I’ve only been living in Corvallis for about four months, but one of my favorite things about switching from infinite suburbia to a small, walkable college town has been the art. Street art has been one of my favorite art styles for a long time. The bright colors and surrealist patterns catch the eye. It can be detailed and hyperrealistic, or abstract. It may take the form of a huge mural on the side of a building, dozens of feet tall, or a tiny little doodle next to the gutter. Coming across it in public feels like finding buried treasure. It’s often associated with big cities, but whether you’re on the streets on NYC or wandering down Monroe, street art can be spotted almost anywhere.
Modern street art is often said to have originated with the New York’s graffiti boom in the 1960s. The pioneers of the art form were taggers, who would embellish blank walls and subway tunnels with stylized names. The tags became more elaborate, bursting into endless variations of fonts, patterns, and colors. Along with that came murals, often (but not always) commissioned by the businesses whose walls they adorn. The line between mural and graffiti is often blurry. On one side of the spectrum are the elaborate, well-sanctioned paintings that give an area that upscale, artsy feeling that developers crave; on the other side are the highway tags that get brought up when anyone mentions downtown Portland with a curl in their lip.
However, it’s impossible to have one without the other, and the two aren’t always mutually exclusive. The work of probably the most famous street artist in the world, Banksy, regularly sells for hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars. When a Banksy appears on a building, it makes headlines and draws tourists. Yet, the anonymous artist maintains the air of mystery that makes him so lucrative by painting his murals deep undercover, and painting them without permission on private property. It’s (somewhat debatably) illegal, and it would be more illegal if it was done by someone without the name recognition.
I think it’s a mistake to refuse to appreciate something’s beauty just because it breaks the law. I don’t endorse illegal tagging (both because it damages property and because this is a school-affiliated blog), but that doesn’t stop me from staring as a cargo train goes by, admiring the bright colors and stylized fonts and wondering how whoever wrote that picked out their alias. Those names, splashed up on the highway barricade or the blank warehouse wall, are proof that someone cared enough to pack up their rattling cans of spray paint and balance on a narrow ledge in the middle of the night. Padlocks on bridges, initials carved into trees, E was here scratched into the bottom of a desk… in a world where it’s easy to fade into the background, people yearn to be remembered.
Just as the form of street art can be controversial, so too can be the subject matter. It’s often used as a platform by activists to share a wide variety of political stances. During the cold war, the west side of the Berlin wall became completely covered with paint as a form of anti-war protest. Today, you can find dozens of examples of murals painted to support the Black Lives Matter movement, draw awareness to pollution, or celebrate LGBTQ culture. Our pal Banksy gets lots of his press from the social statements he makes with his art. For example, he has long brought attention to Israili-Palestinian conflict with his work. He has multiple murals up along the West Bank wall, and he founded the Walled-Off Hotel, a fully functional (thought rather controversial and currently closed) inn located in Palestine less than 15 feet from the barricade.
In Corvallis, murals tend to reflect on community values. OSU has a strong focus on environmental science and agriculture, and thus, conservation and climate activism are common themes. Walk Lightly in Time, near Jefferson and 5th street, depicts climate activism through a sprawling landscape, including hikers, puzzle pieces, and footprints. Loaded with symbolism, it was painted by community youth in collaboration with Esteban Camacho Steffensen. Its sister mural in Eugene honors the date of the original Juliana V. United States climate trial. On Monroe street, The Bessie’s Blues mural honors an endangered local species of butterflies with 6000 mosaic tiles, each representing a single insect left in the wild and scaled to the butterfly’s size.
Street art also gives a voice to a more diverse set of artists than galleries and museums tend to. A 2019 study of 18 major US art museums found that 85% of the featured artists were white, and 87% were men. When it comes to patronage, museums may have inconvenient hours, expensive entry fees, or cultural perceptions that make them less appealing to much of the general population. Street art, by contrast, uses accessible materials and jazzes up the walls that people walk by every day. It’s made to be seen.
If you’re interested in learning more about local street art and artists, Corvallis is a great place to be. The Corvallis Mural Project, initiated in 2016 by Jennifer Moreland, collaborated on creating and cataloguing many of the pieces that decorate our streets today. Encounter murals organically on a stroll through the downtown waterfront area, or use this map to pick a few ahead of time and make a trip out of it. You could also scroll through the account @corvallismuralproject on Instagram (although they don’t have much recent activity) or grab a friend and try out the Corvallis mural scavenger hunt. And if those seem like a bit much, remember that one of the beauties of street art is its accessibility. You don’t need to go anywhere special to encounter it, you just have to keep your eyes open and be willing to appreciate it.
Read more:
A podcast episode about about graffiti tagging and its opposition
An article about the gentrification of street art
