Happy New Year folks, I hope you had some great ways to celebrate the holiday. I decided to bring the new year in with a brief look at one of our most prolific graffiti artists here in Pittsburgh. I know that I've said there have been a couple of stickers I feel pretty confident that you've seen before but if there is one tag that you are guaranteed to have seen it's a Chu. A Chu tag can come in quite the variety options: some are just the letters, others are the letters turned into a face, many are just spray painted onto objects but there are quite a few which are sticker's like tonight's example. And while it is a very simple design, it is a very common one to find. A lot of the Chu tags seem to be concentrated around the Lawrenceville area but I know I've found this tag in most of the neighborhoods that I've wandered around, although this admittedly is not that large of an area at the moment.
The mind behind Chu is the artist Jerome Charles. According to his website he started off as a photographer, got into tagging, and is now doing a fair amount of work as an illustrator. The collection of his work on the site is impressive, with examples of his photography and the recent exhibits that he has participated in. One of these exhibits was in association with Ace Hotel, where they gave him a room to do whatever he pleased. He also does a lot of work in community service, although a portion of this is due to the fact that it's court mandated. In 2016, Jerome Charles turned himself in for the damage to public property and criminal mischief charges that had compiled against him. And although he complied with the police and their investigation, he made it into the papers again a few months later when it was announced that he had gone against the pact he made with the court and continued to graffiti. He also mentioned in a blurb on his home page that when he was doing the exhibit with Ace Hotel, he had a court appearance the day after for his graffiti. While I understand that it is technically a crime to deface public property, and I'm sure that if it was my property that was getting spray paint and stickers all over it I'd be annoyed, but a large part of me has to wonder how much it matters at this point. Graffiti is used to make artistic and political statements on a daily basis. Quite a few of these artists/taggers end up continuing on to make a name for themselves in the art world. It's also not like charging people for this minor crime actually stops it. True this has given Chu even more notoriety but I'm sure he would appreciate having his tags valued without the hefty price on him.
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Maggie Ondrey
An amateur photographer and writer capturing a small portion of the city. Archives
August 2017
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