This past Sunday, the New York Times continued
their run of street art related stories (Banksy, Revs, Wooster Mobile) with a
piece that profiles one of our favorite artists, Leon Reid. The article, written
with Leon’s consent, is a terrific companion to the podcast that Sara did on
March 19th. If you haven’t listened to it yet, you can download it href="http://www.woostercollective.com/2005/03/wooster-podcast-9-on-streets-
with.html">here.

/>MANHATTAN AND BROOKLYN UP CLOSE
/>Bending, Bolting and Evading the Police
By KATHERINE KINGSLEY

/>Published: May 1, 2005

ONE Saturday last month, Leon Reid donned a
hard hat and an orange worker’s tunic and headed for a busy corner in Carroll
Gardens, Brooklyn, where he bolted a bent telephone sign onto the top of a
Verizon phone booth and screwed a crinkled one-way sign onto the top of a nearby
pole.

People drifted past, noticing nothing suspicious in their
midst. After 10 minutes, Mr. Reid disappeared into the subway, leaving behind
the two signs, curved towards each other in a conspiratorial, almost
affectionate arc.

“This is art,” said Mr. Reid, a 25-year-old street
artist who has been doing this sort of thing for a while. It is also a crime.
/>
Mr. Reid removes city-owned fixtures from the streets - poles, signs,
posts - and lugs them back to his workshop in Greenpoint, where he alters them
in subtle and minutely designed ways. He does not steal signs that are in use;
“that would be kind of dangerous,” he admitted. Instead, he keeps an eye out for
broken or abandoned items, which he can salvage and, as he puts it,
“recycle.”

He installs his finished work throughout the city, usually
erecting the pieces in a place other than where he found the raw materials.
Location is a practical decision as well as an artistic one; he must be able to
bolt or weld what he has made onto a pre-existing structure, like a phone booth
or a traffic light.
Over the past six years, ever since he moved to New
York from his native Cincinnati to attend Pratt Institute, Mr. Reid estimates
that he has installed 150 pieces in Brooklyn and Manhattan. If you have not seen
his stuff recently, that’s not surprising; he just returned from 18 months in
London, where he was studying for a master’s degree in fine arts.

/>From conception to installation, each takes around a month to complete. When
not producing his subversive creations, he teaches art to kindergarteners at
Public School 175 in Harlem.

His past work includes a piece in
Bedford-Stuyvesant, where he printed the words “Hollar Back” over a phone sign,
and one in Carroll Gardens, where he carved figures chasing each other across
two Verizon signs; he called that one “Phone Tag.”
By building on what is
already on the streets, Mr. Reid likens his work to a kind of urban pun.
Sometimes, it blends in too well.

“I never noticed it,” said Joe
O’Connor, a retiree who lives in Carroll Gardens, as he craned his neck to
examine Mr. Reid’s latest creation. That does not surprise Mr. O’Connor. “A lot
of people don’t look up when they’re walking along the street,” he explained.
/>
And no, he said, he would not call it art. “All it does,” he said, “is
give you a crick in the neck.”

In the past few years, street art of
all kinds has been booming in New York; the sidewalks of Downtown have been
transformed by stickers, posters, stencils, chalk and paint. Most street artists
distinguish themselves from graffitists, arguing that they are “involved in a
very big public statement,” in the words of Marc Schiller, who blogs on
www.woostercollective.com, a Web site on street art that he founded two years
ago. Street artists, Mr. Schiller added, think that “too much of the public
space has been sold to big corporations, and they’re reclaiming it
illegally.”

Mr. Reid agrees. “It’s political in the act, in the very
act,” he said. “Each and every one of these things is done illegally, without
any permission. That’s a statement in and of itself. It brings up questions of
ownership and what the public is allowed to do with things in public space.”
/>
The police - surprise, surprise - take a rather less nuanced view of Mr.
Reid’s activities. “He’s destroyed the phone booth by attaching something to
it,” said Detective Walter Burnes, a spokesman for the New York Police
Department. “That’s vandalism.” And, he added: “If it violates the law, we’d
make an arrest for it. It’s that simple.”