LA's Operation Under Celebrates Street Art

Bravo to Hyperallergic which celebrates a great street art initiative in Los Angeles resulting in a fascinating and glorious exhibition. Makes me want to travel there to see it!

The Craziest Art in Los Angeles May Be Underground

An exhibition at Superchief Gallery explores the work of Operation Under, a collective of artists using subterranean tunnels as their canvas.

LOS ANGELES — Just after dawn on a recent weekday morning, at the edge of a nondescript parking lot somewhere in LA County, I met three members of Operation Under (OU), a clandestine collective of graffiti artists, painters, photographers, nature devotees, and urban anthropologists. We donned rubber boots and hi-vis safety vests, walked past a “No Trespassing” sign, hopped a low fence, and entered a drainage tunnel.

We set off in the pitch blackness, a path illuminated only by flashlights. Examples of old stoner graffiti were visible near the entrance but quickly faded further in, replaced by scuttling roaches, swooping bats, nesting birds, and other subterranean flora and fauna. 

“One of the things is we don’t leave breadcrumbs all the way to the entrance,” OU member Evan Skrederstu told me, sloshing through a shallow stream of slimy water that flowed down the center of the path. 

Half an hour later, the tunnel opened up into a small chamber containing two works by OU: Skrederstu’s trompe l’oeil painting of a wild-eyed woman appearing to break through the concrete wall and a portrait of a Mexican hairless Xoloitzcuintli dog by Tank One. We ventured further, crouching down as the tunnel got smaller, until Skrederstu stopped abruptly. In the distance, gleaming eyes stared back: a family of raccoons. “I’m not trying to mess with that,” he said, retreating and returning to the outside world just as most people were getting ready to start their day. 

Underground tunnel artwork by Evan Skrederstu (photo Matt Stromberg/Hyperallergic)

The tunnel was one of over 100 that Operation Under has explored and created art in over the past seven years. Now, the exhibition Life Underground at Superchief Gallery just south of Downtown LA brings the group’s mysterious workings to the surface, featuring original artwork by dozens of OU participants alongside photo and video documentation of their exploits. The walls are covered salon-style in painted banners, a recurring motif in their work that conjures a sense of old-world exploration, akin to planting a flag, and the back of the gallery has been turned into a kind of stage-set of a tunnel, complete with a family of curious raccoons, one of whom wields a paint roller. A makeshift tattoo studio behind a faux concrete wall occupies one corner, as illusionistically painted green water trickles from a fabricated pipe. This Saturday, August 24, Superchief will host a panel discussion with Skrederstu; author Susan Phillips; LA graffiti legend Chaz Bojorquez; and other scholars from the worlds of street art, ecology, biology, and beyond.

Installation view of Life Underground at Superchief Gallery LA (photo courtesy Superchief Gallery LA)

OU members wear many hats, and count tattoo artists and scenic painters among their ranks, contributing a sense of technical polish to their work below and above ground. The subject matter in the show reflects the eclecticism of the collective, including elaborate text-based graffiti tags, Aztec imagery, fantastical creatures, references to the natural world, and cartoons. Unsurprisingly, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, pop culture’s most beloved underground dwellers, make a couple of appearances.

Operation Under officially began on January 1, 2017. According to ESK31, the group’s “de facto leader,” he and fellow artist Ser@la were painting in a tunnel they had previously wandered into as kids growing up in LA. “He was gonna write ‘Operation Underground’ but he ran out of room, so he wrote ‘Operation Under’ and put a ‘#1’ next to it,” ESK31 explained. This was the first of many “missions” in tunnels all over LA County (with a few ventures out in Texas, Hawaii, and even Ecuador), each sequentially numbered, that the loose collective has since completed. “It didn’t start with grand initiative,” ESK31 said. “It turned into what it became organically.”

Detail of raccoon murals by Christopher Brand in Life Underground (photo Matt Stromberg/Hyperallergic)

Angelenos have been leaving their marks on overlooked sites of urban infrastructure for decades — on tunnels, bridges, and train yards and along the concretized channel of the LA River.

“These forms of historical graffiti — by children, partying teens, workers, gang writing — slowly got covered by modern graffiti, tagging. Then when they got into rollers, they decimated historical writing,” explained Susan Phillips, who explored this history in her 2019 book The City Beneath: A Century of Los Angeles Graffiti. OU is certainly not the first group of LA artists to use underground spaces as their canvas; however, their novel approach unites their disparate tunnel paintings into one sprawling collective conceptual artwork.

Donning rubber boots and hi-vis safety vests, members of Operation Under use underground tunnels as their canvas. (image courtesy Superchief Gallery LA)

Murals by Operation Under (photo by Bill Dunleavy, courtesy Superchief Gallery LA)

In response to the ephemeral nature of street art, OU was driven to create work that would stand the test of time. Working in the tunnels is a way to avoid erasure by both civic authorities and fellow artists eager to claim a coveted spot, as well as protect artwork from the harmful rays of the sun. 

“They got frustrated with how much work you do just to end up getting buffed,” said Superchief co-founder Bill Dunleavy, who spent two years working with OU on the show.

“There’s never a need to go over someone in a tunnel (beef excluded),” longtime OU member ADZE added. “If you keep walking, you’ll eventually find plenty of nice blank walls to paint on.”

Although some members use spray paint, most OU artists work with brushes and acrylic paint, a more stable medium that holds up better in the dank environment. It also serves as a cover if confronted by authorities. “When you’ve got spray cans, you’re a vandal” in the eyes of police, said an OU member who goes by Sick.

Operation Under was driven to create work that would stand the test of time. (photo by Bill Dunleavy, courtesy Superchief Gallery LA)

Although the secret, secluded locations might seem to preclude the wide visibility that graffiti artists above ground strive for, OU members view documentation as a way to disseminate their work. “Photography is our form of visibility. It is a way to control how our work is represented,” said Sick, noting that it is also a way to control how their work is monetized. They have published four books chronicling the project.

Despite the technically illicit nature of their prohibited excursions, there is a certain element of youthful whimsy and infectious curiosity inherent in OU’s project. “It’s a little like time travel meets juvenile exploration, secret club activity meets urban history,” Phillips said.

“We live in a pretty regulated society,” Skrederstu added. “OU makes these little openings into a part of it that people don’t talk about, that you didn’t even know existed.”

Installation view of Life Underground at Superchief Gallery LA (photo Matt Stromberg/Hyperallergic)

Installation view of Life Underground at Superchief Gallery LA (photo Matt Stromberg/Hyperallergic)

Has Street Art "Jumped the Shark"?

I have been an advocate for street art for many, many years partly because I saw it as an anti-establishment form of expression, forgoing galleries and museums and bringing some pretty amazing talent directly to the people without any effete curation.

So what am I to think when I see the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC offering Sprayground - a Pop Up store at the museum that offers what appears to be fashion and accessories with spray paint street art graffiti designs "while supplies last"?

Well, what I think is that street art has now been co-opted by the very institutions that tried to suppress it and has effectively "jumped the shark" meaning that it is over as a revolutionary form of expression.

I don't mind museums showcasing street art - the Miami based Museum of Graffiti is a great example of how we can celebrate that art form without diminishing it. But the Metropolitan Museum of Art? Really??

Inside the Graffiti-Covered L.A. Skyscrapers that Drew Global Attention

This great article in the Washington Post covers what I just read about in an art-related website. I am all for this type of thing and would encourage it on all dormant gentrification projects. I wish I could go to LA and see this masterpiece! Bravo!

Here is the article since it may be behind a paywall. I have a subscription.

It’s been about five years since Actual was a regular on the Los Angeles graffiti scene. He said he got on the “straight and narrow” when his daughter was born. But when graffitists started converging on an abandoned development in the city, he thought: “Am I going to be that guy that just said, ‘Oh yeah, I saw it happen. That was cool’ — or am I going to be that dude that was a part of it?”

The sky-high graffiti covering dozens of floors of the Oceanwide Plaza development in downtown L.A., a $1 billion project that was abandoned in 2019, has captured the world’s attention. It’s created eye candy for Instagram. It’s become fodder for conversations about urban blight and foreign investment. And despite graffiti’s undeniable rise to the mainstream, it’s reignited an old debate over whether it is art or vandalism.

To the graffitists participating and the experts watching, the “bombing” — as it’s called in the graffiti world — is more than a stunt or a crime. In a culture where visibility rules, the painted skyscrapers have become a landmark, literally taking the art form to a higher level. For them, it’s a historic moment.

Actual couldn’t pass it up. On his first attempt to enter the complex, he got caught and ran out. On his second, he saw security chasing a group of graffitists and tried to enter from the other direction. Another guard was waiting. Then, on his third try, he squeezed in through a hole in a fence that was covered by a construction sign. When he got into one of the towers, heart pounding, the real challenge began: “It was a big climb,” said Actual, who, like other graffitists mentioned in this story, spoke on the condition that he be identified by his tag name to discuss the illegal artwork. He wanted to paint higher than others, but by the time he reached the 36th floor, “I couldn’t walk; all my leg muscles were just shot.” So he scoped out a spot and got to work. “It was like a trance,” he said. “You’re so high up that it’s not until you come back down that you deal with the world again.”

The effort wasn’t wasted. Susan Phillips, author of “The City Beneath: A Century of Los Angeles Graffiti” and a professor at Pitzer College in California, said in an email that it was “perhaps the most legendary roll call in the history of Los Angeles.” Roger Gastman, a longtime graffiti curator and historian, said there’s been “a boom in street work the last few years unlike anything I have seen since the 1990s,” and the buildings show “that graffiti is bigger than ever.”

The reaction was, of course, not entirely positive. The Central City Association of Los Angeles released a statement saying it was “disturbed by the images of the vandalism” and calling for the city to “address this blighted property before it becomes a further nuisance.” The LAPD said Wednesday that it had arrested four suspects and was investigating “numerous crimes.”

In a social media statement last week, it said that additional security measures would be “implemented immediately” and that the graffiti will be removed. The department did not reply to a request for further information. In California, vandalism is punishable with jail time as well as fines. On Tuesday, Michael Delahaut, who lives across the street, said he was watching police raid the buildings. To the 54-year-old, who has been in the L.A. graffiti scene since the 1980s, the creation outside his window was no nuisance — it was more like waking up and finding a masterpiece had been installed in his living room. “It would’ve taken hundreds of writers, tens of thousands of cans. It’s amazing,” he said. “I’ve been able to witness a lot of graffiti movement moments, but this might be the biggest.” 

The opportunity was created by a “perfect storm” of factors, Delahaut said. Buildings in the luxury complex, put up by Chinese firm Oceanwide Holdings, reached as high as 55 stories before the company put the project on hold in 2019 because of financial troubles, the Los Angeles Times reported. In December, the security company responsible for the property sued the developer, saying it had stopped paying. Oceanwide Holdings did not respond to a request for comment. After the first night that pieces started going up, Delahaut said, he expected security to ramp up. It didn’t. By the next night, “it was clearly a scene,” he said.

Delahaut watched with the fascination of a curator. He admired the typography, kept a record of the artists’ progress — noting that he might need it for a later exhibition — and likened the work to the classic style captured on the cover of Martha Cooper and Henry Chalfant’s canonical 1988 book, “Subway Art.” (He also compared it to a smaller project on a building in Miami last year.) As a former graffitist himself, he couldn’t help but think through the logistics: “The process of getting into the building, climbing up the stairs and figuring out how much you got to carry,” Delahaut said. “Graffiti is so much more than the act itself.” Some have looked at the graffiti as a symbol for the state of Los Angeles.

Phillips, the author and professor, said that in a place increasingly molded by private money, the work is a “powerful commentary about who gets to shape what.” Stefano Bloch, a cultural geographer at the University of Arizona who studies graffiti, called it “an exposé on the failure of oversized development,” made “in vibrant colors that force us to look up.”

But the artists are split on their motivations. Aqua, a graffitist and fine artist who worked on the high-rise project, said in an email that for those involved, it was all about location. “It is in the heart of the city with high visibility. What a gem!” For Actual, the work gave new voice to the streets. “The money invested in [the buildings] could have done so much for this city,” he said. Now, he said, the graffiti is a reminder: “That’s every single kid in this city just putting their name down, showing they exist and taking the city back.”

 

Michael Tracy - Street Artist - Dies at 65

Remembering Michael Tracy who made subways cars his canvas.

Tracy 168 was an architect of the graffiti movement.

He was there almost from the very beginning in 1970, until the last days of his life. His influence was felt by multiple generations, and his impact on style can be seen in some of the most famous writers in the world.

Michael Tracy was born February 14, 1958, in the Bronx. As a kid he spent three days a week in Manhattan with his Puerto Rican grandfather, and four days with his Irish mother in the Bronx. His father had left the family early on. Tracy roamed the Bronx fearlessly, at night he broke into the Bronx Zoo to play with the animals, and drive the carts around.

As the graffiti movement blossomed around him in the early '70s, he started writing with a group of kids from his school, Sacred Heart. Those kids would turn into some of the most talented writers of the 1970s.

In 1974, he officially named the group Wanted. He quickly turned over the presidency of the crew to his right hand man, Chi-Chi 133.

In 1975, he started a newer group with limited membership called Wild Style. To Tracy, wild style was more than just a style, it was a way of life, as he said in a recent interview. “To me it’s almost like a religion or way of life, but it started as a series of interlocking mechanical letters that we did our pieces with. So people would see a TRACY 168, or a PNUT 2 piece and they’d have a little WS inside them and whether they could read them or not they’d say “Yo, WILD STYLE!“ So it was not only a crew but it was also the type of style we represented.”

To later generations it would always be the title of the Hip-Hop film by Charlie Ahearn.

The bulk of Tracy’s work was done on the trains from 1972 to 1976. His earlier pieces were just outlines of his eponymous tag. By 1973, he started to blossom, adding his innate artistic ability into his works.

In 1974, he painted a perfect rendering of Yosemite Sam on the side of the trains. Cartoons were fairly new at the time, and his rendering was highly sophisticated.

In 1975, he painted a rocket going sideways, the flames shooting out and enveloping his name, taking a great concept and rendering it perfectly. At the same time as doing these elaborate pieces, he continued to blanket the lines with his name, and painted in billboard letters with silver and black in under ten minutes. His speed and efficiency were so great that he could do twenty of these in a night.

 

 

Risk Recieves Lifetime Achievement Award

‘An Addiction I Could Never Shake’: Street Art Pioneer Risk on How He Brought Graffiti From the Street to the Gallery

To write his first bit of graffiti, a young Kelly Graval didn’t travel very far. He staked out his high school until it was dark, before jumping the fence with four cans of red and white spray paint. On a wall, he painted “a big piece” that simply read “SURF,” a nod to his hobby.

“It was terrible,” he said of his debut as a graffitist—though by the next day, the work managed to draw the attention and admiration of his classmates, most of whom, back in the early ‘80s in Los Angeles, had yet to encounter any form of graffiti.

From there, Graval’s canvases would only grow larger and farther as his adventures in graffiti took him to train yards and freeways across L.A. His legend would develop alongside his tag, Risk, an apt moniker that captured the rebellion and peril inherent in graffiti writing, and that, yes, he borrowed from the board game.

For Risk, it made sense that he should persist in writing and tagging the city. “You have the art form and you have the strategic form,” he told Artnet News of graffiti. “It’s just an addiction that I could never shake.”

Decades on, his endurance is paying off. Recognized as a pioneer in the West Coast graffiti scene, Risk has seen his work included in exhibitions from “Art in the Streets” at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles to “Beyond the Streets” in Los Angeles and New York. His recent forays into fine art and sculpture, too, have fetched prices upwards of $200,000.

Over Art Wynwood weekend which was from February 16 through 19, Risk will be collecting the fair’s Lifetime Artistic Achievement Award for continuing to “innovate and shape contemporary art through his work.” His sculptures will feature within the fair, which is presented by Art Miami, and his graffiti art will take up an entire mural that flanks the entrance.

Certainly, the honor is “mind-blowing,” he said, but it’s also been gratifying to watch what once was deemed vandalism enter the art conversation.

“My whole life I wanted graffiti art to be a mainstream art form—to just be considered a genre of art. I wanted to see this art form be in galleries and museums, and celebrated around the world,” he said. “And now it is.”

Read the full article here.

A Look Inside the Batcave

Like all great graf places, the batcave in Brooklyn is slated for demolition to build ... wait for it ... luxury apartments. But here it is as is.

Dating back to the 1950s, the Gowanus Batcave is one of the City's oldest graffiti havens. Similar to its Queens counterpart 5 Pointz, the Batcave is being demolished and converted into residences. In this immersive 360° video from the New York Times, peek inside the graffiti-filled Batcave before it is gone for good.

 

River City Skate Park

Many skate parks across the world are filled with wonderful street art. Today I want to give a shout out to River City Skate Park in Seattle Washington.

According to their site, River City SkatePark project has been in the works for 15 years. Initially generated as a business plan by three South Park high school students, this once neglected property has blossomed into an incredibly unique skatepark. There’s nothing else like it in the world!

Designed by our late friend, visionary and founder of Grindline, Mark “Monk” Hubbard, River City is a beautiful concrete structure with four doors in the cardinal directions and one continuous, circular half pipe with lines through the middle. Experienced skaters from around the world visit this park, but many people in the area are unable to enjoy it because of the level of difficulty. We’ve been gathering design ideas from skaters and non-skaters alike to ensure that the new and improved RCSP draws people from many crowds and accommodates a variety of uses. Please help us honor Monk’s vision – to finish building River City SkatePark and help build a healthy community space for people to gather and express themselves.

Cadillac Ranch

This, in my opinion, is a great reason to visit Texas. The Cadillac Ranch is apparently an art installation that encourages a continuing expression of aerosol street art. It is located in Amarillo.

25 Places Reborn Through Graffiti

In this list offered on Atlas Obscura, there are 25 international places that have been reborn through street art and graffiti.

Notice that New York City is not listed. And yet this city had what would arguably be the pinnacle of street art revitalization. That was 5Pointz, an industrial square block dedicated to artists around the world. Destroyed in 2014 it is now the site of two vampire towers of glass, isolation and ugliness that the developers have the temerity to name "5Pointz".

Abandoned or forgotten places can become otherworldly canvases.

by Jonathan Carey, Senior Associate Editor, Places

There are endless stretches of abandoned structures scattered around the world, many forlorn and destined to be reclaimed by nature—eventually. In the meantime, many abandoned factories, alleys, hotels, and more have been transformed into living canvases. With every brushstroke and release of spray paint, these places, some officially sanctioned, others not so much, get some injection of new life, as art museums without the white walls. 

Just outside Las Vegas is a former shopping outlet that has been reimagined as a modern art gallery. Due to financial issues, the Primm Outlets were forced to close their doors, until a new owner stepped in with a new approach. Artists were invited to decorate the walls and remaining storefronts of the now Prizm Outlet, and it’s seen more visitors than ever before. In Stockholm, an abandoned industrial village is now one of Europe’s largest graffiti exhibits. Each spring, graffiti writers and mural artists across Sweden descend on what’s known as the Snösätra Wall of Fame to refresh the artwork and craft new pieces. From an abandoned sniper post to an alley that is the largest outdoor art gallery in the Northwest United States, these are 25 of our favorite places reborn from the end of a nozzle. 

Check it out here.

The Pandemic Has Brought Us Some Amazing Street Art

I have seen evidence of this on the streets of NYC but this article in OZY sums it up nicely --

Street Art

Empty city streets served as the perfect canvas for many artists during the pandemic while galleries were shuttered. Some, such as Steve Derrick in New York, painted paeans to frontline workers. Others used their art to mock politicians or simply to lighten the general mood. U.K.-based street artist John D’oh used a Bristol wall to paint an image mocking former U.S. President Donald Trump’s comment about injecting disinfectant to stop COVID-19, while Australian street artist LUSHSUX depicted Chinese President Xi Jinping in a hazmat suit saying: “Nothing to see. Carry on.” Dominican Republic-based Jesus Cruz Artiles, also known as Eme Freethinker, painted a picture of Gollum from The Lord of the Rings cradling a roll of toilet paper and saying, “My Precious!” In Atlanta, artists such as Fabian Williams made huge face masks from white vinyl sheets and used them to cover murals of icons like Martin Luther King Jr. in an awareness-raising campaign for the Black community.