News

Spoil Spurt

It started with Boys Vs. Girls and more childish games have been marring the local graffiti scene every since.

By Nadia Pflaum 

Among the city's legions of skateboarders, hip-hoppers, break dancers and Art Institute kids, it was an anyone-who's-anyone-will-be-there event.

And the Next Space, a hollowed-out storefront on 18th Street between Locust and Cherry, was the perfect place to stage a visual battle between male and female graffiti artists. Two rooms were separated by a hallway -- all the boys' pieces would be on one side, with the whole room painted blue; the girls' work went in a pink space on the other side.

Boys vs. Girls opened the night of September 20, 2002. Artwork by eleven men and nine women was on display throughout the gallery, but the night quickly stopped being about the art -- it went from zero to party in less than sixty minutes.

Someone was passing around penis- and vagina-shaped cookies, and a stripper pranced about topless. (Strangely, though, she had no male counterpart.) Around ten, the coed members of the flamboyant performance-art band the Ssion hit the stage on the girls' side. After the group finished playing a set of its karaoke punk rock, a few DJs on the boys' side took over for the rest of the evening.

By this time, the party had overflowed onto 18th Street, along with a stream of cans, bottles, cigarette butts and plastic cups from the keg. Partygoers were coming and going so often that the people keeping track of attendance at the door stopped counting at 2,000.

It was one of the more successful events hosted by the Next Space, and organizers Newa and Randie Pants (the Pitch agreed to use their street names for this story) were thrilled -- at least until the following morning, when they got the news.

The Graffiti Fairy had visited the vicinity overnight, leaving a mark that may have changed the neighborhood's feelings toward the aerosol art form forever.

Newa's Triple Five Soul hat hides his hair, which he has buzzed into the shortest of mohawks on a dare that got him into a friend's art show for free. His hands are already twitching like twin rabbits, but he orders a cup with four double shots of espresso.

One reason he calls himself Newa is that he once spotted a mangled "One Way" sign, its o and y obscured. Another explanation is that he mashed together the names of his two heroes, Kaws and Nace, two graffiti writers and friends who influenced him in the early '90s. Nace had been his best friend, a member of the Mayhem crew. (Newa has the Mayhem tag tattooed on his arm.) Nace was killed two years ago by a drunk driver, which is why Newa no longer drinks. It's also why, in some alleys downtown, the graffiti reads "R.I.P. Nace."

Like most graffiti artists, he started at a young age, painting city walls with like-minded kids who threw up the names of their crews as well as their personal tags. But since 1997, he's been sticking billboards of his own creation over existing billboards, using a papier-mâchélike mixture called wheat paste. His billboards mock ad campaigns with a twist that usually involves sex, violence or drug use.

Five years ago, Newa put up a sign in Lakewood, New Jersey, that read: "Support Domestic Violence: If You Don't Beat Your Wife, Who Will?" Newa says people interpreted it as a hate crime against women, and a public outcry ensued. He claims that the Lakewood chief of police told him to leave town. That would have been convenient, because Newa had an uncle who was moving his heating and air-conditioning company to Kansas City; by day, Newa now works for his uncle.

Besides catching the attention of police, Newa's work has gained recognition in counterculture magazines such as Juxtapoz and While You Were Sleeping. The latter is a Maryland-based publication, the founder and former editor of which now acts as Newa's manager.

On one of Newa's older billboards, Ronald McDonald appeared with the message "Hey kids, I got a happy meal in my pants!" Recently, Newa has been in a cereal phase. The Lucky Charms leprechaun popped up on a green billboard in Kansas City -- only his version of the character wore a turban and stood in front of the phrase "Arab Bombs." In smaller letters, "The jihad is vicious" went where "They're magically delicious" might have been, in front of silhouettes of the World Trade Center towers crumbling. On a different cereal-themed billboard, the Kellogg's Sugar Smacks frog appears disheveled and apparently strung out on heroin, evidenced by the dancing syringes behind him and the words "Give your arm a good morning smack!" Newa has also desecrated Tony the Tiger, putting Frosted Flakes "of cum!" on his face and writing "Get sprrrrrrrrrayed!" instead of "They're grrrrrrrreat!"

Newa hates the way commercials co-opt language from underground culture -- his language. "Man, you can't watch a Sprite commercial without there being some dude like, 'Yo,' all pretending to be down with hip-hop and the street. I do what real ads do, except I throw it back at 'em exaggerated," Newa says. He sees his art as a kind of public-service announcement, saving people from false advertising. "I use billboards and their companies' methods, and the way my messages are delivered have more impact than theirs ever could. Like those bullshit Truth.com ads. No one pays attention to that. It's not going to stop anyone from smoking. But say I do an ad that says 'Newa Pleasure: Smoke it, fuckface.' Someone will say, 'Wow, I just got really offended by that billboard' and think again when they smoke. I redirect their messages."

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