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Photograph by Thomas Crone
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Photograph by Thomas Crone
By all accounts, this past weekend’s Paint Louis took place without a hitch. With a small group of organizers running the event, participating city agencies signed off without worry, and the back of the event’s T-shirt was filled to capacity with sponsors. A few rainstorms squashed activities for a hour or two, especially on Saturday; and some real heat rolled in on Sunday. But those small weather hiccups weren’t an issue, according to John Harrington.
Long a driving force for the graffiti project, Harrington laughed a bit when asked if everyone was enjoying a weekend of safety and health along the floodwalls. Suggesting that everybody was drinking plenty of water, he added that “these guys are hanging off of the bottoms of railroad overpasses, so I’m not worried about them falling off of a ladder.”
This year’s event was pushed back on the calendar for a couple of reasons. One was to avoid the major heat of the summer months; that turned out to be a mostly successful bet. The time change was also to allow for an extra day of activity, factoring in Monday’s Labor Day holiday. Graffiti writers from across the country arrived on both Friday and Saturday, with Monday set as the day for work to stop. As in past years, the long floodwall was split up in advance, with different writers and crews offered space from Choteau on the north to a train yard on the south, where a natural break in the wall capped the participants at the 100-plus mark.
On Sunday afternoon, Harrington and his organizing partners—Anneliese Stoever, Alejandro Jose Sanchez, and Brian Van Hoosier—figured that about 400 to 500 viewers had passed through the area, most of them armed with digital cameras. The police and other authorities popped through, but only briefly. And the self-regulating nature of the event was holding pretty steady; even though paint cans and beer bottles were getting flung into weeds and bushes by some of the less-enlightened participants, organizers and volunteers were sweeping through the area to keep the mess to a bare minimum.
And as in previous years, Harrington, himself, went into the weekend armed with paint and a power washer to buff paint off city walls, which does still happen despite the organizers’ pleas to keep everything onsite. But that was a minimal issue this here, he said, with incidents mostly limited to a single, highway-facing wall. In short, the Paint Louis board had a solid plan and executed it for all four days of the project.
That’s a tough task, with graffiti writers coming to from all over; this year’s crop included participants hailing from Seattle to Texas to Miami, with a large group coming from Chicago. This year’s event also brought the largest number of female painters yet, up significantly from past years. As in prior years, a few uninvited writers simply pulled up and worked on the back of the walls, where industrial uses are the norm and, as Harrington suggested “only tugboats are going to see it. The city only worries about what’s on the front of the walls.”
For the remainder of this week, the bulk of Paint Louis’ 2014 output will be visible, just south of the Arch grounds. Over the next few weeks and months, paint-overs will become common and even the most-impressive works will slowly disappear. And next year, presumably, the process will begin again, as Paint Louis’ second life continues.
We visited the site each day of the event and captured some images. They don’t tell the full story, but hint at the interesting scene that was taking place at Paint Louis this past weekend. See the full set of images here.
