By: Mark Fitzgerald The best solution to offensive speech is more speech, journalism's conventional wisdom states. So maybe it makes sense that at the East Bay Express, the best solution to graffiti vandalism is turning out to be ... more graffiti.
At wit's end with the tagging, stickering, and just plain battering that can turn brand-new racks into barely operable eyesores within a single week, the San Francisco Bay Area alt-weekly last year tried inviting graffitists and other street artists to spray-paint new racks, which were coated with a sealant and set out on the streets.
It worked. "It's been amazing, it 100% does work," says East Bay Express Publisher Jody Colley. "I still visit some of the racks we put out last summer, and for the most part they are absolutely untouched."
The most dramatic evidence is the Express rack located at the Telegraph Avenue entrance to the University of California, Berkeley, the epicenter of the early 1960s Free Speech Movement and ever since, a haven for anarchistic expression that can tolerate anything but order. "It's almost impossible to keep a good newsrack at that corner ? but it doesn't have a scratch on it" more than a year later, Colley says.
This summer, the Express sounded an open call for artists for a second round of newsrack spray painting, and quickly signed up the maximum 50 participants.
The Oakland Museum of California opened its courtyard so the artists could work live in front of gallery visitors. Forty of the 50 racks, Colley says, were selected, and were displayed for several weeks around the museum.
In mid-September, those racks were being coated for street use around the paper's hometown of Emeryville, a California town with a big appetite for public art. "If you see an electric box there, it's been painted by local artists," Colley says. "They like turning eyesores into art."
By that standard alone, Emeryville residents should like their new East Bay Express newsracks.
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