BRATTLEBORO, Vt. — Stone Arch Properties owner Mike Cota woke Monday to see two of his downtown buildings colored by more than 200 cans of spray paint.
Cota knows he asked for it. Literally.
“A year ago, I thought, ‘Even with all the mediocre graffiti that’s down here, a lot of people love coming to take pictures,’” he said. “It’d be a shame to get rid of it, so what if we did something to improve it?”
That’s why Cota teamed with the nearby Brattleboro Museum & Art Center and Brandon, Vt.-based Juniper Creative Arts to host a weekend “Graffiti Jam” that drew 15 professional “aerosol artists” from as far away as Slovakia.
Vermont’s largest city of Burlington recently made news when someone spray-painted over part of a $10,000 Main Street mural elementary students created near their school. In contrast, the Brattleboro event aimed to show graffiti has its good side.
“It started off with vandalistic origins, but over the last half century it has grown into one of the most legitimized and profitable art forms around the globe,” said Will Kasso Condry, an organizer.
Condry first spray-painted at age 7, then studied fine art and illustration at The College of New Jersey. As a co-founder of the Juniper collective with wife Jennifer Herrera Condry and daughter Alexa Herrera Condry, he has created more than 40 murals in public buildings throughout Vermont. He has won the Vermont Prize for visual art in 2022, the Herb Lockwood Prize in the Arts this summer and, with his family, the Vermont Arts Council’s Arthur Williams Award for Meritorious Service to the Arts last month.
Condry, who works with spray paint imported from Europe, understands why property owners can feel angry when someone targets them with a cheap can.
“It’s ignorant to think that you can stop all graffiti that is being done without sanction — that’s been going on since antiquity,” he said. “Graffiti culture was started by Black and brown children in inner city Philadelphia and New York, but nowadays, a lot of it springing up around Vermont is more than likely done by young white males. You control it through proper education and mentoring.”
And so the event aimed to teach a steady crowd of spectators the difference between “tagging” (a hit-and-run spray-painting of one’s name) and investing time and talent into an authorized “production” mural.
“Some people continue to see graffiti through the lens of vandalism,” Jennifer Condry said. “One of our goals with this event is to reinforce the message that graffiti is a respected global art movement that beautifies neglected spaces and builds community. We’re trying to show an evolution and elevation of style.”
The jam received a $12,000 grant from the Vermont Community Foundation’s arts and social cohesion fund — as well as one complaint from a resident who feared it would encourage vandalism elsewhere.
“This is public art in a graffiti style being done at the behest of the property owner,” Danny Lichtenfeld, the museum’s director, said in reply.
The result can be seen on Arch Street, just opposite Main Street’s Latchis Theatre and Hotel, where organizers found an eager apprentice in 14-year-old area eighth grader Eko Harmon-Fee.
“We’re not telling kids, ‘Just because you see us out here, go do it in the back of your school,’” Will Condry said. “We say, ‘Take the time to understand this is an art form like any other that requires training and education.’ Introduced the right way, this is the future of public art.”
This story was republished with permission from VtDigger, which offers its reporting at no cost to local news organizations through its Community News Sharing Project. To learn more, visit vtdigger.org/community-news-sharing-project.