RIP Michael Jackson and IZ the Wiz. (we've hidden their names, a No Prize if you find them)

5101 Market. The Start of the Letter. Two best responses came from A) Chuck The Barber “Is this some jail issue?” and B) a young lady that said “If someone did that for me I’d like it better than being taken to Red Lobster”

SIGNS! photo by SUX ICY

They Like Signs!

After I stopped writing my name on stuff, I made a lateral move into sign painting. The materials were essentially the same, (enamel on metal), the colors were similar,( bold and garish are best) but the effect was totally different. When you paint graffiti, you are an outsider that is broadcasting your signal to the center of the community. When you paint a sign, you are broadcasting from the center of the community to the periphery. Graffiti is a youth testing out a microphone, Signs speak into the mike eloquently and with authority. Even as a teenager I could see a huge difference in how my work was perceived versus the painted signs that commanded respect. 

There is an amazing painted sign tradition that permeates the landscape of West Philadelphia. I’ll be adding many more pictures in time, but look at these and see the direction we’re going to take this project. We’ll be reviving the dead arts of  sign painting and wall-writing; The bricks were painted 40-80 years ago and they remind us that West Philly was a powerful place of mercantile style and industrial might, and could be again. The rents are certainly right, the community is certainly ready.

Hello, My name is Steve Powers, I was born in Lankenau Hospital, but curiously enough, on my birth certificate they make a point of listing my birthplace as Overbrook, although I’m 100 percent certain that Lankenau is in Lower Merion.  Lower Merion’s price for rejecting me? Stolen Polo garments off the clothes lines and stolen paint and bikes out of the garages of the township. We’re even now, thanks.  My mother grew up in a rented apartment in a good looking building at Lancaster and Drexel, and by the time I hit the scene, had moved a  block and a half away in a rundown slum house with 24 (yeah) cats and 5 humans that were doing their best not to interact with each other. we were joined by my little sister a little more than a year later, and our bizarro world Brady Bunch was complete. Dad we called Fad (pronounced Fahd), after my oldest brother’s mispronounciation of dad. It was an awesome name, because he wasn’t much of a father, and he passed through my life like a fad. Havent seen that fool in 25 years. he split when I was 15, when my latest and greatest interest was an activity that demanded that I have a distracted single-parent unable to grasp that I was running wild (well, mild) at all hours. So Earl, thanks for leaving, really, no hard feelings. and Mary Jane, Thanks for staying and keeping the lights on for when I (eventually) got home.

So once my dad kicks the bricks, I go out and find me a real role model. a stand-up guy that’s got his head screwed on tight and good data to unselfishly share with me, for nothing more than the paint I would supply for the lesson. Suroc, aka Nick-E-Dee, aka Falcon. pka Buford Youthword, a standup guy from Avondale street, showed me the ways and means of making a name for yourself. We painted this rooftop in 1989, well into my 5th year of marking surfaces, and 2 years after I painted my first rooftop on Market Street, a building Suroc took me to paint. The rooftops were the perfect location for work. Largely forgotten spaces on the tops of buildings that youth would climb and put their personalities on display for the passing trains and the pasengers who passed their commute looking at the names that encapsulated those personalities; RAZZ, ESTRO, MR BLINT, CREDIT, CLYDE, RAN and MANIAC to mention a few.  Suroc and I spoke our piece alongside those guys and added to the visual cocaphony that was Market Street in the 80’s.

One day in the mid-90’s it all got buffed brown. Nobody remembers when exactly, but it happened, efficiently, completely permanently.  I find it interesting that no one noticed that a hundred full color walls suddenly went brown. That was always the problem with graffiti, for all it’s efforts to communicate, most people don’t understand it and if people don’t understand, they don’t take ownership, and your  name gets taken down like a campaign poster in December. In our fame-addled America it’s easy to understand the motivation to write your name,  a lot harder to appreciate the unreadable result. If you did make your name easy to process, you leave your audience cold after the 10th time they’ve seen your name, never mind the 100th or the 1000th. “I get it, you’re everywhere except the electric chair, (shout out to JS), but I don’t care.” So in creating Love Letter, thinking about the medium of marking that made me the artist I am today,  thinking about the amazing West Philadelphia that gave me the inspiration to do it, and finally the commuters that ride the train, I’m looking to make colors and words happen on these rooftops and walls in a way that people will take ownership of the work. So if the buffman comes back around, people will shout him down.

A Love Letter meant for one but with meaning for all is being painted from 63rd to 45th Street on the rooftops and walls of Market Street by Overbrook native Stephen Powers and the youth of West Philadelphia

Please send us words of romance, thoughts of relationships, your ideas of what love really is.

Be it comforting or troubling, passionate or past tense, even if it’s “hate to love” or “love to hate,” to help us make this Love Letter for West Philly from West Philly.

Send your thoughts to: love@loveletterforyou.com

SIGN SCHOOL
We are accepting applications for a free sign school that will teach the basics of sign making, in an intensive one month class that will create new, free signage for businesses along the Market Street corridor. Three classes will be offered with up to ten spots available, for young adults 18+.  Classes start soon. Email kevin.brown@muralarts.org for more info.

JOBS
Adults 18+ that have experience in exterior surface painting are invited to apply for jobs to assist with this project. Email naila.mattison-jones@muralarts.org for more info.