Art Crimes

An authentic Kansas City art experience doesn’t require waiting for the first Friday of the month. There’s no boxed wine, no crowded corridors, no closing time: One need only overcome the fear of urban alleyways.

The Kansas City Art Institute is indirectly responsible for making this Midwestern city a street artist’s oasis. Gear, a Kansas City native, calls himself Kansas City’s first graffiti artist; he can remember throwing up his first tag as early as 1982. But he dropped out of the Art Institute in 1993, after his first semester — when, he says, members of the school’s administration informed him that they didn’t recognize street art as a legitimate focus of study. The following semester, another painter, known as Scribe, tells The Pitch he was asked not to return for the same reason.

Gear and Scribe soon had a new goal: to make graffiti as visible as possible in Kansas City. They approached business owners about painting murals — they didn’t call it graffiti — on their buildings. They had no car, so they strapped 24-foot ladders to their backs and hauled gallons of paint in Army duffel bags from their place at 43rd and Walnut to Westport. A few business owners, such as Mark Dodd of Big Dude’s Music City at 2817 Broadway, offered up their walls to host Scribe and Gear’s artwork. Big Dude’s has since been painted over, but many other walls still display Scribe and Gear’s murals. In 2003, the pair won prestigious Charlotte Street Foundation awards.

These days, the alleys and tucked-away walls of the city crawl with street art that is political, poetic, rebellious and funny, a sketchbook left by artists passing through town, visiting to paint with their idols or just moving on after four years of art school.

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