Really Old School

November 10 was a Sunday like any other in Johnson County. SUVs ambled past one another at a leisurely, weekend pace as families headed to Target, Organized Living and Bed, Bath and Beyond. Cars steadily replaced one another in strip-mall lots, and abundant groceries were purchased by many. Undoubtedly, a cul-de-sac or two was mistaken for a through street. But just a few blocks south of 119th and Nall, something unusual was happening.

Up the long and winding road that leads to the assisted-living community Village Shalom, cars with Missouri tags gathered in the gazebo-dotted parking lot. Inside the entryway, where a few people with walkers usually congregate near a visitors’ sign-in booth (and where we have occasionally heard residents squabbling over the names on New York Times subscriptions), a huge crowd of people who more often hang out in such hip, urban venues as YJs, the Next Space and Recycled Sounds stood around enjoying snacks from the dessert bar, just stone-cold chillin’ in the retirement home, yo.

The Gallery at Village Shalom was hosting the opening reception for Balance and Flow, featuring the work of well-known graffiti artists Gear and Scribe.

“Before the show, I was actually kind of nervous,” Scribe confesses. “Along with the stereotypes we might get as graffiti writers, people in [midtown] have a lot of stereotypes of people in Johnson County.” Scribe’s friends had expressed skepticism. Just as city dwellers accuse suburbanites of harboring an unreasonable fear of downtown, these urban youth weren’t sure they’d be willing to brave an afternoon in the land of big lawns. That the show was on a Sunday — not the time for art openings — made the turnout even more unpredictable.

So Scribe was pleased to see the gallery packed with the usual crowd as well as Village Shalom residents. Of course, all those people standing shoulder to shoulder made it hard to see the art — a graffiti retelling of the David and Goliath story on one wall, and an intricate, insectlike creature spray-painted on another — but the dialogue inspired by the show made the hassle worth it.

Most of the residents said that it was really the documentary, made by Russ Hadley of Third Eye Productions, that helped them understand and appreciate the art. Set to hip-hop tunes, the documentary is a specially edited snippet of a feature-length film Hadley has been making for several years. In it, Gear and Scribe talk about their relationship, the past nine years they’ve spent doing graffiti together, and the motivations and desires that keep them painting on walls, outside, in the city. The video also shows them at work on the letters and characters displayed in the current show.

At various points in the video, Gear offers eloquent definitions of graffiti that differ wildly from what authority figures would have us believe the word means. “Graffiti is the beautification of the city,” he says. “People in the suburbs might look at me and say graffiti is wrong, it’s disgusting, it’s a menace to society. And I’d say back to them, cutting down forests and putting up houses is wrong, it’s very disgusting, it’s a menace to society.” At this point, the documentary cuts to a scene that resembles the gallery’s own surroundings: a suburban development, with imposing gray buildings spreading out as bulldozers flatten the ground to make room for the proliferating, identical structures. “What you’re doing,” Gear says, “is what I’m doing.”

Graffiti writers and developers create extensions of themselves and their perceptions of beauty in their physical surroundings. The crowd that had gathered — especially the dreadlocks-and-cargo-pants contingent — couldn’t have been happier with the comparison. Applause nearly drowned out Gear’s rant altogether.

As he left the gallery, a tall, thin man in a neat, unwrinkled suit looked bewildered. “I lived in New York for fifteen years, and until now I didn’t recognize graffiti as art,” he said. “I loved his analogy of what graffiti artists do versus what developers do in the suburbs. I mean, they’re not just throwing something up and running away. It’s a visible art form.” For someone who says he was exposed to work by Jean-Michel Basquiat and Andy Warhol in the 1980s to gain his true understanding of graffiti not in the Big Apple but in Village Shalom shows that art sometimes works best out of context.

“If people see what we do on the street or something, they’re only seeing an image,” Scribe says. “I was happy to see that people were able to identify, because I think educating people on what we’re doing eliminates a lot of fear.”

Bringing in Gear and Scribe wasn’t necessarily a stretch for the Gallery at Village Shalom, which, in fact, is always bringing cutting-edge art to the public and to its residents. In the past two years, the gallery has exhibited such daring group shows as A House Is Not a Home, showcasing unusual modern furniture design; and Tokyo Pop, with pop art by big-name Japanese artists who blend fanciful, sexual and violent imagery. Right after September 11, 2001, May Tveit’s Retail Therapy urged viewers to question the idea that their civic duties were threefold: to shop, to buy and to consume.

Scribe says his portraits of David and Goliath were intended to make the characters seem more psychologically complex than people are used to thinking of them. Goliath looks afraid, even shocked — has he ever questioned his infallibility before? And David looks intense, focused — he squints, consumed by frantic motion lines that convey the overwhelming effort he’s exerting. Fighting this giant isn’t heroic or triumphant — it’s hard work, and if he loses momentum, he’ll be crushed.

But these “biblical superheroes,” as Scribe calls them, weren’t the only ones becoming more real at Village Shalom. Gear and Scribe became more than rebellious kids from the city. They became artists and, more important, human beings.

“These are most unusual. They’re really different,” said Ruth Cohen, a resident, as she walked through the display. “Very, very lovely. Of course, I don’t have my reading glasses.”

Miriam Cohen, also a resident, says she used to overlook graffiti when she saw it on the street, but the video and the talk made her more receptive. “I just think it’s interesting that someone’s creating. Beholden in different eyes, it makes a different story,” she said, pointing a finger instructively. She then made note of something so obvious we hadn’t thought about it: Most of the residents aren’t able to get out as much as they’d like, which means that it’s unlikely they would see graffiti on the street. “This is education for me,” she said. “At my age, I would not have had the opportunity to see it otherwise. I am very appreciative.”

Not all the residents liked what they saw. “The first person who came in was like, ‘I hate this stuff. It’s so ugly. I don’t understand it at all,'” Gear recalls. “The very first person who came in!”

And the crowd didn’t please everyone. Some residents would probably have preferred a nice, quiet Sunday at the home — not a party. As Gear and Scribe were answering questions for the hordes of visitors, a woman in a wheelchair rolled by. She stopped, looked inside the gallery and shook her head, muttering, “I’m not going in there. We never had such a crowd.” Then she wheeled off in a hurry.

But that’s OK. Activity Coordinator Michael Levine says, “One of the nice things about the gallery is that it brings the community into Village Shalom so we don’t become an island.”

That day, the urban art community became less an island as well. “I’ve never been in a Jewish retirement center that had so much style,” said Phil Shafer, who spins records for the hip-hop trio known as Human Crop Circles. “As a matter of fact, I’ve never been anywhere in Johnson County that had so much style.”