Russell Howze Brings "Stencil Nation" to Greenville

Russell Howze is a native Greenvillian and a stencil artist. He runs the Stencil Archive and published the collection Stencil Nation: Community, Graffiti, and Art in 2008, documenting the work of over 350 artists from 28 countries. The Stencil Nation Book Tour will stop by the Warehouse Theatre Monday, December 20 at 7 PM.

Create Greenville: Give me a little background information on yourself. Are you from Greenville originally? Did you go to art school?

Russell Howze: Yes, I moved to Greenville County at a very young age and lived there for over 20 years before moving out of SC. I did not go to art school and maybe took two or three art classes over the years. Being self-taught, stencil and graffiti art were some of my first examples of work that anyone can learn.

CG: How did you get into stencil art?

RH: In 1995, I went to Europe to teach myself art and graphic design. I assumed that that meant going to museums and galleries, but I quickly noticed advertisements and graffiti as easy, free, in-the-street ways to learn theory and style. Staring at all of this on the streets of major European cities, I soon noticed stencil work as well. I was snapping limited photographs of this work (no digital cameras to take hundreds of photos back then), and found stencil art to be the most intriguing. When I finally moved to San Francisco in 1997, I was surprised to find a long, rich history of stencil graffiti in my new Mission District neighborhood. As I snapped away at all the new and old work, I started meeting stencil artists and documenters. Soon after, the connections went online and international, resulting in a huge pile of amazing photographic historical books on the art from.

C: How did you come up with the idea for the Stencil Archive?

RH: Back around 2000, just before Banksy became an internationally-known vandal (he does not admit to being an artist), I was trying to get my stencil photographs published as a book. Tristan Manco’s “Stencil Graffiti” book had just come out, mostly focused on European work, and I had hundreds of photographs from San Francisco and USA. But I got turned down by a few local publishers in San Francisco and found other places online that said things like “three year backlog of releases.” I needed to learn website design, so I decided to put my photos online. There were maybe a dozen websites at the time that featured stencil art, and they were all simple single artist sites.

Thinking up the name for the site was the hardest part since I had a pile of content waiting to be scanned and put in online albums. Back then, storage space was expensive, so I started with small jpgs of the images. At the time, I thought “I’ll put my stuff up and then announce the site to the few places that stencil artists might surf.” After a few uploads to the Stencil Archive, artists from around the world contacted me and started submitting jpgs to the site. Some of those artists, SWOON, Jef Aerosol, Chris Stain, etc., ended up in my book “Stencil Nation” and are now collected in major museums and galleries across the world.

Soon after Stencil Archive went live, Melbourne, Australia’s Stencil Revolution went live. They were professional website designers so their well-made site exploded with thousands of photos early on. My site is slowly heading towards 20,000 photos, all of which I personally curate and upload to the proper place. My rules are simple: if I can tell it is a stencil, I will post it; I try not to post duplicate images of the same stencil; and I also try not to post negative/fascist/racist work, unless it is from the 1970s or earlier.

CG: I know debates surround the artistic merit of graffiti. How do you explain or prove to people not familiar with stencil art that it is in fact art?

RH: In many ways, stencils are and are NOT art. Making the stencil tool can be an easy thing to do, and I encourage everyone to try to cut one out. One thing that stands out about stencils is that they are used in many cultures to get messages out in public. Sandinistas in Nicaragua used them. Anti-apartheid activists in South Africa used them. Anti-fascists in Germany use them. If you look at the images on my site, you will see that some are much more sloppy and crude than others. I don’t know if I’d call it art, but I do love the idea of non-artists creating something with their own hands. Corporate media does not tell us to do things like that, so in some respects they are indeed creating like artists.

Then you have another level of stencils. You have the more creative crude works, which can be quite appealing artistically (see the buffalo stencil image from Greenville) and then you have artists that create amazing, compelling stencil pieces that are indeed art. Banksy more than anyone shows how the different elements of stencil art take the form to appealing levels. He takes mostly crude images and stencils, finds the perfect location, and presents it all in a way that has captivated all types of people from all over the world. His work is usually illegal, political, and he denies the fact that he’s an artist. Thanks to his photogenic work, and a media/art world frenzy around it, he is now one of the most famous artist of the 21st Century.

If you are asking this question in regards to stencils as graffiti or art, then I always put it in a capitalist context. There are many stencil artists doing illegal work around the world: Banksy, Shepherd Fairey, SWOON, CAB (here in San Francisco), XOOOOX, Blek le Rat, etc. These artists are also getting gallery exhibits and being collected in major museums. So though they are breaking the law, their work is accepted and validated by the commercial art world. On top of this, there is another level of commerce and capital that forms in the nature of graffiti-style fashion and trendiness. In cities like San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York, boutiques sell the lifestyle to anyone who can drop $35 for a tee-shirt. These places sell spray paint, markers, and the black books graff writies like to compose pieces in.

So the big irony is this: As municipalities spend millions of dollars trying to eradicate all types of graffiti, they allow businesses to market and sell the lifestyle. Stencil, spray, marker, sticker, poster graffiti is at the same time illegal and legal no matter what people think of their artistic merits. I find this paradox fascinating and think that city governments’ eradication attempts are like trying to stick a finger in a leaky dam. In the world of free market capital, they’d never shut down businesses that sell the lifestyle! I would also like to add that humans have left their marks for millennia, so good luck attempting to end all those toilet scrawls.

CG: What is the process of designing/creating a stencil like?

It depends. In my book “Stencil Nation,” I asked artists to share their process and got varied methods. Simply put, one needs to think up an idea, draw it on a firm piece of media, cut it out in a way that it doesn’t fall apart, and then paint it in a way that it can be read. For me, I either draw the idea out and cut it, or I trace items in Illustrator and then transfer it to the media to cut. Sounds simple but practice is key on all the steps! Though I’ve had a few “master courses” with amazing stencil artists, I still consider myself a moderately successful one.

CG: What are your thoughts on returning to Greenville and the nature of smaller arts communities than San Francisco’s?

RH: Greenville has a lively arts scene compared to other cities, more so since I moved away in the late 1990s. But Greenville falls behind in stencil art. Asheville, NC and Charleston are much more interesting places to wander around with a camera hunting for stencils. Chicago stencil artist CRO just moved to Asheville and the infamous Shepherd Fairey is from Charleston, so that might explain things a bit. I do find stencils in Greenville, but was saddened to see that the Twin Towers DIY skate park was fenced in on my last visit. That was a safe place for kids to experiment with stencils and spray art, not to mention their skating moves. If anyone knows where the stencils are in Greenville now, please pass it along!

CG: What can attendees expect to see at your presentation at the Warehouse Theatre?

It is mostly a one-hour presentation that features some of the art and text in my book “Stencil Nation,” but I will also talk about what is currently happening with the art form. I will bring cut out samples to share, discuss how stencils are made, and am hoping to feature some regional work that I’ve found over the years (in SC, NC, TN, and possibly GA). I like to keep things light, so people who attend can ask questions, touch the cut outs, speak with me, and possibly buy an autographed copy of my book for a holiday gift. I will also bring along some painted work for sale too, by artists who are in the book.

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Come see Russell’s presentation December 20 at 7PM at the Warehouse Theatre.