By BOB NORBERG
AND JEREMY HAY
THE PRESS DEMOCRAT (Santa Rosa, CA)
A Santa Rosa man suspected of being the prolific tagger "El Barto," whose widespread graffiti has caused about $100,000 in damage, was arrested Friday, police said.
xxxx, an 18-year-old Santa Rosa Junior College student, is suspected of several hundred graffiti incidents throughout Sonoma County and in other parts of the Bay Area during the past year, making him one of the region's most active vandals, Santa Rosa Police Sgt. Lisa Banayat said.
PEX, Street Artist
BEN MORGAN, Director, Quality of Life (Graffiti Film)
JOHN DOFFING, Founder, START SOMA + START MOBILE Art Galleries
MACHAELA M. HOCTOR, Deputy City Attorney, San Francisco City Attorney's Office
MOHAMMED NURU, Chair, San Francisco's Graffiti Advisory Board
JONATHON KEATS, Art and Culture Critic; Visual Arts Critic, San Francisco Magazine - Moderator
This essay was originally written for Josh MacPhee's Stencil Pirates book. Parts of the text were used in the book's final run, but here it is in its entirety. Note: this is in no way a comprehensive history of stencil art. Hopefully it is the beginning of the artform's history.
"We need to learn how to spread the vision of liberation and life everywhere in humble, small, invisible ways. Like grass slowly growing up through the cracks in the concrete, perhaps our counterinformation can eventually sneak up on the mighty machine and topple it."
- PB Floyd, Slingshot, Summer 2003
David Willis just emailed scans of drawings, artifacts, and photos of his 1976, Street Lightnin' Gang, stencil-graffiti bust (the written story is here):
David Wills in Street Lightnin' Gang uniform outside Camden Town Underground station
Wills sprays the traffic light control box in Notting Hill Gate.
