Street Art
Bisbee, AZ, October 28, 2010
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Whenever I visit my sister Virginia in Southern Arizona, I always try to make it down to Bisbee. I was born there on July 6, 1948, and have no childhood memories of the place because we moved away to Turkey when I was a toddler. My sister Virginia was about twelve when we left Arizona, and has fond memories of the place where she attended grade school. As an adult she lived most of her life in Iowa, but when she and her husband retired, the pull of the place was so strong they returned to Arizona and settled into a desert bungalow in Green Valley.
In the fall of 2010 I was once again visiting my birthplace for a day's touristic adventure. Ever the practical man, I wanted to continue my postcard series (see Houston Time Portal), re-photographing old postcards of historic places. |
I had started this series some years earlier right here in Bisbee, then returned home to Houston to perfect the process over the ensuing several years. Rephotographing Houston was very different from Bisbee, a place hardly altered by the passage of time, and I had learned a lot about how to carry out my project. I wanted to return to Bisbee to correct my novice mistakes, so I came with cameras at hand and a dozen old postcards. At first I rambled about town on my own, leisurely taking pictures of the Post Office, Bank of Bisbee, Copper Queen Hotel, Central School. We met back up as I was photographing the site of the former Union Station, and I had her place her fashionable hat on a spot on a vehicle windshield that was rendered too "hot" by a reflection from the sun overhead.
Virginia was the sister I most admired as a child, an "artist" who typified the calling for me as a young scientist. Mary, five years old when I was born, was too close to me in age and we occasionally were sibling rivals. Ethel, sixteen at my birth, had married her high school sweetheart from Bisbee and was all grown up by the time I have any clear memories of her. Diane, nearly eighteen, left Bisbee from the same Railroad Station I was photographing the summer I was born to go to nursing school; she was a far-away relative too busy with adult issues to sister me when I was growing up. But Virginia was my idol as a kid, she treating me with great indulgence. Now artists both, we sauntered past the Brewery as she reminisced about youth and the fickleness of memory. We came upon a strange assemblage of figures stenciled on a wall beneath our view of the Pythian Castle.
"What does it mean?" she asked me.
I scrutinized the figures and ventured, "It looks like an anti-war statement to me, but which war is not clear. The oppressing soldiers are red, white, and blue, but they look Asian, and what are the strange hats? Maybe it is some statement about Chinese retaliation. I just don't know." Bisbee had become something of a Hippy refuge in the last years of the 20th century, and there was still a significant presence in the town of highly liberal opinions, at least compared to most of Arizona. Such a message would not be unwelcome in a community of former draft dodgers.
We continued to ponder as we stared at the stenciled wall. For us it was clearly not vandalism, despite its unauthorized presence there. We appreciated it more than any gallery piece we had encountered in the fashionable arts district of the town that day. I can't remember any of those pieces now, but this piece continues to intrigue.
Virginia was the sister I most admired as a child, an "artist" who typified the calling for me as a young scientist. Mary, five years old when I was born, was too close to me in age and we occasionally were sibling rivals. Ethel, sixteen at my birth, had married her high school sweetheart from Bisbee and was all grown up by the time I have any clear memories of her. Diane, nearly eighteen, left Bisbee from the same Railroad Station I was photographing the summer I was born to go to nursing school; she was a far-away relative too busy with adult issues to sister me when I was growing up. But Virginia was my idol as a kid, she treating me with great indulgence. Now artists both, we sauntered past the Brewery as she reminisced about youth and the fickleness of memory. We came upon a strange assemblage of figures stenciled on a wall beneath our view of the Pythian Castle.
"What does it mean?" she asked me.
I scrutinized the figures and ventured, "It looks like an anti-war statement to me, but which war is not clear. The oppressing soldiers are red, white, and blue, but they look Asian, and what are the strange hats? Maybe it is some statement about Chinese retaliation. I just don't know." Bisbee had become something of a Hippy refuge in the last years of the 20th century, and there was still a significant presence in the town of highly liberal opinions, at least compared to most of Arizona. Such a message would not be unwelcome in a community of former draft dodgers.
We continued to ponder as we stared at the stenciled wall. For us it was clearly not vandalism, despite its unauthorized presence there. We appreciated it more than any gallery piece we had encountered in the fashionable arts district of the town that day. I can't remember any of those pieces now, but this piece continues to intrigue.
A sampling of street artists in Houston
COOLIDGE
BigAnt
Unattributed Miscellaneous
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REVOLT
GARRO
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EYESORE
Brush Painted walls
ROBOT
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Street Art's Cultural Roots
I became aware of Keith Haring when I was teaching Genetics Lab, long before I had any artistic pretensions. Keith Haring contrasts street art and gallery art: "It's always the most pure situation for someone coming across and then running into it and not knowing where it came from or how it got there or if it's even supposed to be art. One of the most limiting situations in showing things in a gallery or museum is it's already in a situation where all the walls are white and people are sort of conditioned to thinking that anything inside there is art." (see NPR interview) |
