Shades Detroit Graffiti - Graffiti Forum

Caboose · 08-13-2008, 02:15 PM

Detroit Free Press
Wednesday, May 23 2001

Tony Agee doesn't easily give up wearing shades, and it's not for fear of losing his anonymity. Those darkly tinted glasses offer an irreverent balance to the dab of hair that hangs at the end of his chin as an in-your-face exclamation point. For a graffiti artist who signs his work with the tag "Shades," making art is as much about projecting a defiant attitude as it is coming up with a clever composition. And attitude spills in all directions from Agee, as if sprayed wildly from an aerosol can of paint. At this weekend's Detroit Electronic Music Festival, Agee one of the city's most widely known and frequently commissioned graffiti artists will bring his underground art to Hart Plaza for an aboveground demonstration. Along with four other artists, Agee will be "bombing" walls in a style that has been called the fine-art branch of hip-hop.

This weekend, these Detroit artists needn't worry about facing arrest for what Agee calls a "guerrilla approach to making art." In a public place such as Hart Plaza, getting caught making graffiti would be a misdemeanor, punishable by a $500 fine and up to 90 days in jail. But festival producer Pop Culture Media's decision to showcase graffiti also known as urban art has transformed a criminal act into a hip artistic expression. To those who contend urban art can be a compelling expression of street life, the response has been a collective "It's about time."

Though most of the graffiti Shades and his compatriots create during the festival will be removed afterward, the city will leave the paintings on the tunnel walls beneath Hart Plaza. Agee's paintings on canvas and other objects will also be on display for festival goers at the Ethnic gallery in Hart plaza. The Exhibit along with the graffiti demonstrations is sponsored by CPOP, a Detroit gallery that shows work by "post-pop pop artists," according to gallery directory Mary Harrison. The reference is to artists whose work falls outside the definitions of the academic art world of the tastes of established galleries, often called outsider or outlaw artists. But the graffiti artists push the boundaries even further. Using walls of abandoned buildings, highway underpasses and train cars as their canvas and spray paint as their medium, graffiti artists sign their work with pseudonyms, or tags, and work in teams to keep a watch for police. "There's a fine line between a renegade who's destroying a building and an artist who's making a statement," says CPOP's Harrison. "Tony and the other graffiti artists in Detroit are creating art that's immediate. It's about now,' the human condition, time and place. It's about the electricity of living."

AGEE'S SHADES-WEARING graffiti-artist persona and his gregarious nature go together like hip and hop. "My art is vibrant, it's bright, it's right there in your face," says Agee. "The whole idea is to get your attention." His self-described style: Straight up. Got a question? He's ready with a shotgun blast of quips, anecdotes and run-on sentences. But as quickly as he lifts the shades from his eyes, Agee reveals a different persona. He puts away the in-your-face Brooklyn born-and-raised attitude (after all, he's probably spent more time in Detroit, where he attended high school and graduated in 1991 from the Center for Creative Studies with a degree in illustration). No shades, no chip on the shoulder. "There's two faces the face of Antonio. It's like that with all graffiti artists," Agee says. "Most kids tagging out there are introverts. They're shy, and when they put it out there, there's this huge rush like the world is going to see their work." Agee doesn't shy away from the limelight. But he says his days of hooking up with a lookout for a night of bombing are over, at least for now. He talks with a never-again tone about the time he was held for 19-hours by Detroit police on the misdemeanor charge of defacing public property.

Agee says he knows of as many as 50 graffiti artists working throughout Detroit who remain defiant about making their marks. Most are between 13 and 23 years old, he says, with a few as young as 10. Agee, at 30, appears as the senior statesman articulate about his art, sympathetic to the up-and-coming artists. One of those is 16-year-old Dibal, whose eight-person crew known as ATW has been bombing in southwest Detroit for a year. "There's all these abandoned, ugly buildings that we look at every day," Dibal says, "and I don't understand why they don't allow us to express ourselves." "We are not part of a gang," he says. "We don't do gang graffiti, and we're not defacing property. We want to be known as artists. Showing our art is a rush." It's the gang graffiti that most concerns the city, according to Greg Bowens, spokesman for Mayor Dennis Archer. Prosecutors now have the discretion to charge perpetrators of graffiti with malicious destruction of public property. Actually, Bowens says there is a growing acceptance of graffiti art from the mayor's office: " Detroit is the first city to accept techno and all the comes with it. Its not like graffiti has caught our attention as a big-time nuisance."

GRAFFITI HAS ALWAYS BEEN part of the urban landscape, from "Kilroy was here" to expressions of love on highway overpasses. Graffiti from the Latin from "scratched" has been found etched into walls in the ruins from ancient Egypt to Pompeii. The roots of the contemporary graffiti scene are often traced to underground New York city artists, such as Keith Haring, who left their mark on subway stations and cars during the mid-1970's. Haring and Jean-Michael Basquiat, both now dead, went on to international art careers.

With the upcoming high-profile demonstration and exhibit of his work, Agee is part of the further legitimization of graffiti art. "It validates that you are an artist," he says. "It's out of the street and through to f as art, not just graffiti. Instead of your art being immobile on the side of a wall, your art is sold on a canvas and driven to someone's home." The path from streets to the galleries, however, wasn't a particularly direct one for Agee. The godson of well-known rebel, social activist and poet John Sinclair, Agee is the son of a jazz alto saxophonist George Agee. A traditionalist in his personal tastes, he listens not to hip-hop, but Sinatra, Coltrane, Nat (King) Cole. Through he came to prominence in 1992 for his graffiti in Pontiac promoting an AIDS benefit, he doesn't see his role as social critic. "I see myself as Switzerland staying neutral until I understand the cause." And four years ago he traded in the aerosol cans for a hard hat.

After success in the early 1990's, including commissions in Greektown and on Cass Avenue touting the 1994 World Cup, Agee fell into a creative tailspin.. Too much partying and living up to the rowdy graffiti-artist reputation, he says, led him to a dead end. He quit making art and took a job as an inspector at Flat Rock Metal, where on breaks he would doodle as he sat in an upstairs office watching for graffiti artists' tags on passing trains. About a year ago, Agee came back to Detroit and to his art. He's received commissions to paint graffiti at local businesses and in private homes. He's also been commissioned by the City of Detroit to design two murals for the Detroit 300 Family Festival July 20-22 in Hart Plaza, to be done in a paint-by-numbers style with children working under his supervision. And he and brother Kevin Agee have been commissioned by Detroit's Department of Recreation to paint a mural honoring Detroit's historical figures at the Butzel family center on Detroit's east side. "He's dependable, works well under deadline and doesn't mind changing a design," says Jennifer Roberts, spokeswoman for the recreation department. "Plus he works really well with kids, who can really relate to his designs." Maybe that's because Agee isn't far removed from a kid's world. He collects spawn figurines and vintage Slinkys. He says he gets his inspiration from watching the Cartoon Network on his big-screen TV, which takes up most of the living room of his Indian Village apartment. And he connects with kids at the Latino American Social Economic and Development Center in Southwest Detroit. "Unfortunately, many kids in our area don't have many mentors," says Raquel Soberal, counselor at the center, which Agee was drawn to when he heard it allowed kids to paint graffiti on the gym walls. "Tony knows where the kids are coming from. These kids love to paint, and here comes Tony, who does graffiti for a living. He gives them hope." It's not exactly the typical path of a career-minded artist. But that's to be expected with Agee. "People don't even know I'm an artist," says Agee. "I don't promote it like that. I won't let people stereotype me. I've got to do my own thing." With and without the shades.