Twenty
years ago, the hip-hop triad of graffiti, rap, and breakdancing still had the
shine of new. These art expressions were raw and energetic — its purveyors
had mystique. The artistry was there; few in the mainstream recognized it as
that.
Rochester had and has its share of
graffiti writers. One of them, Change, started to get noticed in the mid-’80s.
Suddenly his tag and his murals were showing up all over the city, from North
Winton Road to the Broad Street Bridge to Genesee Valley Park. It seemed like
he’d go anywhere, tag anything.
“There’s
this buzz about this ‘Change’ person. It’s got to be a 12-year-old black kid,”
says Michael “Change” Maier of his Rochester career. “I kind of like that
colorblind nature of the wall. You can’t tell who’s behind the painting.”
Change
is, actually, a white man. He lives in Milwaukee with his family. He has a
fulltime design job. And he still writes.
In
high school he had admired the pencil tags he saw around Franklin. But it
wasn’t until he was in college and saw the 1983 documentary Style Wars that he found what he wanted.
He went out and painted his manifesto under East Henrietta Road, along the Canal,
in foot-high letters, starting out, “If this were Egypt or Ancient Mesopotamia
we’d decorate the walls instead of leaving them gray and blank.”
One of his favorite venues was Genesee
Valley Park. “For me it was this great intersection of the suburbs and the
city, the whites and the blacks,” he says. “At night no one was there and in
the daytime it was full of people. It was my gallery.”
He
tracked down another writer, Pose2, after seeing his work in an art gallery. He
found him airbrushing T-shirts at All Day Sunday in Midtown. Change — decked
out in his finest punk gear — had to show his book to prove who he was. The
two formed a crew, learning that they could find legal venues for their art. At
one approved painting jam in 1986 in Genesee Valley Park, Change got caught in
the middle of a scuffle and a stray punch broke his jaw.
“I
always had this question: Am I disrespecting somebody’s culture or not?” he
says. “In some crazy way, after that I felt legitimate.”
Change
stopped writing after he left Rochester in 1990 and didn’t pick up the cans
again until 1995, when he spotted a familiar face at a mall airbrushing kiosk
in Philadelphia. Pose and Change started painting again, traveling to different
cities’ graffiti jams, where a collection of artists converges on a legally
approved wall.
In
his return to graffiti, Change has become, in a way, an activist. His voice has
been given a kind of sanction. He speaks the word-on-the-street, dangerous
rumblings kind of truths that graffiti artists have been writing on walls for
decades; now he can speak through press releases and in roundtables addressing
graffiti culture.
“Graffiti
is a loaded term,” he says. “It gets into people’s headspace, it affects their
safety zone. It means ghetto and poverty, chaos.” But still: “You want people
to respect your property when they may never own property,” he says. “You’re
not even meeting them halfway.”
He
still loves writing because of what it can achieve outside of a canvas. “You
can go out and say, ‘I am,'” he says. “It’s being able to do something bigger
than yourself. It goes back to painting on caves.”
Change
and Pose2, along with several other artists both local and out-of-town, were in
Rochester on Saturday and Sunday, July 9 and 10, for an approved painting day
behind Village Gate Square. www.changerous.com, www.pose2.com.
—
Erica Curtis
This article appears in Jul 13-19, 2005.
