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At least half the artists represented by the new Seattle gallery known as BLVD have police records. They ran afoul of the law by tagging on the street. Some moved on to murals while others continued to draw in the public realm without the public's permission.
Urban outlaws? Not quite. While all in the BLVD lineup want to be respected as artists, most are happy to cash the checks when ad agencies, gamers, graphic designers and shoe companies make them offers.
"Art for art's sake" is not a motto they can get behind. Closer to their hearts might be, "Show me the money."
If there's a line between corporate illustration and fine art, they don't recognize it. "They're not selling out," said BLVD backer Kirsten Anderson. "They're sneaking in."
BLVD, pronounced boulevard, a fancy way of saying street, opens tonight in Belltown with a show titled "Groundswell." It's the best gallery in Seattle dedicated exclusively to hip-hop aesthetics.
As a movement, the visual end of hip-hop is older than many of the artists currently sheltering under its big umbrella. Emerging in New York in the early 1970s, it has rolled on, generation to generation. Although there are thousands of artists around the world embraced by their graffiti peers, only a handful have gone on to wider art-world recognition, starting with Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat, and most recently Barry McGee.
Haring and Basquiat left street art to others after fame came knocking, but McGee continues to carry aerosol cans in his coat and flash a figure or two on the wall when he feels the moment is right. In 2000, as the big-name anchor of a Consolidated Works graffiti exhibit, he had to call the curator from jail to bail him out. He decided to leave evidence of his journey on a wall in Seattle and was arrested before he recapped his can.
Graffiti was a nervous experiment for ConWorks.
For BLVD, it's the heart of the matter. Instead of once again waiting for the art world to turn its jaundiced eye toward hip-hop, deigning to cherry-pick an artist or two, BLVD is based on the premise that urban street aesthetics continue to evolve and can attract their own collector base.
Anderson, who owns and runs Roq La Rue Gallery, began to focus on graffiti after she saw Damion Hayes' terrific 2004 Bumbershoot exhibit, titled "Beyond Fresh."
She recognized the talent but didn't think her gallery was the place for it. Roq La Rue specializes in punk Surrealism. There's a small graffiti overlap, but gallery owners blur the boundaries of their product line at their peril.
The truth is, it's not her field.
That didn't stop her. With Roq La Rue flourishing in its niche, she thought she could take a chance and open another gallery next door, stepping aside to let an urban art specialist run it. She tapped Hayes as director and added two backers to help bankroll the venture: Marcus Lalario and Brian Rauschenbach.
In the entrepreneurial realm, Lalario and Rauschenbach are Seattle's hip-hop royalty. They co-own a nightclub known as The War Room. They own a hip-hop barber shop, Sal's Pike Street Barbers, and are partners in the Viceroy Lounge.
Lalario also runs Jasiri Artist Management, representing Seattle up-and-comers such as Band of Horses on Sub Pop and Maceo from De La Soul. Rauschenbach is co-founder of Graylife, a Seattle group that promotes events fusing fashion, art and music. He runs the online interactive ad agency known as Don't Blink (www.dontblink.com).
BLVD director Hayes is editor of artstash.blogspot.com, as well as a founding member of CutKulture United, a Seattle art collective.
Raised in New Mexico, he gave college a try and found it wanting. "I wasn't interested," he said. Seattle lured him because of its vibrant silk-screen poster community, including Art Chantry (now in Tacoma), Modern Dog and the Ames Brothers.
His career as a silk screener for artist-designed products soared, and his curatorial career emerged after that with a number of DIY projects.
The artists he picked for his gallery's debut are largely but not exclusively West Coast.
Highlights include Invader, who is from Paris. He makes starkly colored mosaics inspired by video games from the 1980s, most significantly, as his name indicates, Space Invader.
Four are from Seattle. Tra Selhtrow is a backward, Sly Stone spelling of Worthles Art, an assumed name that's a grandiose misstatement of the facts. His painting of birds on a twisted tree trunk has music in it, and his pale blue-on-white collage of a city scene is a tragedy with rhythm. Sam Sneke is Seattle's best-known graffiti muralist. Iosefatu Sua activates South Sea island tattoos into a living grid. Robert Hardgrave lets his forms droop, but there's real muscle in his runaway black shadows.
Four are from Los Angeles: Mear One paints like Norman Rockwell on LSD; Joshua Petker is a ghoulish, silkscreen version of Gustave Klimt; Greg "Craola" Simkins makes "Alice in Wonderland" illustrations with the dainty element missing; Joshua Krause enfolds found objects in inky designs.
Three are from San Francisco. Sylvia Ji paints lovely young women rising from the stinking wasteland of the city: Venus born from a Dumpster. Bigfoot is both the artist's assumed name and subject matter. Damon Soule paints organic landscapes through which robotic figures stumble.
There's only one New York artist, Oliver Vernon, with his surrealistically slurred alphabet lettering.
Prices range from several hundred dollars to several thousand. If BLVD and its backers connect with collectors, those prices will be rising.
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