Tag: street art

Lawrenceville Stencil Graffiti

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stencil graffiti of rabbit jumping, Pittsburgh, Pa.

This law-abiding blogger has never committed an act of graffiti in his life–but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t think about it! All the time, as a matter of fact. If I were going to get into the wall-scrawling business (don’t get your hopes up: the chances are extremely low), I’d follow a very strict code of ethics: I wouldn’t touch anyone’s personal property, I wouldn’t write some dumb, regrettable message or invent a cheesy “tag” like, say, 0rbi7, I’d make damn sure the graffiti was only an improvement to the visual landscape, and I’d perpetrate with a stencil.

Why a stencil? I’m glad I asked for you. Mostly because if they’re created with any dignity, stencils just look uniformly good, without looking uniformly, uh, uniform. They have the beauty of any hand-run print process that provides great repetition of image, but with each rendition some warm distortion and subtle variation.

All of these stenciled pieces come from a relatively small area of Central Lawrenceville–mainly 42nd and Harrison Streets (I think). I’m sure there are plenty more where these came from, so hopefully The Orbit can get a few more pulls out of this particular template.

stencil graffiti of figure in wheelchair with the word "equal", Pittsburgh, Pa.

Equal

With all due respect to The Orbit‘s female, LGBT, and people-of-color brothers and sisters, the disability community is the minority group that has by far the least public exposure and the largest and longest denial of basic human rights. No Hollywood stars are lining up around accessible transit issues, Iggy Azalea is not getting uninvited from any giant downtown deaf pride events, and no one is burning retail stores over the unemployment rates of blind people. I’ve seen these Equal graffiti splashes in Lawrenceville, Polish Hill, and Bloomfield, which is a great sign of some small amount of awareness at a very literal street level (and my wife reminds me that there are a lot of very positive changes happening in this space). Now, why the person in the wheelchair looks like Pac-Man with a torso…

stencil graffiti of hand grenade, Pittsburgh, Pa.

Hand grenade (?)

This one violates my above-stated personal rule against “bombing” personal property. But if I was the owner of the row house whose cement foundation wall had this illicitly added, frankly, I’d be fine with it. [That is not an invitation!] So far, no one has busted out the Zinsser to cover it up, so perhaps these neighbors are on the same wavelength. Bonus points for the paint run (the stenciler’s equivalent of a beauty mark) in the bottom left corner.

stencil graffiti of man with top hat and the word "kween", Pittsburgh, Pa.

Kween

According to the computer internet, “Kween” can mean umpteen different things, none of which we’ve ever heard of. So it’s hard to know what the profligate who sprayed this one was going on about. [Enlightened Orbiters: straighten us out.] But sure: top hat, weird spelling, stencil on concrete–that’s good enough for us.

stencil graffiti of a dove on a street pole, Pittsburgh, Pa.

Dove

Lay a flat stencil on a round surface and you’ll lose line definition somewhere. Whoever committed this one got that and more with a blurred leading edge so fuzzy it looks like this particular winged creature has just engaged hyperdrive. That, coupled with some oxidization and the pre-existing copper-colored lines it’s competing with and the results are a really beautiful addition to this particular streetlight pole.

Vacation notice: If you’ve gotten this far (and I’ll bet you have!) then, Mom: call me! No, seriously, Pittsburgh Orbit will be on a week-and-a-half vacation break wherein we’ll try to figure out what to do when we get back on Pittsburgh time. In the words of the late, great George Willard, “All of the sudden, her eyebrows were too intense.” Be good.

Public Art: The Howard Street Line Painting Tests

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Street line test (detail)

Street line painting test (detail), North Side

The Orbit doesn’t know what it likes, but it knows art. And we’re going to go out on a limb here and say that this fair city’s very best piece of public art is one that almost no one ever sees, tucked away on a dead-end street on the North Side*. Yes: it’s more exciting than the french fry sculpture, or the Tomb of the Unknown Bowler, or that red paperclip-looking thing, or even Dippy the dinosaur (yes: better than a dinosaur).

Street line test (detail)

Street line painting test (detail)

Back in February, The Orbit did a story on the Toynbee Tiles of Smithfield Street wherein we had the gaul to claim that “it doesn’t get much more ‘street art’ than [the tiles].” Well, this blogger is not too proud to admit when he has erred. The giant Howard Street painting was created right there on the street, by road workers, with special street line painting machines. This time we really mean it: you really can’t get much more “street art” than that.

We can only assume the city Department of Public Works (which has a facility right at the end of Howard Street) created the painting as some kind of test area for applying street directional/lane marking lines in white and gold. Whatever prompted it, the final creation is totally beautiful.

Street line test (detail)

Street line painting test (detail)

What’s miraculous about the piece is that the crew that laid it down stuck to a very particular fifty-or-so foot stretch of road surface, testing back-and-forth, on top of and just next to the previous runs. Howard Street is probably three quarters of a mile long, completely void of any houses or traffic, so the workers could have stretched their tests out lengthwise if they wanted to, but for whatever reason they chose to concentrate their dense repetitions on one contained area, approximately the width of one lane of traffic.

Street line test (detail)

Street line painting test (detail)

The result is a hypnotic series of dot-dash blocks of a common width, but with the off-register overlap of a cheap silkscreen job. Colors fade and flare irregularly where layers intersect, the grooved pavement cracks, and time and tide have done their various things. The big blocks suggest the abstraction of intense pixelization or a more figurative image refracted through raindrops. Staring at them long enough, letting your eye focus go soft, could easily work as a kind of Rorschach test.

Street line painting tests

My only regret is that I didn’t have one of those big Genie lifts on hand to take me up thirty or forty feet in the air to get a proper photograph of the whole enchilada. If I were running the Carnegie International, I’d be tempted to just exhume the whole road surface and bring it in to the big architecture hall. Or maybe they should just hold the International right there on Howard Street. That’d show ’em.

street with line painting tests, Pittsburgh, Pa.

In context: Howard Street line painting tests, North Side

* The Orbit sadly acknowledges that the bar is extremely low for this particular category.

A Tiny Castle in The Strip District

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homemade model of a castle mounted to a brick wall

A tiny castle on a wall in an alley in the Strip District

Man, can The Orbit ever haunt some alleys. Some days it seems like all the good stuff turns up in them. It was that way recently when this blogger found himself headed home from downtown, rolling through Spring Way (the long alley between Liberty and Penn in the Strip District). There I was, minding my own business*, not a care in the world**, when something quite literally popped-out from the brick wall high over head causing one citizen-journalist to nearly eject himself from his bicycle seat with the hasty application of a desperately in-need-of-repair set of brakes.

What could possibly demand this kind of reckless photo-pseudo-journalism? Well, the astute reader has probably already divined that there was a mysterious red castle fixed to a painted piece of wood and screwed to the wall. The piece is high over head (I’d say maybe twelve or fifteen feet off the ground?)–so unnaturally out-of-sight and out-of-mind that less reputable bloggers and side-street walkers wouldn’t even have noticed its presence.

Ha! It’s this kind of attention-to-detail that hopes to land Pittsburgh Orbit as your go-to news source. Look no further! But where was I? Oh, yeah–the castle.

We have very few clues to tell us what this is all about. I’m calling it a castle, but it could just as easily be a prison, maybe a school, or some other institutional building with turrets and large porticos. The model has what appears to be a flag of Mexico affixed to the high central parapet, but it’s up too high to make a positive ID. There’s also a dramatic helipad with a tiny yellow chopper seated in place.

homemade model of a castle mounted to a brick wall

In context: the tiny castle affixed above window/door height

“Real” castles may last for hundreds (thousands!) of years, but this objet d’art d’alley will not. It’s made of some combination of particle board, foam, paper, and paint and is already showing some serious deterioration. I doubt it will make it through more than one harsh Pittsburgh winter—and that’s assuming the man doesn’t take it down before then.

Getting there: For all these reasons, if you want to see the tiny castle, you shouldn’t wait too long. Those headed to Penn-Mac for their Fiore Sardo or to Stan’s Market for cheap peppers this long holiday weekend should take the extra couple minutes to walk around the corner. The castle is located in Spring Way on the block between 21st and 22nd Streets, approximately behind Luke Wholey’s Wild Alaskan Grill. Look up.

homemade model of a castle mounted to a brick wall

Note: An Orbit apology for the photo quality here, which does not meet our usual standards, but it’s the best we could do under the circumstances. The piece was so high I had to get way back to snap it and the ol’ camera phone just doesn’t do too well with the zoom.

* Nebbing into every possible window, conversation, open loading dock, etc.
** Skating on the thin ice of crippling self-doubt, guilt, and regret