The World is Their Canvas
Posted: July 25, 2007
Vivid colors pop on an otherwise bland concrete surface. A green-skinned, tattooed skateboarder with a red goatee look as if he could jump right off the pavement.
This is the world that St. Ambrose student Nile Foster and four other area graffiti artists have created at Davenport’s riverfront skate park with the blessing of the city. The sophomore art major from Davenport spent several days in late June on the commissioned project, taking the “tagging”—as illegal graffiti is called—on city property and morphing it into one of the newest forms of art.
Nile himself didn't enjoy seeing the swear words and gang signs spray-painted on virtually every surface of the 32,000-square-foot skatepark. Concerned that the city would limit access to the skatepark to deter tagging, Nile’s group approached the city about creating “managed graffiti.” Part of their plan included having the artists on call to paint over illegal tagging within 24 hours, removing any incentive for tagging.
The skate park before managed graffiti
The opportunity to further hone his craft is exciting for Nile, who became interested in graffiti as an impressionable fifth-grader. He remembers seeing graffiti murals in other cities and thinking, “Somebody was able to put something so beautiful up, and they did it legally.”
Raking his hand through his blond hair, he talks about how graffiti itself has “tagged” the art world. “We make the world our canvas,” he says. Instead of brushes or pencils, a graffiti artist’s tools are aerosol cans of paint.
It can be a complex medium, with different nozzles regulating the spray, and limitless color possibilities. Nile calls the sometimes illegible words that are a part of this art form “modern-day hieroglyphics. We've developed our own type of calligraphy. It’s hard to read, but that’s because it’s camouflaged. It’s by us, for us.”
In fact, the practice of tagging developed hand-in-hand with the underground culture of skateboarding, BMX riding and inline skating. Bikers and skaters will do whatever it takes and go wherever they need to in search of the perfect concrete surface to perform their death-defying tricks. In order to keep skaters and bikers from making many public places their personal playground, cities are building legal skateparks. When they do, they’re also creating canvasses.
“Most of the bikers and skaters appreciate it,” Nile says of the legal tagging at the skatepark. “They’d rather have that than a fence around it.”