PRINTOff the hook street art
Why urban structures might be sweating the summer heat
COURTESY KNITTA, PLEASE
A member of Knitta, Please attaches a project in Houston, where the art and the group originated.
June 21, 2007 | 12:00 a.m. CST
It is just past midnight, and the crew gathers once again to go tagging under the cover of darkness. They have a few beers and decide on their target of the night. The huddle breaks, and it’s off to work. But instead of reaching for cans of spray paint, they grab their knitting needles and hit the streets.
This is how a typical night of tagging begins for the members of Knitta, Please, a group of six who are knitting their mark not only on Houston but also all over the world. Each member of their crew goes by a code name in order to ensure their anonymity. After all, most of the members have careers and families.
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It started in October 2005, when shop owner and founder of Knitta, who goes by the name PolyCotN, knitted the door handle of her boutique.
“It was real simple and sort of innocent,” PolyCotN says. “I loved how it looked. What I didn’t expect was that people who walked by the store loved it. This light bulb went off, and we were like, ‘Let’s do more.’ Within a week, we had our plan.”
The strategy was to use knitting to tag Houston as much as possible. Slowly but surely, stop signs, streetlights, mailboxes and car antennas were no longer cold, damaged, filthy urban structures. Instead they were canvases transformed with a blanket of vibrant rainbow-colored wool.
Similar taggings have appeared in Columbia. The pole of a stop sign bears a thin layer of light-blue yarn at the corner of University and William. Although tattered and torn from the weather, it has yet to be removed. This is one of the copycat jobs that are popping up around town and raising public interest.
Although Knitta members and aspiring taggers in Columbia perceive their graffiti as a method of beautifying public space, the underground art form is a type of vandalism and is illegal when it defaces public property in Missouri. But when it comes to the cozy wool nestled on a local lamppost, the city of Columbia seems to be turning a cold shoulder to the sweaters. “We need citizens to help turn in these taggers or let us know where the graffiti is,” says Jill Stedem of Columbia Public Works. “We don’t have enough staff to cover every inch of the city.”
Not all local knitters have actively joined the movement, but they still support the fuzzy art outside the traditional standards of scarves and baby booties. “I like the idea that it’s just a spontaneous outburst of fiber art,” says Jenny Sennott, coordinator of the Knitters Study Group of the Columbia Weavers and Spinners Guild, an organization that meets twice a month to share their craft and socialize. “You can’t wear it, so it’s not useful in that respect. But it’s cheerful and might make someone laugh and think about why it might be there.”
As the Houston-based group gained national attention, its members knew they wanted to expand. They traveled to bigger cities with bigger targets in mind. The first stop was New York. “We tagged every icon you could think of in three or four days with five of us,” says PolyCotN.
Instead of attempting the work alone, Knitta called upon its growing fan base, including admirers in Columbia. The group posted bulletins on its Web site and MySpace page and asked fans to send whatever they could. Knitta was overwhelmed by the response.
The increasing popularity of tagging by knitting caught the attention of the Standard Hotel in Los Angeles this May. The hotel caters to an edgy clientele who value trendsetting designs and concepts. The hip hotel features a new up-and-coming artist each month in a glass box that sits behind its check-in desk and asked Knitta to tag it.
The group took the opportunity to try something new by knitting an underworld sea complete with wool waves and stitched seaweed.
“I think it’s really fun and sort of tongue-in-cheek,” says Jenni Boelkens, the art director for the Standard Hotel. “It proves graffiti doesn’t have to be a negative word or art form.”
Copycat work started appearing in the United States and all over the world. There are an estimated five to 12 organized groups. The only thing that Knitta asks of local taggers, such as the Columbia branch, is that the knitting groups adopt their own names.
This is exactly the kind of response Knitta wanted. “I hope that what we do for people encourages them to look at the environment and look at graffiti and see that just because something isn’t government sanctioned, it doesn’t mean that it isn’t beautiful,” PolyCotN says.
Police might continue pulling the wool over their eyes when it comes to this friendlier form of graffiti. So for now, beautifying public spaces will be the common thread for these taggers, both locally and internationally. The trend of knit-fiti will continue to be a craft project of mass proportion, that is, one you can cuddle up to.
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