Spoil Spurt

"Most of this stuff in the Crossroads is garbage," he says gravely. "It's just defacing things for the sake of putting up a tag, and graffiti breeds graffiti. There's two types of graffiti we're working with here. You've got graffiti artists, people who do pieces and spend a lot of time on beautiful work, taking the time to show off their talent. Then you've got the taggers, trying to catch tags. It's not the same at all, and that's the Catch-22: People doing these beautiful pieces probably started off catching tags, like me in 1985. People whose hearts are in it won't ruin someone's private property. With art, you just don't do that. Alleys, poles, bricks, mailboxes -- those are always open. But not windows, not active businesses. If something's vacant, it's free. But a car? No. A house? No. And people just don't know, and they're writing on everything, and that will ruin it for everyone. There's two sides to this coin. You can't have the chicken without the egg, and you can't have Kobe Bryant without him raping a girl. The good and the bad, well, they go hand in hand.

Newa parks his car in the alley behind Y.J.'s Snack Bar, where there's an intricate garden, and stairs lead down to a lower parking lot. There, the walls glimmer with paint, and the corners seem alive with crawling things -- one-dimensional tags, complicated pieces and cartoon characters of robots and waifish, Japanese-anime-type girls.

"If you give people a place to paint and tell them not to do something, they'll respect it," Newa says.

So if he agrees with the idea of painting only legal, or "permission," walls, then who tagged the TWA building? And why did it say "Newa"?

"That's called 'dick-riding,' and people who do that are what we call a 'toy.' It's an inexperienced writer, a moron. They write another guy's name on a wall, thinking it will make you happy. It's as bad as groupies for rock bands, except it's only guys on other guys. We're talking about kids in the sixth, seventh, eighth generation of graffiti. Newa, he's the third generation," Newa says.

Despite Newa's claims to the contrary, other writers in the graffiti scene find it hard to believe that he has renounced illegal graffiti and that he had nothing to do with the graffiti on the TWA building.

Wizdom, a Kansas City native who claims to be familiar with the city's post-1980 graffiti scene (the year he was born) and writes with the crews TUF and BU, says he respects Newa for his work. "I've seen his graffiti around, his writings, his wheat pastings, his whatnot. That's cool. I like it when people write on things. It's like a heads-up for everybody, whether it's a message or just somebody's name, like, obviously somebody who wants some kind of attention. Some of that shit is like shock value or whatever, in my opinion, but if you're going to put your artwork in the public, out on the streets, I'm gonna criticize it."

Is it possible that someone else is tagging Newa? Wizdom bursts out laughing. "Who the hell would want to tag Newa? What does it mean? If someone else is tagging his name, what for? Is it some kid who wants to be him, and if so, how old are they? How fucking dare you, as a graffiti writer, say you don't do something when you did? How are you going to act like 'I'm a good graffiti writer?' That's an oxymoron. There is no such thing."

Be it by his hand or "someone else's," Newa's name did appear in the West Bottoms gallery area in the late summer of 2001, to the dismay of the then-owner of the Kelvin Gallery at 1317 Union. (The Kelvin has since closed, and its owner asked not to be named.) The Kelvin owner says he liked one of Newa's designs, which featured Gary Coleman's face, and that he planned to put up one of Newa's pieces in a gallery show. He calls Newa's work "seriously fucking amazing." Significantly less amazing was the fact that two days before the show was to open, someone scrawled "NEWA" in dripping, light-blue paint directly across the street, on the building housing Doc's Caboose Inc., a screen-printing shop and model-train store at 1400 Union. The Kelvin owner pulled Newa's work from the show.

"Some people called me a hypocrite, saying I should understand the nature of graffiti work, but it's hooliganism and makes legitimate graffiti artists look like assholes, and it was a black eye on my gallery. So to make it clear that I wasn't condoning what he did, I pulled the piece," he says.