Street Art at The Gallery

The usually-white walls of Olympic College’s The Gallery at OC were covered in spray paint Oct. 14 when the gallery opened for an 18-day show featuring street artists from Seattle and Tacoma.
The gallery walls are currently covered in what some would consider property-damaging street art, the majority of it created with spray paint. Political messages dot the walls amidst colorful murals and stylized graphics.
“We wanted to ask the question, ‘What is street art?’” said Maria Weichmen, chair of the gallery’s faculty committee.
The most common art form used by the eight invited artists, none of whom used their names but signed their work with their aliases, was graffiti art, but street art includes other arts focused on presenting art to the masses in an informal, and often unexpected, way. Flash mobs, poster art and street performances are types of street art, but graffiti art is the most popular form, possibly because it seems to give a voice to an otherwise unheard group.
“If we don’t have property, if we don’t have access, if we don’t have voice, we feel that lack of voice,” said Ian Sherman, a faculty member on the gallery committee. “And that’s one of the places, at least in my interpretation, where street art and graffiti is coming from.”
The gallery committee invited eight street artists to come and spend a day tagging the gallery. They had not seen the space they had to work in before they started, and there was no time to plan.
“We’ve broken some boundaries, maybe a few rules, I’m not sure,” said Weichmen, “depending on what your rules are.”
The gallery didn’t break any rules of the college, as the college authorized the work and the painters wore respirators while working. To keep the display true to graffiti’s underground roots, the artists were told by the committee they could use their allotted space to create anything they wanted, without the college or its representatives trying to hide any coarse language or graphic images.
“I just told these eight artists that we were not going to censor them, that they could use any language, any image they wanted, stopping short of hate language,” Weichmen said. “Even then, if you look around this room, there is not one profane word, not even one subtly offensive image. They had the option, but they respected their audience, they respected their space.”
The self-censorship of the art didn’t stop the artists from using their art to make a statement, a message being sent from around the country, and more locally from the Capital Hill campus of Seattle Central Community College, the current location of Occupy Seattle.
“It wasn’t that surprising to me that the narratives from Occupy Wall Street ended up on (the gallery’s) walls. ‘We are the 99 percent,’ ‘Take back this that was taken.’” Sherman said.
The gallery committee closed the first week of the exhibit with a panel discussion about what street art is Nov. 18 in the gallery. Eric Hill, a guard from OC Safety and Security and one of the three members of the panel, said the style of art is different from the graffiti he encounters in his line of work.
“I walked in here Monday morning, … and I said ‘who got in here, what happened?’” said Hill.
The walls of the art gallery will be repainted over the winter break to prepare the space for their next show.