Scuffle

Mural of the Story

Graffiti artist Oliver Fox is hardly a martyr on the altar of censorship

The wall paintings in Altamira, Spain, and Lascaux, France, serve as the world's earliest surviving examples of graffiti. If the caverns had been designated as museums, of course, the paintings would have been declared art. But since they rendered images of animals to be killed so that the cave dwellers would be able to eat in that pre-agricultural age, they were probably messages from the cooks to the hunters listing meal preferences.

Millennia later, Italian stone masons laying the floor of the cathedral in Sienna inlaid the tiles of the nave with black-and-white marble, conveying messages for God in "grafito." The messages from graffiti artists in contemporary urban America, however, tend to serve a harsher spiritual purpose than that of their predecessors. On mailboxes, railroad cars, street signs and the walls of abandoned buildings, they express the anger of alienated youth.

In Syracuse, the local cityscape had been overwhelmed by vandals with aerosol cans by 1993, according to Jeff Paston, chair of the Graffiti Busters Coalition of Syracuse and Onondaga County. "It was everywhere, especially {along routes} 690 and 81, so visitors would see it when entering the city," Paston recalls. "From my interest in real estate, I could see that it was deterring potential customers from doing business here, potential residents from buying homes here, and potential firms from moving here."

Then a news reporter for WSTM-Channel 3, Paston kept that concern alive among his media colleagues. Three years later, while running for re-election, Mayor Roy Bernardi embraced the issue and established the committee, which has policed the city's graffiti ever since.

The group drew fire last month, after being accused of harassing of 18-year-old graffiti artist Oliver Fox. Media outlets reported that the Graffiti Busters attributed gang-related messages to Fox's wall murals, an accusation that it seemed cost him at least one client, Coca-Cola.

Paston, however, denies that the Graffiti Busters targeted Fox. "Actually, I was approached by a member of the coalition who happens to work for the {city} Parks and Rec Department with the issue of Oliver Fox's mural. I said I thought the issue was not our focus, wasn't within our jurisdiction or realm, and should be handled through channels in the city administration."

Administration staffers are now mostly mum on the subject of Oliver Fox but generally agree that Coca-Cola was not even his client to lose and that he got local mural work "through the back door" by "jumping the contract" between the soda company and a local high-school art competition.

Called Art and Harmony, the high-school program has operated for the past four years through the city's Department of Parks, Recreation and Youth Programming. In cities such as Baltimore, Denver, Detroit, Houston, Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., heavily graffitied areas are painted over with wall murals that incorporate Coca-Cola in their theme.

This year, the 12 finalists in the local competition were to have their entries reproduced as wall murals by artists with experience in the genre. Mark Topp, who coordinates the program for Parks and Rec, hired Eliyahu Benysrael (cited last April as a New Times Emerging Artist) and his partner John Hamblin to do the mural work.

"We were working two days a week, but somebody else was doing them because we would go to a location and the mural was already finished," Benysrael says. One day they set up to paint a wall on the near West Side and were shocked, he says, to see Fox working on a wall a block away. Topp says he had not hired Fox.

"I sent them {Coca Cola's head office in Atlanta} some pictures of my work last year," Fox explains. "I've been doing murals for about 21/2 years. I've done about 40 around Syracuse. They liked what they saw. They gave me some to do; two last year, and five this year. When I found out they were doing it different this year, I called them in Atlanta and they sent me some to do."

Neither the confusion in assignments, however, nor the work Fox produced for the program created the ensuing furor. The controversy arose when Fox signed the two Coca-Cola murals he produced this year with his name, which may have raised hackles among the Graffiti Busters, who had been accusing him of graffiti vandalism for the past year.

When Fox completed the two assigned panels on the side of the Sunshine Market on Delaware Street, the store's owner commissioned him to fill the rest of the wall with an original work. Fox's graffiti signature or "tag" dominated the piece he created. Fox and the store owner say that police officers charged that the signature was gang-related and must be removed lest it provoke more gang-tagging on the wall and the possibility of gang activity.

Officers, however, insist they didn't say the tag was gang-related. The official stance of the Syracuse Police Department, after all, is that there are no gangs in Syracuse, at least if gangs are defined by representing a specific geographic area, wearing "colors" easily identifying their gangness and making their collective livelihood from illegal activities.

"I'm not really doing graffiti anymore," Fox insists. "If I used a paintbrush they wouldn't call {what I do} graffiti. But the whole Coca-Cola program came out of the spray-paint experience. And I'm not in a gang. I live in a half-million dollar house. And I've been using that tag since eighth grade. I made it up myself."

Fox says Coca-Cola paid him $1,400 for the two murals he did this year, but when they heard about the controversy they didn't send him any more assignments. Parks and Rec Commissioner Otis Jennings, whose Art in the Parks mural program first attracted the Coca-Cola connection, is confident the storm has been weathered and that the company's $10,000 in scholarship prizes will be available for Art and Harmony winners next year.

The Graffiti Busters continue to warn of the future shock of spray-painted tags that only the initiated can read. And as Oliver Fox prepares to leave for college, his phone rings off the hook with offers of new commissions. "I don't know where this all ends up," he says. "I'd like to sit down with Mayor Bernardi and talk the whole thing out."

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