Art wars on urban canvas

THE canvas was a neglected 19th century building on the edge of SoHo, its brick exterior layered with spray paint and wheat-pasted images: a robot, a smiling heart, a series of red lipstick smudges, a man with menacing eyes aiming a gun, a life-size confused-looking Waldo.

For the last three decades, the five-story building on Spring Street served as an outdoor museum for graffiti and then illegal street art -- contrasting forms of expression that involve vandalizing public spaces.

In the 1970s, the walls had been claimed by graffiti crews made up mostly of poor kids who christened the building by tagging their street names.

Two decades later, artists had moved into this industrial area called Nolita and created lofts. It was one of the few affordable places left for them to live in Manhattan. A new class of graffiti known as street art began showing up on the building and elsewhere in the city’s gentrifying neighborhoods.

It was practiced by art school students and others from middle-class backgrounds. Using stencils, posters, stickers and wheat paste, they left intricate portraits and images on the building’s splashed-up facade, often covering graffiti tags.

Last year, a developer bought the 11 Spring St. building to convert it into condominiums that would sell for millions. The message to the artists seemed clear: In this city caught in the grip of gentrification, affordable neighborhoods had become as impermanent as the graffiti.

The building on Spring Street would be forced to shed its storied skin, erasing the street art and tags. But before it did, dozens of street artists from New York and across the world agreed to convene there in December for a final tribute. With the new owner’s blessing, they spent two months covering the inside and outside with provocative, sometimes beautiful images.

One artist created a poster of two women sewing. Someone put up an image of a wrinkled, obese baby with a leash around his neck. Another artist painted a dollar bill with George Washington’s face replaced by a skeleton with antlers.

The art would be displayed for four days. The show’s opening day came. In a few hours, the public would begin lining up to see the art. As the sun rose, some uninvited guests arrived.

They obscured their faces with hooded sweatshirts. They dipped rollers into buckets of silver paint. One climbed a ladder. Another pulled out a can of spray paint. They went over the street artists’ work in gigantic block letters, covering one wall almost completely as passersby shouted at them to stop.

It might have been the biggest tag in New York. The letters read “DYM,” the initials of the graffiti crew Demented Young Minds, which has been around for 20 years. Its members grew up in New York before many of the neighborhoods were claimed by people they called “yuppies” and “hipsters.” Underneath their tag, they wrote a message: “Take it from the pros, street art ain’t graffiti.”

Some bloggers and artists reacted in disbelief. Many couldn’t understand why the graffiti crew would deface street art.

In response, a DYM member who goes by the moniker HOST18 replied online: “These people continually put their art over real graffiti, completely devaluing what us real writers do.”

HOST18 is a 30-year-old graffiti writer who oversees his crew’s website, brooklyngods.com. He doesn’t reveal his real name publicly and often covers his goateed face with bandanas and hoods. He grew up in public housing projects in Brooklyn in an Italian American family. His crew is a diverse group -- members come from Trinidadian, Haitian and Polish working-class backgrounds.

“Anytime I see street art over graffiti, I go over it,” he said recently at a Starbucks in a Brooklyn neighborhood that has become trendier and pricier over the last decade. “I’m going to war, you know?”

Many street artists who moved into low-income areas, he said, treat traditional graffiti as colorful backdrops, but not as art. Most street artists don’t have regard for the history and danger -- fights with other crews or clashes with police -- associated with New York’s tagging lifestyle, he said, or the neighborhoods where it grew up, the same areas where poor people are squeezed out to make room for people with more money.

“In New York, it’s a thing where soon there will be no middle class,” the graffiti writer said. Street art “is just a reflection of what’s going on in New York as a whole. To me, it’s sad, because I know what New York used to be.”

TRADITIONAL graffiti is a bold style of writing done with spray paint or markers. It represents a rebellious street culture that thrived in New York in the 1970s and 1980s, at a time when the city was coping with soaring crime. Graffiti earned worldwide fame as its pioneers tagged subway cars and buildings here.

Graffiti writers practice varying styles: tagging, which is the most basic way to sign a name; throw-ups, which layer paint in one color and outline letters in another; blockbusters, or block letters; and wild style, a more elaborate style of letters blended with different colors.

City officials have spent millions to curtail traditional graffiti, and in gentrified and commercial areas it has declined along with other crime.

Street art flourishes in neighborhoods that are considered bohemian and trendy, whereas graffiti still shows up everywhere -- though less prominently in heavily policed places. Graffiti is most often found in poor and industrial areas, where it is less likely to be removed. But some graffiti writers say it’s thrilling to tag a crowded touristy area like Times Square because the harder it is to paint, the more respect they earn.

Much of the public considers graffiti abrasive and difficult to decipher, but street art is often seen as aesthetically pleasing. Anyone caught doing either can be arrested for vandalism.

When street art begins to show up in a neighborhood, it is a sign that it is becoming safer for artists and outsiders to move in, said Jake Dobkin, who collects images for his website, streetsy.com. “That is the first step in the gentrification cycle.”

The artists’ presence attracts young professionals and middle-class people who want to live in trendy areas. Multimillion-dollar condos usually follow, pricing more people out of housing, and pushing them farther out into a widening halo around Manhattan.

Walking through Manhattan’s Lower East Side, Ace Boon Kunle, 27, founder of a graffiti crew called Irak, talked of the transforming neighborhood, stopping at a brick building a few blocks east of one of the city’s upscale neighborhoods, and a few blocks west of public housing projects. Its rooftop had his tag, “Earsnot,” which he had spray-painted a decade ago. As he reminisced, construction workers tore down the building next door.

“They’re going to turn this into a Candy Land-like playground for the wealthy,” said Kunle, who recalled growing up and getting into trouble on the streets before they were overrun by cafes, bars and lofts.

He turned onto a narrow street. He spotted a black-and-white street art poster depicting a life-size shirtless man with a blurred face. The street artist had pasted the image over dozens of black, yellow and white graffiti tags.

Kunle walked toward the poster and splashed his hot tea over it.

IN the late 1990s, art school graduates Patrick McNeil and Patrick Miller moved to New York. The childhood friends from Arizona became fascinated by street art on the walls of Lower Manhattan.

Some images were abstract; others had undertones of activism and anti-capitalist messages. Street artists have replaced billboard images advertising iPods with dancing skeletons, or pasted Andre the Giant’s face over a Starbucks logo. Others have altered signs inside train cars from “do not lean on door” to “do not fall in love,” or turned the McDonald’s Golden Arches into dripping streaks of slime.

With its roots in Europe, street art is often practiced by people who learned about it overseas, saw pictures online or noticed it on the streets of Manhattan and Brooklyn and wanted to try their own styles.

“They’re not 16-year-old kids with a pen in their hand,” said Marc Schiller, who runs woostercollective.com, which documents street art from around the world, and who organized an art-show tribute to the Spring Street building. “They are artists that really are interested in the city and they look at it as a canvas.”

McNeil and Miller experimented with their own street art, calling themselves Faile. The pair’s first images were of nude females, which they wheat-pasted in the middle of the night against the swirling backdrops of graffiti tags. They returned days later to discover the paper had ripped or crumbled in certain spots, sometimes adding precious details and character to the image.

“It was an art form that had a life,” McNeil said. “It would transform into things that you didn’t expect because of the weather and people interacting with it.”

The two were arrested a few times, and like many beginning street artists, they did not understand that going over a tag could mean war. The artists, who have a studio in Brooklyn, are more careful now. They display less of their work on public walls, focusing instead on creating pieces on traditional canvases and other backgrounds to sell and display in art shows around the world.

They participated in the showcase at the Spring Street building, though they did not get upset when DYM and Irak crews tagged over the artists’ work. They have not mourned the building’s conversion into condos.

In New York, they said, nothing is permanent, nothing is precious -- that is part of its allure.

“Whether it’s the art or whether it’s the buildings, New York is constantly changing,” McNeil said with a shrug. “Nothing stays the same.”

“Same as the art,” said Miller. “One day it’s there, and one day it’s not.”

erika.hayasaki@latimes.com