The South Side’s popular Color Park became the site this week of competing visions of how street art should be done there.
Since its creation along the Three Rivers Heritage Trail in 2017, the park has welcomed anyone to paint art on its concrete wall, its 100 or so concrete barrier blocks, even the asphalt trail. Color Park was created by artist Baron Batch, working with nonprofit group Friends of the Riverfront following his own conviction for creating illegal graffiti.
Six years of colorful artwork had accumulated — legally — since. But Tuesday evening, a crew of volunteers for Friends of the Riverfront painted it all over with white primer. The “refresh,” as the group called it, had been originally scheduled for late April, but was postponed because of rain.
“It was always meant to be ephemeral and changing constantly, and the vision Baron always had was that it would be refreshed every year,” said Friends of the Riverfront executive director Kelsey Ripper. She added that the paint-over was meant to help curtail the spread of the artwork, which now runs beyond the park’s original bounds, up the trail beyond the 10th Street Bridge, and even to buildings and trees nearby.
Ripper said another goal was to clean up the language in some of the artwork. “We were getting a lot of complaints about the obscenities,” she said.
But by Wednesday morning, street artists had begun voicing their displeasure with the move, both on social media and, armed with spray cans, in person. Surfaces painted stark white just hours before now bore messages like “Friends of the Riverfront Are Idiots,” “There was art here u destroyed it You better do better than what you ruin,” and “You painted over dead artist work Be ashamed.”
Discussing the paint job with WESA, an artist who goes by the name Wizo said, “I thought it was absolute bulls—t. Nobody asked for that.”
“It rubbed me the wrong way and I think it was a little not the best optics,” said Cam Schmidt, another artist who has painted at Color Park.
Ripper said the site is owned by the City of Pittsburgh and the Urban Redevelopment Authority.
Thursday night, Batch joined about 40 volunteers to paint over the primer — and over some of the tags added in the prior 48 hours. Most worked on the walls and barriers with rollers while up the trail toward the Tenth Street bridge a handful of young artists with spray cans did their own thing on the barriers there. The walls and individual, 6-foot-long barrier blocks were mostly painted in single colors — blue, orange, yellow — that recalled how it looked when it first opened.
Batch acknowledged that some in the community were upset by the painting-over, but said he viewed it as “an invitation to participate” for others.
Batch, 35, added that he has often painted at the park himself and frequently bikes through the site. “The crazy thing was to ride through every year and see it change,” he said.
The park remains open to all artists who care to contribute. But for some artists, the damage has been done.
Street artists value Color Park as one of the few legal graffiti walls in the city — and one, moreover, in a semi-secluded riverfront site with a view of Downtown.
They are used to their work being painted over by other artists. But ideally, they say, that happens organically, with only older or less impressive work effaced.
At Color Park, some said a lot of good art was covered over indiscriminately, or “buffed.”
“When it comes to a chill wall like that, you kind of let it live and let it grow to what it is,” said Cameron Nesbitt, a muralist.
“There’s been very little to no regulation, and things have been going great,” said Wizo. “So to disturb that structure, it’s just harmful.”
Some non-artists who frequent Color Park agreed, including Mike Calfe, who works nearby and said he walks the trail daily. “They probably could have been a little more selective of what they covered over,” he said.
Ripper said Friends of the Riverfront discussed whether all the art should be whited out. “We … ultimately decided we didn’t want to have to say, ‘This is a good piece of art and this isn’t a good piece of art,’ and to reinforce the idea that it is ephemeral and changing.”
Not every artist who has painted at the Color Park was upset by the paint-over. “As an artist working in graffiti, if anything, I think it’s kind of a good lesson for the artists working in spray paint, just because graffiti and spray paint is an art of impermanence,” said Max Gonzales, a muralist. “It is a quick, rotating art form.”
Color Park, officially, runs about 200 yards. But the concrete barriers laid both upstream and downstream along the trail have also been painted over by artists, as have memorial benches and a way-finding sign on the site. Ripper said Friends of the Riverfront attempted to clean graffiti from an interpretative sign that provided information about local ecological and industrial history, but eventually gave up and moved it.
The surfaces painted white on Tuesday denote the official boundaries of the park. Ripper said her group’s next step is to cover graffiti outside those bounds.
New signs were posted by the group at the site. One read, “Thank you for visiting the South Side’s Color Park. Graphics beyond this boundary will be removed. Please keep your art and creativity in the Color Park!” By Wednesday, some of those signs had been vandalized.
Ripper said the “refresh” will now be an annual event.
Artist Wizo said he doubted that will make the practice any more popular. “They’re gonna get negative reception every time they do it,” he said.
