Bored
Reaching Bored seemed as easy as dialing 773-669-TURD.
Bored styled an Albany Avenue sidewalk to resemble a Monopoly-board square, with a pair of to-scale green houses stuck to the pavement. Outside of Lula Cafe he installed a stack of wooden panels painted to look like Chance cards; the top card read Carissa, will you marry me? if yes, please advance one block south to the nearest church. A Community Chest card was more cutting: Go to jail for public douchebaggery.
He has scouted spots in San Francisco, Miami, and New York City scribbling down intersections that would make good canvases for his work. “The first time I went to NYC, I thought about archetypes that would fit the city. But I ended up going in blind. It’s not like being in Chicago where I know the contexts of neighborhoods, or about this corner on Ashland. I did a big paste of a taxicab with a couple making out in the back and I thought, OK, this will make sense on the Lower East Side.”
LHW fell into street art the summer before his final semester at the University of Kentucky, when he interned at FugScreen Studios, a screen printer in Bucktown, and was asked to produce work for a show. He found a picture of a waving man in a bunny suit on the Internet. “It was stoner-esque and funny,” he remembers. “I drew it, and people responded to it.”
Penny Pinch started out drawing “guys in Cubs hats,” and those evolved into the Ziggy lookalikes and horned monsters he does today. His practice is informed by his frugality, hence the name; he claims to have never spent money on his art—all his supplies are “either found, traded for, or reused.”
Stef Skills
In 1992, Stephanie Garland first took the wildstyle techniques she’d honed while creating flyers for hip-hop shows and parties and began applying them to walls around Chicago. She began simply by writing her name, but two decades later Stef Skills’s work is skillfully executed with a strong feminist bent—a refreshing perspective in the male-dominated world of graf.
