Graffiti was once considered a sign of urban decay, the sort of thing that might keep tourists away from a neighborhood. Now, not only is it an accepted art form, but it’s also the subject of a new tour in one of Miami’s trendiest neighborhoods, Wynwood, where legal outdoor murals by graffiti artists cover the walls near art galleries and restaurants.
The two-hour tour — which takes place on Vespas — is offered by a company called Roam Rides. It starts with a 15-minute ride from Miami Beach over the Venetian Causeway to the Wynwood Arts District, considered the mecca of Miami’s emerging arts scene, and includes four or five stops to survey the area’s best graffiti. The tour ends with lunch at a happening Wynwood restaurant.
Once considered a rough neighborhood, Wynwood has become a destination for artists from all over the world. Art galleries abound and events are held here each December as part of the Art Basel Miami Beach art fair. Wynwood is also now home to one of the world’s largest installations of murals by multiple graffiti artists.
“It’s gotten to be so pervasive and it really brightens up the neighborhood,” Kit Sullivan of Roam Rides said.
“It’s so not what you would expect of Miami,” said Jesse Bull, an economics professor who took one of Roam Rides’ recent graffiti tours. “The graffiti has kind of added to that. It livens it up and makes it fresh and artsy and I think that’s a good thing.”
Guides point out work by different local artists — such as Typoe and “Tribe Called Phresh” aka TCP — while explaining the evolution of graffiti from the days when artists plastered their names on vacant buildings and train cars as a way to gain street cred.
These days, building owners give permission to artists to spray paint their designs, and these legal pieces share the walls of dozens of neighborhood art galleries and chic restaurants. They’re easy to distinguish from illegal graffiti, which is often done fast, in secret and at night, with a single or very few colors. The sanctioned murals, in contrast, allow artists to take their time, use multiple colors and work in-depth in large spaces with elaborate details.
“It’s definitely a changing art form,” Sullivan said. “It’s gotten to the point where a lot of these guys don’t even use their names at all. They just have a certain distinctive style. You can recognize it when you see it.” For example, artist Chor Boogie’s signature work includes geometric elements and half-hidden faces, as well as an eye.
Major paint companies are even helping graffiti artists make the transition to a legitimate art form by donating spray paint.
“Graffiti has been a bad word in America for a long time. We are trying to change that,” said Jayson Moreira, co-owner of Montana Colors North America, a spray paint company based in San Francisco, which donated 8,000 cans of spray paint used to create many of the murals in Miami during Art Basel. He even helped paint a mural of Japanese girls on the side of a two-story building that was once an RC Cola plant.
The world of graffiti has its own lingo. Artists “tag” their works with their names. A “throw up” is a quick piece. A “bomb” is usually illegal work that is “thrown up” fast, often at night, in a place that’s difficult to access. “Slashing” is when an artist disrespectfully “throws up” his names over a legal piece. A legally done mural or elaborate work that took days or weeks to complete is considered a “masterpiece.”
Artists looking for a space to paint legally here may seek help from Primary Flight, an organization that has brought hundreds of artists to the streets of Wynwood.
“A lot of people don’t go to museums or aren’t art collectors or art-educated,” Primary Flight founder Books Bischof said. “If you can take the same exact image from a street and put it in the museum, it doesn’t speak as loudly as it would if it were illegally on the street corner or in a gritty part of the neighborhood.”
Oscar Montes, 36, has been painting since he was a young teenager. Better known as Trek6, the artist wanted to pay tribute to his origins and the Puerto Rican community that once made up the Wynwood area, so he painted a legal mural that included a coqui, the island frog named for the ‘ko-kee’ sound it makes at night.
Montes said he spent around US$2,000 of his own money on paint — as well as hours of his time under Miami’s hot sun — creating the mural.
Graffiti is changing, he said. “A purist would tell you it’s gotten really soft,” he said. “When I started, everything was illegal. There was [a] serious graffiti task force. They’re less aggressive now because so much of it is legit.”
But while the artists are invited to do their work on buildings and sometimes get donated materials, for the most part they are not paid. Some predict that may change, and that the Miami graffiti community may eventually find fame and profit in their designs, the way artists like Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat did in New York several decades ago.
“That generation is going to bring it to another level where one day,” said Erni Vales, who runs a studio in the arts district, “it’s going to be like Pop Art.”
Recently the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and its Mini-Me partner in the legislature, the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP), have been arguing that construction of chip fabs in the US by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) is little more than stripping Taiwan of its assets. For example, KMT Legislative Caucus First Deputy Secretary-General Lin Pei-hsiang (林沛祥) in January said that “This is not ‘reciprocal cooperation’ ... but a substantial hollowing out of our country.” Similarly, former TPP Chair Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) contended it constitutes “selling Taiwan out to the United States.” The two pro-China parties are proposing a bill that
March 9 to March 15 “This land produced no horses,” Qing Dynasty envoy Yu Yung-ho (郁永河) observed when he visited Taiwan in 1697. He didn’t mean that there were no horses at all; it was just difficult to transport them across the sea and raise them in the hot and humid climate. “Although 10,000 soldiers were stationed here, the camps had fewer than 1,000 horses,” Yu added. Starting from the Dutch in the 1600s, each foreign regime brought horses to Taiwan. But they remained rare animals, typically only owned by the government or
Institutions signalling a fresh beginning and new spirit often adopt new slogans, symbols and marketing materials, and the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) is no exception. Cheng Li-wun (鄭麗文), soon after taking office as KMT chair, released a new slogan that plays on the party’s acronym: “Kind Mindfulness Team.” The party recently released a graphic prominently featuring the red, white and blue of the flag with a Chinese slogan “establishing peace, blessings and fortune marching forth” (締造和平,幸福前行). One part of the graphic also features two hands in blue and white grasping olive branches in a stylized shape of Taiwan. Bonus points for
It starts out as a heartwarming clip. A young girl, clearly delighted to be in Tokyo, beams as she makes a peace sign to the camera. Seconds later, she is shoved to the ground from behind by a woman wearing a surgical mask. The assailant doesn’t skip a beat, striding out of shot of the clip filmed by the girl’s mother. This was no accidental clash of shoulders in a crowded place, but one of the most visible examples of a spate of butsukari otoko — “bumping man” — shoving incidents in Japan that experts attribute to a combination of gender
RSS