Elizabeth Miller
Rose B Simpson says give graffiti artists a voice at Fort Marcy Park.
Santa Fe's art scene holds more than the works that adorn galleries lining Canyon Road, and there's talk of opening up a new space to showcase some of those other, younger, voices. The single portrait that looks out onto the fields at Fort Marcy Park has sparked a conversation about turning the entire side of Fort Marcy Recreation Complex into a legal wall, a place where local young graffiti artists could come to paint.
"Young people are so lost and so unseen and so uncared for and so unnourished and so unnurtured that they turn to drugs and alcohol, domestic violence," says the portrait's painter, Rose B Simpson. "Then there are some of those young people out there painting their names huge on trains, on walls, in places, and they step back and say, 'See how big I am and how colorful I am and how beautiful I am. I am someone. Take that. You can't hold me down.' And it's a beautiful thing. So why don't we nurture it?"
The purpose of the legal wall would be twofold: to provide alternatives to painting on places where it's unwanted, and to show these young people they're welcomed into a community that can often feel like it's got no room for their aesthetic.
Simpson knows how that goes. She was once a young person in Santa Fe trying to find herself and her place in the community, and she found it in the underground youth scene in Albuquerque, where she attended the University of New Mexico.
"The graffiti community is very much a tribe, it's very much a place where people could feel like they could speak...A lot of young people are drawn to underground youth cultures, looking for an attachment to culture, because that's what's been taken away from us, so we build new tribes," she says.
Simpson is close friends with filmmaker Razelle Benally, who was awarded a Sundance Institute Native Filmmakers Lab grant to make the short film I Am Thy Weapon, which was shot around Santa Fe this summer. With the city's permission, she asked Simpson to paint the mural for a moment in the story in which a young Navajo woman makes a graffiti portrait of her now-dead sister to come to terms with that loss and to find her voice.
Rather than paint over it when the movie was finished, Santa Fe's Art in Public Places Committee accepted Simpson's painting as a donation to the city's public art collection. She returned this fall with the idea of opening the rest of the wall up to other graffiti artists who might want to paint there. Rob Carter, city parks and recreation director, says the city could end up with several graffiti walls.
"We're really preliminary, but the idea is really to give the kids a new opportunity, kind of controlled, with making sure that gang signs or gang stuff and swear words are not used, with the idea that every few months, we'd go in and paint it and have it restarted again."
Matthew Chase-Daniel, local artist, co-founder/co-curator of Axle Contemporary and member of the Art in Public Places Committee, first brought the idea to the committee in early September—the same meeting in which the group discussed how to expand the criteria for what the Public Art Committee can fund to spend down an accrued budget of $360,000.
"There's a lot of different ways that art is being made in the world these days, and what our committee is very actively trying to do is find ways to bring it that are relevant today, so street art, graffiti art are one of those ways," Chase-Daniel says.
Simpson half-jokingly calls herself a telephone line between cultures—a biracial kid who grew up with a foot in either culture, who now finds herself straddling the graffiti world where she feels much at home, the lowrider culture of her hometown Española and the highbrow attitudes of places like the Denver Art Museum, which has shown her work. She swaps the gallery opening-mandated high heels for a track jacket, backward baseball cap and nose piercing. She's picking up the phone, essentially, and asking Santa Fe how friendly they want to get with these young people they're so worried about losing year after year.
"We are an art capital, why aren't we fostering this type of art? Why aren't we fostering the youth arts? What we care about in the art world is so, so limited," she says. "We complain that all our youth are leaving—well, why? Because we don't make anything here for them to stick around for."
Legal walls are typically created after approaching the owner of a large wall and asking for permission to paint on the space. There's a code of ethics—of asking the person running the wall where and when to paint and avoiding painting, for example, at a business when cars parked adjacent to the wall might be hit with overspray. It's a chance for these young artists to express themselves, and test themselves, and earn respect among their peers.
"Part of the respect is you don't get painted over," Simpson says. "Kids are like, 'Oh I like that,' so they leave it. And then you're like 'Wow, that's fresh.' And if your stuff sucks, it gets painted over, so it gives you incentive to get better."
Officials at the Santa Clara Pueblo created a legal wall at the skate park that's become a hub of activity.
"They're not painting anywhere else, because this is an epicenter of that creative energy, and it's really cool to see kids from the community and the tribe really claim the space and say, 'This is mine,'" Simpson says. That's the benefit, too, for city agencies tasked with graffiti removal. "The long-standing argument is if you give people a place to paint, they won't paint on your shit."
At Fort Marcy, she sees the possibility for a combination of a permanent mural and a curated rotation of artists' work, an evolving piece of artwork that continues to reflect and communicate with the community.
It's a way, for the city to say, "I see you. I care about you, and I want to hear what you have to say; you're a part of my community, and you're valued in my community, and wow, look at what you did," she says. "That changes the community. That changes a lot of things. It transforms the city's value system, through media. That's what art is."
