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Graffiti Abatement

Alice Street Mural Project A Big Hit With Local Media Outlets

  Recently, CRP pulled off a pretty cool feat: within the course of ten days, the Alice Street Mural Project received media hits from the Mercury News , Oakland Tribune, KQED, Oakland Mayor Jean Quan’s newsletter, Oakland Tribune  (again), and the Contra Costa Times. That’s easily the most attention from local media CRP has ever gotten for any of the 150 mural projects the organization has done in the past four years. Even more impressive was what the media had to…

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Alice St. Mural Project Phase I Ribbon-Cutting Ceremony Highlights

On Friday, August 8, 2014, CRP announced the completion of Phase I of the Alice St. Mural Project with a ribbon-cutting ceremony, held in the parking lot at Alice and 14th St., in front of two sections of the mural wall. The event, which was noted by the Oakland Tribune, the San Jose Mercury News, and KQED, was an overwhelming success, with over 120 attendees, including approximately 75 residents of the Hotel Oakland, along with neighborhood residents and artists-in-residence at…

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Alice Street Mural Phase I Completed; Ribbon-Cutting Ceremony Announced

Community Rejuvenation Project artists Desi Mundo and Pancho Peskador have completed Phase I of the monumental Alice Street Mural Project, capping two weeks of intensive painting which often saw the artists pulling ten-hour days. The first wall, completed earlier in July, covered a large wall facing the Malonga Casquelord Center for the Arts on Alice and 14th Sts., which was decorated with portraits of Malonga, dancer Carla Service, an Ohlone Indian chief and drummer, social justice activist Cephus “Uncle Bobby”…

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Alice Street Mural Project Report-Back

  After a little more than a week of painting the wall at 14th and Alice, CRP is pleased to report the wall is nearing completion. This project has been a real eye-opener; the level of interaction we’ve had with the community has been unprecedented. It’s not an exaggeration to say the mural has started to become a magnet for community-building, even before it’s completed. The project started with covering the entire wall—covered with unsightly and highly unartistic graffiti tags–with…

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South Shore Mural a Shining Beacon in Chicago’s Sea of Bureaucracy and Brown Paint

Chicago, Illinois, is a city with a deep division over public art. A case in point: The city’s controversial “Graffiti Blasters”  abatement program, which for the past 21 years has criminalized street artists and muralists, by linking aerosol expression of any kind with gang violence. Introduced in 1993, the same year as the classic hip-hop albums “Midnight Marauders” and “93 Til Infinity,” Graffiti Blasters – the name sounds like a lightweight racist take on the term “ghetto blaster” – became…

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CRP’s Desi Mundo Returns to Chicago for Two-Week Residency at Hyde Park Art Center

It’s been said you can’t go back home again. For Community Rejuvenation Project founder and Executive Director Desi Mundo, however, that wasn’t exactly the case. After 14 years of living in Oakland, where he founded CRP — which has become the city’s most prolific producers of public murals — Mundo returned to Chicago, the city he first learned the aerosol arts in, for a two-week residency at Hyde Park Art Center, which happened to be celebrating its 75th anniversary. In…

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It’s Time to Rethink Graffiti Abatement Strategies

The answer to the graffiti problem isn’t throwing money down the abatement black hole or instituting stricter zero-tolerance policies. Any viable solution must revolve around the creation of sound, forward-thinking policy which avoids knee-jerk reactionism and repeating mistakes which have been made in the past. San Jose’s example shows that permanent reductions in graffiti vandalism through zero tolerance measures aren’t sustainable, and that with current abatement strategies, sometimes you get less than you pay for.

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The Zero Graffiti International Conference: At Odds with Long Term Solutions?

The First Annual Zero Graffiti International Conference was held in San Francisco last week. Hundreds of police officers, public works officials, “graffiti” consultants, and industry reps from 52 cities gathered as the industry that has grown up around abatement announced that it had made $17 billion in profit in the United State alone.  Despite the massive expenditure, no study has been undertaken to measure the effectiveness of simple abatement on vandalism recidivism. San Francisco alone spends $20 – 30 million…

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Nova Scotia Discovers the Solution!

Halifax property owners have discovered a solution for their vandalism problems. Instead of chasing away the youth at night, they are encouraging higher quality works on their space during the day. What they have discovered is that most young writers simply want to express themselves. Given legitimate forums and encouragement, they focus on developing themselves and their style and they create masterpieces. According to the youth, blank walls are a target. But high quality murals and masterpieces invoke respect. Its…

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Gardena and the Inflatable Felony

This is the first of a three part series by the Community Rejuvenation Project on the perpetual criminalization of aerosol culture, the abatement industry and the politics of incarceration. We begin with the problematic issue of “charge stacking,” which occurs when a prosecutor increases the severity of a charge or adds additional charges to an arrest to add leverage when making a plea agreement. This phenomenon was documented in Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow in relation to the drug…

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