of the offences”.

She pointed out that they were committed when Shields was still a teenager and said he had “removed himself from his previous associates and has turned his back on that activity”.

She added that Shields was hoping to start a university course and was prepared to meet the bill for the damage.

Lord Wheatley told Shields: “We want to emphasise this was a serious series of offences.”

But he said they had decided the jail sentence would be quashed and they had in mind an alternative disposal of community service and “some measure of compensation” to the companies who suffered financial loss.

The appeal judges said they would seek further information about which firms should receive compensation before finally disposing of the case in about six weeks.

[Via:bbc]

A GRAFFITI artist jailed for 28 months for a spraying spree today admitted his actions were wrong - and promised never to do it again.

Gary Shields, 21, of Glasgow, pleaded guilty to causing damage totalling thousands of pounds to trains and railway stations.

But now he has been released from Barlinnie Prison on interim liberty pending an appeal against the length of his sentence, which will be heard on Friday. He has served just two months in jail.

Shields told the Evening Times: “I totally understand what I did was vandalism, but I like the artistic side of it.

“I know now what I did was wrong and will never do something like that again.

“The sentence I got was the biggest for graffiti in England or Scotland - I thought it might have been too harsh, but it is up to the judges on Friday. I hope the appeal judges can see it was a bit harsh.”

He is back working as a draughtsman, doing technical drawings for civil engineering firm Petrie Robertson Design, of Paisley.

He said he hopes to devote his artistic abilities to a future in architecture and legal art forms.

Shields is required to serve half of his 28-month jail term. If his appeal is unsuccessful, he will be returned to Barlinnie to serve the remaining 12 months of his sentence.

His appeal comes after a campaign was launched by the city’s underground music and graffiti scene to free the 21-year-old, from Crookston, who is dubbed “Daze” after his tag name.

Illegal flyposters sprang up across Glasgow and internet petitions were launched encouraging people to write to their MSPs asking the authorities to “Free Daze”.

Glasgow City Council reacted angrily to the flyposting, with deputy leader James Coleman threatening to have the culprits “locked up like Gary Shields”.

But Shields, who was sentenced on March 20, got letters of support from all over the world and thousands have signed petitions or joined online support sites.

He added: “I was shocked at the level of support, but it made me feel less lonely to know I had a lot of people on my side.”

Aside from jury duty, the Shields family had never set foot in a court prior to Gary’s appearances at Ayr Sheriff Court.

His father John, 43, said: “I am delighted this appeal has allowed Gary to come back home. He has started work again and is trying to get back to normal.”

One of the campaigners who helped orchestrate the online Free Daze! petition said he had been in touch with Shields since his release.

Glasgow hip hop musician Eastborn said: “Gary called me after he was out of prison to thank us for the support we gave him.”

Two Santa Paula men were arrested Tuesday on suspicion of spray painting the name of a local tagging crew near the 12th Street bridge and the Santa Clara River.

Julian Camarillo and Amador Leal, both 18, were caught in the act by deputies at 1:30 p.m., Ventura County Sheriff’s Department officials said.

The deputies were patrolling the Santa Clara River area in an effort to deter graffiti vandalism, authorities said.

Both men were arrested on suspicion of misdemeanor vandalism and booked into Ventura County Jail and are scheduled to appear in Ventura County Superior Court today.

Camarillo was held in lieu of $7,500 bail Tuesday night. Leal’s was bail was set at $2,500.

Witnesses say he fell onto the interstate near the Main Street off-ramp with a can of spray paint in his hands.

A man apparently spray painting graffiti on an overpass fell Saturday night onto the 5 Freeway in East Los Angeles, authorities said.

Several motorists told authorities that the man had possibly broken his back at about 9:45 p.m. and had a can of spray paint clutched in his hands as he lay on the freeway near the Main Street off-ramp, said California Highway Patrol spokesman David Porter. Porter said the man was taken to a nearby hospital where he was being treated.

The accident comes about three weeks after prolific tagger Cyrus Yazdani — who goes by the moniker “Buket” — was arrested for causing hundreds of thousands of dollars in property damage.

Yazdani is perhaps most recognized for a YouTube video that shows him climbing and spray painting behind the Hollywood Freeway sign near Melrose Avenue as traffic speeds below.

[Via:Latimes]