Adam5100 takes street art into heady world of galleries

Oakland Tribune, May 5, 2006 by Zoneil MaharajCORRESPONDENT

OAKLAND -- As you walk through the front door of Adam5100's modest Oakland home, you are greeted by an "Enter the Wu-Tang" poster -- a colorful homage to the famous New York City rap group.

Follow the trail of spray paint cans that line the hallway like bread crumbs, and you will come to a pyramid of more spray cans next to his entertainment center -- a phonograph, VCR with "Harold and Maude" sticking out, a small TV, and a PlayStation 2 -- by far the most modern of all the items.

In the middle of the room sits Adam5100 wearing a turkey hunter's hat with the bill flipped upward, shooting spray paint through a stencil onto a 5-by-3-foot canvas. He got his start as a kid, tagging any available blank wall. Today his art commands collector prices in art galleries.

Today even though he paints in his front yard, the house still smells of paint. The open window and cool spring breeze do little to eliminate the smell. Sheets of paper and cardboard -- remnants of old stencils -- are scattered across the floor.

He has been working all day, preparing for upcoming art shows.

Adam5100 will not let go of the knife. The house is a mess, with bits and pieces everywhere. The man is on a rampage and won't stop until each painting is done.

The artist creates photo realistic paintings by shooting spray paint through multilayered stencils, reproducible designs cut into cardboard, paper or any other medium you can stick an Xacto blade through.

But his art was not always openly embraced.

In fact, he had to duck cops just to create his art and hope it wouldn't be painted over the next day. Now he sells his work for $750 to $2,500.

"The gallery lets me express a different side of myself," Adam5100 says. "I can be a lot more subtle in my paintings versus putting them on the streets. It also lets me push my boundaries of my medium. I couldn't take an 18-layered stencil to the sidewalk."

His artwork was recently displayed at the Urbis Artium Gallery in San Francisco with Logan Hicks in an exhibit that ended April 28.

For more information on his work, visit his Web site: http:// www.adam5100.com.

"Adam5100 takes stencils, which have grown out of a street art scene, and has turned them into an elevated fine art," says Erin Sanderson, manager of Urbis Artium, a gallery of modern art.

"Most people don't realize they're stencil paintings until they look at them closely. The amount of time it takes for him to cut the stencils and spray them out is more intensely intricate than a lot of other stencil work I've seen."

According to Russell H, a self-proclaimed "certified stencil geek" and curator of the community Web site StencilArchive.org, stencils as street art emerged as an underground counterculture movement of the 1960s art scenes in Paris, New York, and other major cities worldwide as a means to convey political messages.

"Stencil art is a legitimate form of expressing yourself and your political beliefs. It may be illegal but it's definitely legitimate," says Russell, whose Web site has had 5,000 image uploads from across the globe since its 2002 inception.

"You can't afford the billboard, so you just make the stencil and put the stencil up all over your neighborhood."

Adam5100's work is an evolved form of what is done on the streets. Like many current Bay Area artists today, that is where Adam5100 got his start.

When he was growing up in Albuquerque, N.M., the city's many empty walls provided the perfect canvas to display his art. He started tagging in the eighth grade and progressed into stencils during his high school years.

"(Graffiti) boosts that pubescent, ego-trip, testosterone-driven 'I wanna conquer the world'-type business that happens when you're young," says Adam5100, who has designed logos for Broke Pockets Entertainment and Slept On Records.

Graffiti won him a scholarship and got him into the California College of the Arts, despite a 1.6 grade point average.

"(Street art) has become the aesthetic of now," Adam5100 says. "It's infiltrated commercials and corporations. More and more institutions in media, their creative directors came from graffiti. It's starting to saturate."

Recently, Sony led a stencil ad campaign for its PlayStation Portable (PSP) to appeal to the youth market.

Comedy Central's current programming layout incorporates graffiti and stencil elements. Shoe company K-Swiss is also riding on this new art wave and in June, Adam5100 will participate in the K-Spray China Tour'06 for the shoe company.

Being able to sell art "makes me feel like there's a place in the world for everybody, and I feel like I'm finding mine," says Adam5100. "I don't think I can do anything else (besides make art)."

For more information, visit http://www.adam5100.com.