is it still graffiti if it’s commissioned?

I attended my second Arts Alive! here in Eureka last night. The art scene here is part of the reason that I think Eureka has way more going for it than your average small town of a similar size. (That, and the number of coffee places with free wireless.)  Arts Alive! happens the first Saturday of every month, and along with the art shops and galleries, all the other businesses in Old Town showcase pieces by local artists and serve free food and drink.  Many places also have live music, and then a lot of stuff happens in the street as well: random musicians, magicians, and other street performers hang out in some of the squares or just on the sidewalk.

The big to-do last night was, in my opinion, at the Accident Gallery, which was featuring an exhibit on hip-hop art. (Which was a drastic improvement over last month’s “erotic” art exhibit, whose main messages seemed to be the somewhat tired line of “we’re artists, so we can paint people nude or having sex and thus it’s art” and the unfortunate sentiment of “hey, bdsm is trendy now, so even though we’re mostly men and our paintings all depict and encourage violent sexual acts against women, it’s all OK.” It was pretty awful.) But this time, not only did they have some great paintings and prints on display, but the gallery was surrounded by live art, and was itself being transformed:

 

I’m hoping to go by there in the next day or so and see what the final creation looks like. In addition to the graffiti artists, they had a turntable set up, and some guy who teaches kids breakdancing had his students there and they were all performing. Some of the kids were pretty good, but perhaps even more entertaining were the toddlers in the audience who decided that they, too, deserved a turn and went and rolled around in the middle of the street in an attempt to ‘breakdance.’ No photos of them, but here’s a shot of the main guy:

I think I’m going to miss Eureka. There are only two weeks left to my internship; then Ben will arrive, and we’ll spend a few days here, then a few days hiking the Lost Coast, and then it’s back to Chicago for the rest of the summer.  I feel like everything’s gone by really quickly.

And chances are that returning to school, all my coffee shop encounters will become a little less exciting.  At the Div School, I’m a lot less likely to have conversations, for instance, like the ones that just occurred while I was writing the above.  I had an older gentleman walk over and ask for my help in copying down the name of the photograph above my table, along with the artist’s info, so that he could contact her about buying it.  It’s a really pretty photo of bright orange poppies.  The man, who was rather old and using a cane, and who couldn’t read the info himself because he couldn’t see it well enough, then proceeded to tell me about how much he liked poppies.  He liked them so much, he said, that when the gardener for his apartment building mowed over the nearby poppies and sprayed them with pesticide so they wouldn’t come back, he not only planted new poppies and put a protective fence around them, but then threatened the gardener that should they be mowed over again, he would beat him with a baseball bat and make sure he did it well enough to ensure that a hospital trip was necessary.  “Oh,” I said. “Couldn’t your building just hire a different gardener?”

And then, a little later: another man (also, strangely, old and with a cane), seeing my pile of books and notes, said, “Studying, eh? I left college forty years ago and never looked back… sometimes I still have nightmares about trying to make it to a final exam on time, and not being able to find it… I always hated studying.  Glad to get out. How long until you get to be done?”  “Oh, well… I’m thinking about getting a PhD. So I’ll probably be in school a bit longer yet.”

On both accounts, their friendly expressions became somewhat quickly less friendly, and they decided that the conversation was over, sort of like I was a person so obviously unreasonable that all future discussion should be avoided.

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