AAD 550 Group A, Module 1: The Portland Street Art Alliance and Legitimizing Graffiti

by Shannon Barry, Shawn Li, Nikki Silvestrini, and Sarah Wyer

 

The Portland Street Art Alliance (PSAA) is a volunteer-run organization based in Portland, Oregon. Their mission is “to activate Portland’s streets by promoting creative interventions in public spaces” (pdxstreetart.org). PSAA advocates for rebranding graffiti as art and is trying to promote free expression throughout the city. It was founded in 2012 by Tiffany Conklin and Tomas Valladares, who now serve as Directors of the organization (pdxstreetart.org). PSAA uses a variety of transmedia to achieve their mission and goals, including an expansive website, YouTube videos, links to various resources, and the murals they help to create. While they work with many community and local government organizations, PSAA does not have a regular source of funding instead relying upon donations and kickstarter campaigns to fund their projects. They serve as a touchpoint for artists, businesses, and people in the Portland community and beyond that are interested in participating in street art.

A vibrant arts scene is a vital ingredient in helping the city of Portland attract creative professionals and artists who want to live in a vibrant, accessible, dynamic, and safe city. PSAA’s objectives are to advocate, research, educate, network, and activate street art (pdxstreetart.wordpress.org).  They are passionate about the development of graffiti, while protecting and promoting innovative graffiti art. They organize various activities and research projects connecting many people in the street art community while providing creative spaces for artists and legitimizing graffiti as art. For example, the Portland Street Art Alliance hosted a guided bicycle tour of the new 2014 Forest for the Trees murals that began sprouting up all over town in August 2014. Forest for the Trees is a not-for-profit, public mural project that promotes public visual expression; collaboration; and community engagement with contemporary art and the creative process.

PSAA also tries to provide more free creation space for artists. Last year, PSAA submitted a proposal to Portland Parks and Recreation to adopt a new public art program called parkART, where rotating public art murals are painted on racquetball walls. In the same year, PSAA is working with City Repair and the Portland Department of Transportation to plan a “Portland Free Space”. Portland Free Space will be a designated place for free public expression using biodegradable wheat-pasted paper art, where people can share their art and ideas with others.

Most recently Conklin attended the region’s largest anti-graffiti event, the annual Portland Graffiti Abatement Summit. In one presentation, PSAA was accused of promoting vandalism and crime and the audience was told to ignore PSAA’s mission statement describing it as meaningless academic jargon. After that, PSAA clarified on their website: “PSAA has worked to build bridges and relationships within the city. We want to help promote all forms of public art in Portland…PSAA exists because we feel passionately about the public’s right to free speech, public space, and the city. We see these rights as essential…and the vast majority of graffiti in Portland as a sign of urban revitalization, vibrancy, energy, and urban culture-building…. and recognize it as a valid form of self-expression” (pdxstreetart.org). This statement best describes PSAA’s commitment to the world of street art.

For any art network, participants are vastly important. PSAA has innumerable participants.

Many are directly involved while others are linked indirectly through products and advertising. Those directly involved include the artists themselves, those in PSAA who are working with the artists to get permits, and those advertising the work. PSAA does not differentiate between types of street art  (sticker art, installations, mural art, etc.) which allows for the participation of a wide variety of street artists. Additionally all of the volunteers at PSAA, those who designed and run the website, the two directors, the five member advisory committee, and the five contributing members. There are many other people involved in various ways. The business owners and their landlords who donate walls for artists to work on are essential participants. The diverse audiences are an integral part of this specific art world, people who are patrons of the businesses with murals, people who simply walk by, those who live in the area, and even those who hate the art and think of it as defacement. This in turn involves the authorities that be, police and other authority figures, that disapprove of graffiti as an art form. The news networks that cover the art, in either positive or negative lights, are directly participating by spreading the story around all types of media. In an even more nebulous sense those involved in making the tools of the trade are participants, the people who make and sell spray paint used by various artists working with PSAA.

In addition to the people who participate, there are various organization who are linked to PSAA; on their website they have links to legalwalls.net, the Regional Arts and Cultural Council (RACC), as well as other organizations that support art in the Portland area. From their website we can add that PSAA works with City Repair, RACC, Portland Department of Transportation for some of their projects. Portland Street Art Alliance’s website has multitudinous resources. They have over 50 books listed on their “Further Reading” list and each of these books contribute to the ideology. Each article on their website involves more people as participants; the author, their readers, their constituencies. It is truly impossible to create an exhaustive list. Participants whether directly engaged in the art or not, are vastly important to the Portland Street Art Alliance. (pdxstreetart.org)

Becker states that an art world is the result of the cooperation of people “producing patterns of collective activity” (p. 1). This is clear with PSAA which is completely dependent on the collaborative efforts of its’ volunteers to fulfill PSAA’s mission and values. PSAA advocates for the public right of free expression, desires to heighten public awareness regarding the value of street art, connect and build relationships with people both in and out of the street art community, and create dynamic spaces in which art can be sustained. These objectives cannot be reached unless PSAA has a strong support system of people who are willing to commit their time and energy in preserving and promoting the value of street art.

PSAA’s volunteer structure can be broken down because as Becker states, “Each kind of person who participates in the making of art works, then, has a specific bundle of tasks to do” (p. 11). The PSAA directors Tiffany Conklin and Tomas Valladares, for example, both have Masters degrees in related fields: Conklin in Urban Studies and Public Space, Valladares in Arts Administration and Media Management. They do radio interviews, post on the website, facilitate the connection of artists to interested building owners, organize events, and are the public faces of PSAA such as Conklin’s attending of Portland Graffiti Abatement Summit mentioned above. One could argue that by the very nature of Conklin and Valladares’ task bundling they are, though their aesthetic definitions are very broad, critics of this art world. In their founding of PSAA in 2012 they built an aesthetic system that places value on street art and joined the growing number of organizations dedicated to the sustainability and practice of street art (Becker, p. 132).

Street Art constitutes an art world, but one usually apart from institutional ideas of fine art or convention. Graffiti and other types of street art are already loaded with interpretation and meaning. Since PSAA values street art as a genre of artistic practice, part of the organization’s struggle is to legitimize street art in the face of opposing conventional aesthetics. As Becker states, “In general, breaking with existing conventions and their manifestations in social structure and material artifacts increases artists’ trouble and decreases the circulation of their work, but at the same time increases their freedom to choose unconventional alternatives and to depart substantially from the customary practice” (p. 34).

This struggle is enhanced by the collectively determined attitude towards street art. Many participating street artists in Portland are local as non-local artists have found it difficult to navigate the surrounding legalities of Portland’s complicated street art history (pdxstreetart.wordpress.org). This is evident when compared to public art space either locally or globally. Eugene, Oregon, for example, has a free art wall and large scale participation in graffiti at the now demolished EMU and the United States has just 108 documented walls while Europe has well over 1,000 (legal-walls.net) This is impressive to think about when considering the geographic size differences of these regions. The makers and shapers who decide what constitutes as art, whether they be institutions or art critics or your preconceived idea of real art versus non, do not open the doors to their criteria easily. As Becker notes, “[Aestheticians] do not want to take an inclusive approach to art, counting in everything that conceivably might have some interest or value. They look, instead, for a defensible way to leave some things out” (p. 137). In this kind of artistic climate, PSAA has two options. They can either try to fit street art into existing artistic conventions, or they can create a new convention and rebrand an appropriate aesthetic of graffiti.

        PSAA has picked the second option. While the art itself can be intellectually separated from its most common locale, being able to fuse graffiti and its natural environment, the streets and walls of cities and towns, is an artistically acceptable right that PSAA actively fights for. Leading aestheticians have historically fought the notion that art is for everyone, both creators and experiencers. They seek to be exclusive and use institutional theory to provide logic and logical fallacies for their selections. PSAA attempts to promote and support street art in Portland despite the rebuffs of legal and social backlash. As they mention on their website, “By definition, public space is supposed to be open to everyone. The quality of our public spaces, and the degree of access we have to them, speaks volumes about what we, as a society, believe to be important.”

Becker, H. (1982). Aesthetics, Aestheticians, and Critics. In Art worlds. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Becker, H. (1982). Art Worlds and Collective Activity. In Art worlds. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Legal Walls. (n.d.). Retrieved October 9, 2014, from www.legal-walls.net

Portland Street Art Alliance. (n.d.). Retrieved October 7-12, 2014.