The Wake

29th and Aldrich, 3:55 a.m.

A pool of light illuminates a small brick building, abandoned, but for a sign taped to the door reading: Attention gangstas, pimps and prostitutes. YOUR TIME IS OVER! Night patrols starting NOW. To the right, a large plywood board covers a partly smashed window. Like a blank canvas it waits, taunting the artists that haunt empty corners and alleys, bringing them to life with a flurry of spray paint and brushstrokes.

Ignoring the sign’s angry threats and the infrequent hum of traffic drifting from Lyndale Avenue, “27” sets down a backpack bulging with paint cans and brushes. The shadow cast by the building’s overhanging roof helps conceal his body, buried in head to ankle black, with dark brown sneakers torn near the toes. Broken hunks of glass and concrete grind beneath his feet as he steps over two empty 200 mL Peppermint Schnapps bottles with his spray paint in hand, poised for action.

He starts with the face, onion-shaped and pale pink. Next comes a torso in yellow, legs in blue and a wave of hair. A car engine roars closer—too close—and 27 is gone, gliding down the street. The vehicle passes, and he’s back at the window, legs slightly bouncing as the paint flies faster, a rhythmic pss, pss, pss sound disrupting the damp air’s cool silence.

According to the City of Minneapolis website, illegal graffiti is not art. “If it’s done on your house, would you think it’s okay?” asks Steve Johnson, Deputy Chief of the University of Minnesota Police Department. But 27 tries to avoid private property, favoring city-owned dumpsters and doorways. “I would rather hit abandoned things,” he says. Besides, “If it can be painted over, it’s not really destroyed.”

27 strides toward the glow of Lake Street’s Super America, cuts across a parking lot, and walks down a bright alley. He inspects and dismisses a dumpster, sighs, then settles before a brick-red door, already marred by several tags scrawled in black and green. Eyes narrowed in concentration, he draws a cartoon body using what’s left of a white oil bar. He smears the pigment with his right hand before lining the character in black, adding streaks of side swept hair, eyes like sideways rain drops and a nose that swirls and slides into a cheek.

A generator kicks on, sending a bolt of electricity through the air and into 27’s oil-darkened fingertips. Each strategic smudge injects life into the flat surface, until suddenly the character pops—exploding off the door, into the third dimension.

Another page on Minneapolis’ website says, “A neighborhood plagued by graffiti generates fear … creates blight … and is inconsistent with the city’s aesthetic standards.” Of course, it depends on whose aesthetics you’re talking about. While business owners and police officers often decry graffiti artists as vandals, galleries across town, from the venerable Walker Art Center to Ox-Op, a miniscule venue off-shot from Grumpy’s bar, celebrate notable graffiti artists. And then there’s Intermedia Arts—a veritable shrine to the genre, wrapped in a rainbow of paint that sends tourists digging for cameras.

“We’ve gotten really positive feedback. People like the change, new colors and activity,” says Theresa Sweetland, Programs Manager of Intermedia Arts. Once a year, a group of artists paint a mural on the building’s façade. The current design was created last summer in conjunction with “B-Girl Be,” a six-week long exhibit honoring women in hip-hop. Nineteen females, from St. Paul to Phoenix, collaborated over five days and countless cans of paint. “This is the first time we know of that a whole wall was painted by all women.”

Trail the three-color ribbon connecting the mural around Intermedia’s corners, and you’ll find the only “free wall” (a space where graffiti is tolerated by the police) left in the city, since former Minneapolis mayor Sharon Sayles Belton launched a full-scale attack on the illegal art form in 1999, prompting Sgt. Tom Stocke to shut down the Bomb Shelter, a free wall near 34th Avenue South.

Intermedia’s free walls are awash with pieces (multi-colored designs with 3-D qualities), tags (single-color monikers, quickly penned to identify the artist), a shout out (“Hi Waffle!”), and political propaganda (“End War.”) “It’s an outdoor gallery, a space for learning artists,” Sweetland says.

Across town, Tupac’s gruff alto thumps up Juxtaposition Art’s winding stairway, where co-founder Roger Cummings sits with a stack of photos and a half-full album. Adolescents bent over giant canvases wield cans of spray paint in several pictures, but don’t call the graffiti hotline just yet—it’s all part of Juxtaposition’s mission for “Guiding urban youth along paths to success through visual arts.”

“A lot of people come in who want to do graffiti. That’s not what we do,” Cummings says. “We do public art, teaching the basics of aerosol, and the history behind it.”

The soft-spoken artist’s own interest in graffiti emerged in junior high, when he wrote his Dungeon and Dragons name up and down the street. “It’s a way to acknowledge that you exist, and have something to contribute to your neighborhood,” he says. “Kids are gonna be rebellious. Some get noticed because they can fight really well, or because of promiscuity or access to drugs … This is the least of the evils. People recognize you for doing something creative and colorful, even though it’s not the best place to do it.”

For 11 years, Juxtaposition’s students, mainly teens from the North side, have been commissioned to paint murals on walls across Minneapolis, including the intergalactic farm scene on a Kemps/Marigold building. It’s a win-win partnership—the students can legally indulge their creativity in a space where they’ll be recognized, and businesses are less likely to endure tagging on an already painted surface.

29th and Aldrich, 4:24 a.m.

Birds twitter loudly in the ever-lightening sky as 27 dabs a long paintbrush into a pool of black ink. He paints with his body, bending at the knees to lower his back with each vertical stroke, until he’s crouching over the littered ground. Every new line heightens the contrast—between the pink face, yellow torso and blue legs—with the brown plywood background.

Plastic gloves protect 27’s already-stained fingers as he seduces the fresh paint into position, blending and shading with an experienced touch. At 4:31 a.m., he adds his lucky number—27—to the corner of his canvas, then vanishes back into the streets.