Vandals Smear ​“Inside Out”

Only a few days after hundreds of neighbors came together to line a State Street underpass with their smiling faces, two spray-paint wielding taggers came along and ​“assaulted” them.

With cans of spraypaint, two taggers blacked out eyeballs on pictures of people laughing and high-fiving each other. They scrawled ​“Bump” on a smiling toddler’s forehead and scribbled ​“Watcher DOA” across a half-dozen other portraits.

The photo portraits were installed last week as part of a community public-art project called Inside Out. Neighbors have been working for months to transform two underpasses into open-air portrait galleries: getting permission from the state DOT, raising thousands of dollars in donations, taking hundreds of photographs of neighbors, and finally printing and applying huge photos to the underpass near Bradley Street. Instead of complaining about the way mid-20th century highways divided New Haven neighborhoods, they have been reclaiming two such crossroads for beauty: one near Bradley Street and another connecting (or dividing) Upper State Street and Jocelyn Square.

The project is related to the work of international artist JR, who has completed similar pieces around the world.

The graffiti, discovered early Sunday morning, prompted immediate outrage on Facebook and prompt action at the underpass.

Chris Randall, a photographer and organizer with the project, took pictures of all the damage, then spent 14 hours Sunday painstakingly handpainting over the graffiti.

On Monday morning, he was at it again. With Brand Nubian blaring from his pickup truck parked nearby, Randall stood under the overpass with a palette on his arm and a yellow safety vest on his back. Keeping an eye on a laptop computer showing the original photo, Randall tried to recreate a face defaced by a tag. Randall said he has no idea how to paint. He’s learning as he goes.

“I thought it was important to reclaim the wall as soon as possible,” Randall said. He said he wants to send a message to ​“Bump” and ​“Watch” and other taggers that vandalism of the project will not be tolerated. If they’re looking for recognition, he said, he aims to take it away as quickly as possible.

Randall said some of the online discussion on Facebook and SeeClickFix has dealt with the question of whether tagging is a kind of art that should be incorporated into the public nature of the project. He said the tags on the underpass are not art.

He said he recently visited the Five Points section of New York City, where some of the city’s most famous graffiti art is on display. ​“That’s art,” Randall said. ​“This is shit.”

The Bump, Watch, and DOA tags are the equivalent of ​“a dog pissing on a tree,” Randall said.

(Click here to read about a local street artist who has drawn a more positive reaction.)

Randall said ideally he’d like to have the taggers join the project as members of the community who should be recognized. ​“I want to get their faces on our wall.”

Failing that, he’d like them caught and punished, he said. He said he’s willing to start a reward-for-arrest-information fund with $100 of his own money.

“We just have to collectively not want the graffiti more than they want it,” Randall said.

Neighbors are already so opposed to graffiti that Randall got the cops called on him Sunday, he said. Someone had phoned him in as a vandal.

Randall said the Inside Out project will proceed with another wheat-pasting session on Thursday at the Humphrey Street underpass. ​“This not going to stop us.”

Ben Berkowitz, former head of the Upper State Street neighborhood organization and an Inside Out organizer, said the tagging will only make the project stronger by uniting the community.

“I anticipated that it was going to happen,” he said. The project was never meant to be permanent, he said. Its impermanence was even a condition of state approval. But no one thought it would be hit with graffiti only days after going up.

“It has really hurt a lot of people’s feelings,” he said. ​“It’s a very emotional project. … It’s almost like an assault on the individuals.”

“What upset people is that it happened so quickly,” Berkowitz said. ​“And these kids get to disrupt the efforts of about a thousand people.”

Berkowitz said he knows, through emails and mutual acquaintances, who the vandals are. He’s tangled with them and with the ​“DOA” crew in the past on Upper State Street and through SeeClickFix, the neighborhood improvement website he started.

“I really don’t personally care about the justice system for these guys,” he said. ​“They may never stop doing this.”

In fact, public attention will only encourage them to do it more, Berkowitz predicted.

“This is about them destroying something,” he said. ​“I hope he [Watch] sees that he’s really hurt children in the process and maybe that will affect him.”

“He’s made this about writing on people’s faces and saying, ​‘I am more important than all these people’” who came together to make the public art project happen, Berkowitz said.

Berkowitz said the project will probably reprint and re-paste the photos that were tagged. He said he’s going to talk to people about whether to try coating them with some kind of graffiti-resistant treatment, which would require permission from the city and state.

Like Randall, Berkowitz said the Inside Out project will not be stopped by taggers. ​“The main reaction from our perspective is to just do more of it,” he said.