Thanks to @SarahEMyhre and other CHS readers for asking about the faces
(Image: Seattle Office of Arts and Culture)
A new temporary art installation has added colorful portraits to Cal Anderson Park.
Meanwhile, a prolific new(?) street artist has drawn attention with stylized faces popping up around Capitol Hill.
The Seattle Office of Arts and Culture says artist Jean Bradbury’s The People Make This Park will be on display around Cal Anderson through September. The “colorful, larger-than-life” portraits feature park-goers and include excerpts from interviews about the subject’s relation to the park. The project “speaks to the theme of how important land is to people,” the city arts office says.
Cal Anderson isn’t the only Capitol Hill park with temporary art. CHS reported here on the project that added 14 stone “benches” in Volunteer Park through next summer.
Meanwhile, a new Capitol HIll character is appearing on utility boxes and power poles, dining patios and dumpsters around the neighborhood as one of the more prolific street art efforts in recent memory is decorating mundane streetside items with graffiti featuring cartoon-worthy faces complete with googly eyes and wide-open mouths showing off zig-zagging tongues and jagged teeth.
https://twitter.com/SarahEMyhre/status/1569390755176943618
We don’t know who the artist is and we’re not sure what the faces are meant to depict but they seem to appear in the right places at the right time to provide just the right amount of goof to your travels around Capitol Hill. If this is some kind of viral marketing campaign or the roots of some unfortunate future meme, we apologize, but the art seems solid enough to overcome.
You can learn more here about the Seattle Office of Arts and Culture program making Jean Bradbury’s project possible and other parks with current installations.
You can learn more about the faces by walking around the neighborhood.
UPDATE: It’s marketing… and art: @bummercomix
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This nuisance graffiti started several months ago and continues to expand as it finds its way onto more and more surfaces.
I’ve lived on Summit for 7 years and have always seen those frog faces, just for a data point of contex.
The “colorful, larger-than-life” portraits feature park-goers
It seemed all of these portraits were people of color and as somebody who walks by the park every day the overwhelming majority of people who use the park are not. It’s odd this is supposed to represent the crowd at the park when it clearly doesn’t.
I’m not sure when you walk, but when I do the overwhelming majority of users, particularly in the area where these were put up, are people of color, and even if not, I’m perfectly okay with their voices being over-represented for once!
You sound white, and that you choose to only see white people. I live by and walk past or thru the park often and there’s a mix of people.
Also there’s at least 4 standees that could be white people, so…
Straight out of ’60’s SoCal kustom kulture, stripped down.
“Meanwhile, a prolific new(?) street artist has drawn attention with stylized faces popping up around Capitol Hill.”
It’s not street art, it’s street vandalism. And it’s illegal, or doesn’t that matter anymore?
Should we talk about the dog owners that illegally let their pets destroy Cal Anderson on a regular basis, or does that not matter anymore?
Good luck stopping graffiti and street art, it’s as old as civilization 🙄
Seattle used to have very limited graffiti, but something has definitely changed in the last five years. These characters have more going for them than most of what I see around our neighborhood, and of they were an isolated example, they could be beneficial. But the neighborhood is beset by rampant graffiti and property vandalism (broken car windows, for example) and it really needs to change. When people think painting a beautiful 100 year old brick building with random symbols and sayings is tolerable, even worthy of celebration, there is something wrong here. It is not street art to paint community center and elementary school announcement signs, private property, public infrastructure, or much of anything really. It’s vandalism and we should not spend one moment endorsing it.
Gasp! A popular outlet covering Seattle graffiti a decade ago 🙄
https://crosscut.com/2013/10/seattle-graffiti-artists-murals#:~:text=Graffiti%20came%20to%20Seattle%20by,exteriors%20of%20the%20train%20cars.
So the capitol hill blog is celebrating vandalizing public and private property.
Love the frogs! Fun to see them adapted to fit their spaces and their individual personalities.
The fence art at Cal is great too
Took a tour thru the Bronx and Queens with some young graffiti artists in the 80s. Some of those works involved huge panels on subway cars that told a story as they went by. The Seattle graffiti scene seems smaller than that in some other metro areas but maybe that will change.
It’s not a frog… it’s a fish…
I like the one on the streetery shed. Assumed it was commissioned by the restaurant.
This is great street art, reminds me of the old “The Bald Man is Watching You” pieces that used to be prolific on the Hill. Maybe this will “inspire” some of the assholes who spray apartment buildings, shop windows and stop signs with their stupid tags to quit. We can only hope.
I’m disappointed by how many new hill dwellers hate fun and don’t understand the amazingly fun turmoil that is urban living… As the great Samuel L Jackson said in the millennial gospel, “hold on to your butts!” 🤣
One person’s fun is another person’s heartache. Having your business, home, or property tagged again and again may be fun for the perpetrator but not for the person victimized. I’m disappointed you can’t even acknowledge that much.
I’ve had my property damaged and stolen plenty of times, it sucks and is frustrating, but you kind of just have to laugh it off and move on. I don’t approve of damaging functional signage or breaking things, but what were seeing is pent up emotional pain being expressed as street art and we would have much more impact if we focused on the root causes rather than the cosmetic outcomes of it.
If the graffiti is truly approved by the property owners or the city then fine, it’s not graffiti, it is art then. If it is people going rogue and tagging whatever they want on public or private property then those perpetrators need to be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.
I’ve lived on the hill since 2003 and there has definitely been a noticeable increase in unlawful graffiti over the past several years, most of which is just ugly and unreadable or bizarre gibberish or words. What really makes me irate is when people tag public art, sanctioned murals, and scultptures in the city. I’ve noticed a lot of that over the past several years.
I think one of my favorite pieces of art was someone writing “Art?” on the new lighted art installations in Cal Anderson. We have an increase in street art because we have an increase in people living on the street, it’s not about some change in enforcement. I continue to be perplexed at how easily people overlook the impact of a region growing at the pace Seattle has (we’ve outpaced the gold rush era) and that we’re still living through a once in a century pandemic and the ripple effects of both of those things. I hear/see lots of complaining, but not really anyone talking about solutions.
I appreciate the fact that you’re now acknowledging that graffiti, street art as you call it, has increased in the last few years. In prior posts you seemed to deny that fact. I also appreciate that you acknowledge the problem is largely associated with our homeless population, which should be obvious, but has been a difficult thing for many homeless advocates to acknowledge. The two phenomena are often colocated, but many deny the correlation.
As for addressing the issues, more enforcement of existing laws and more money for graffiti removal and assorted homeless services would be a start.
I never denied that, I just said that art will always function as a mirror to our society and is often created by those outcast from it. Graffiti and street art have always existed and have been common elements of social movements, particularly for working and underclass populations that rely more heavily on common spaces and reject or resent those who control those spaces.
Trying to remove the graffiti is like painting over black mold, sure it will look okay for a day or two, but unless the underlying mold issue is dealt with, you’re just going to have mold again soon. It’s almost useless to paint until you’ve treated the mold and fixed the conditions that caused it in the first place. Maybe that analogy will be helpful for the homeowners here 😅
No graffiti please… Or I start singing in public places, and not one wants that!
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