Love Letter

From the series Love Letter by Stephen Powers and the Mural Arts Program

A passage by Randy Kennedy of The New York Times from the August 28, 2009 article Art to make you Laugh (and Cry). Mr. Kennedy had a rendezvous with bits of the Philly art scene on a recent trip to Philadelphia and reported on his findings. This one sparked my interest and an adventure ensued...

"The final stop on my tour actually ended up being many stops, as I stared out the window of an elevated-subway train in West Philadelphia, where the Mural Arts Program has been working for weeks with the artist Stephen Powers, a West Philadelphia native, and many local painters to create a series of more than 30 huge, text-based murals, collectively called “Love Letter,” along a sometimes blighted stretch of Market Street.

The project, painted in consultation with business and building owners, is in part Mr. Powers’s homage to Darryl McCray, known as Cornbread, a legendary Philadelphia graffiti artist who began painting messages of love on walls in the late 1960s to impress his girlfriend. (Mr. McCray also once managed to tag the Jackson Five’s private jet, and painted “Cornbread Lives” on the side of an elephant at the Philadelphia Zoo to dispel rumors that he had died.)

Jane Golden, the executive director of the Mural Arts Program, said she remembered Mr. Powers as a teenager, when he was a prolific and notorious graffiti writer known as Espo who couldn't be persuaded to “come over to the other side” and paint legally. So there is a “wonderful irony,” she said, to the fact that now, as an established gallery artist living in New York, he has returned to Philadelphia to mount an ambitious urban beautification project, one whose odd, affectionate messages — like “Forever Starts When You Say Yes” and “Pre-pay is on/Let’s talk/Till my minutes are gone” — are about love and reconciliation. (The project will be unveiled officially on Sept. 10, though most of the signs are now visible for the price of a $2 subway token.)

Mr. Powers said the idea was to create a single, serial urban work whose hopeful messages might resonate with a kind of universality in a neighborhood in need of hopeful messages. And as a fringe benefit, he said the murals might even help in a more practical way.

“Hopefully, there will be a few sly guys out there who say to their girl: ‘Hey, Baby, I wrote that up there for you.’ ” "

I hopped on the el after work with a boy that will always have my heart. From 2nd and Arch we walked over to Market to go underground together. I missed him and he missed me too I think. It just seemed right and appropriate...doing this trek together, seeing this Espo project. I was intrigued by the inspiration for the project and the scale. He was intrigued by the project because of historical ties to the Philadelphia graffiti world. It was a beautiful day on Sunday and it just felt right and sorta magical to hop on the el with nowhere to go, nothing to do, but sit back with a true confidant and friend and watch the world and the art go by outside the window. We rode to 69th Street. When we got above ground, past 46th street, adrenaline pumped through me when I was hit with the first piece. I felt like an excited little kid. Dotted in unexpected places on roofs and walls, with impeccable and intentional timing, the murals came into view.. They brought us to our feet to see them as we looked from one side of the train to the other. It became a sort of treasure hunt. Who can find the next one? Did you catch that one? Did you see the one hidden in the cut? Wow!...We oo-ed and ah-ed our way to the last stop, rode it back to 46th St and hopped on a train up to Millbourne to catch a glimpse of the murals one last time....They were beautiful. They read like 1950s ads but with a vibrancy of color unmistakably "today". I've dreamed of having the know-how and the perseverance and the drive, the clarity, the directness, the appropriateness that I found in this work. The language was of today, of Philly. The quality of the painting was unlike any Philadelphia mural I have seen before. The cleverness of how these ads could fool your eye into seeing them as relics of a 1950s ad campaign was so fascinating. It's almost like your eye tried to scan through them like any other advertisement but just couldn't once you read what one said. The old timey quality was captivating on its own because it had that graphic look of the past with a subtle show of the hand and the fact that this old fashioned looking ad was not faded and worn brought on another level of interest hard to ignore. It felt like I was riding the train in a different era, seeing the old tricks of the advertising world. But my eyes were really captivated by the of-the-moment language. How simple and effective using regular young folk words can be...we live in city and a time of distinct language, slang. Sometimes only young people can understand it...or maybe just people exposed to the city can understand...

There was an effectiveness about this work. The fact that it was done by an iconic graffiti artist made it, I dunno, more real or prevalent. In recent years, I've gotten mad at the graffiti world, at hip hop...I've wanted a culture so influentional on my generation and the one before to say something meaningful to me, to say something more than it's original intentions, to break beyond the act of "getting up" into the act of getting up to say something from the depths of the heart. I feel like this Mural Arts Project did that. Though Espo did it legally, the murals still resonated to me as secret pieces done in the night. Because of the freshness of the project I felt like I was catching the moment they were seeing the first light of day the next morning. They had the newness and energy of freshly done, beautifully crafted graffiti pieces, vibrant against the industrial walls of the city, but with a pleasant offness due to the messages of life and love. Simple phrases made important, prominent, elevated.

It's unique and alive and romantic and special, Espo's work....it gave me courage to pursue the things i want to pursue in my art and in myself and in love....it made me wanna fall in love...It allowed me to remember the jewels of love... there is such a complexity to it. All the ups and the downs. But this work let me remember the most fun part of love...the romance. I definitely fell in love on the el that day and had the perfect road dawg with me...what a magical afternoon...

See it as the sun sets.

xo ac