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On the Trail of a Tagger
By LYNN BASA May 22, 2018 Sean Lowe was at his gallery, Camp/Us (2883 N. Milwaukee), today so I went over to see if he’d had any luck finding the culprit who tagged the James Jankowiak butterfly mural on Corner. On my way over I saw that the Eagle printing building had also been tagged with the same “4” in a circle. The staff at Camp/Us had already cleaned off the tags on 2901 and 2905 N Milwaukee and said they would clean that one off, too. According to Sean, the night of the tagging, Saturday, there was a party at Camp/Us for a well-known artist from Mexico who was in town to promote his new paint line. Out of the 35 people there, only three were local. The rest were from Texas and Mexico. When Sean heard about the tagging he said he wondered how he was going to track down whomever did it because he assumed it was one of the visitors, but when he saw the tag, he was dismayed to realize it was one of the locals who were at his party.
Wall at Camp/Us set aside for artists to test paint inside the gallery. Notice the number 4 in a circle.
Sean was both apologetic and angry that someone he had welcomed into his gallery would violate the strict code followed by taggers. “Local guys are supposed to respect murals,” he said. “I don’t know what they were thinking when they went out that night and did that.” He added that Caspar, Jankowiak’s former nom de guerre, isn’t “in a street war with anyone” which makes the tagging even more senseless. “Stamping someone else’s piece is the most disrespectful thing you can do because it’s ruining something that took people hours to do.” |
Sean Lowe at his gallery, Camp/Us Sean said another reason he’s “so mad” is that this tagger breeched the code in another egregious way. Usually when a tagger uses a crew’s mark they individualize it with their initials in small letters off to the side. This one did it anonymously which means “he put the entire crew up there” and hasn’t come forward to claim responsibility. (“Because he’s afraid of ‘Big Sean,’ “ an employee chipped in.) I asked Sean how someone not familiar with graffiti culture can tell the difference between a gang tag and crew tag. He said gang graffiti is very specific and is related to sacred geometry and free masonic imagery. They also don’t use artist-type spray paint. He added that territorial tagging by gangs has decreased significantly because they’re bickering over turf on Facebook these days, not by marking it on the street. He said that 80% of what we see on the street is graffiti taggers, and only about 20% gangs. Sean said he’s going to find who did it and get them to apologize to me. I’m hoping to use that opportunity for Part Three of this series, to find out what made him tag an artwork when he knew better than that – and knew that it would give Sean and his gallery a bad reputation in the neighborhood. Meanwhile, Sean has a message for us: “Tell the neighbors that if anything happens, we will take care of it.” |
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Corner's Popular Butterfly Mural Tagged
by LYNN BASA, May 19, 2018 Corner's across-the-street neighbor, Kurt Gippert, alerted me that someone had tagged James Jankowiak's butterfly mural on the side of my building. By the time I got to Corner, neighbor Thomas Burns was already there wiping it off because he'd been doing work at Kurt's and couldn't stand looking at it a second longer. He sent me this picture of it before he cleaned it off: 
,The first thing I thought of was to walk across the street to Camp/Us, a gallery for street artists to ask the owner, Sean Lowe, if he recognized the tag. Sean wasn't there but when I peeked through the door, I saw this bit of incriminating evidence:
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I e-mailed the photos to Sean. He immediately wrote back and responded like I hoped he would, "I will find exactly who did it and make them come and apologize to you. It will never happen again. I will handle all expenses to fix it. Im very sorry we do not condone any mural defacing at all. I will get to the bottom of it right away."
He knows James Jankowiak (aka "Caspar") and through him, Kurt allowed artists from Camp/Us to paint his construction wall -- which I noticed hadn't been tagged at all despite all of the buildings around it having been hit. I thought there was supposed to be a code of honor among taggers about not defacing another artist's work. 
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