Rise Up With Fists

Stewart Ebersole's plywood street art makes a statement — or five.

by Andrew Thompson

Andrew Thompson ONE-TWO PUNCH: Ebersole's stenciled fists, once let loose on the streets of Philadelphia, have found new — temporary — digs at Bambi. (CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGER VERSION)

Ask Stewart Ebersole four times why he runs around Philadelphia tacking painted plywood fists on abandoned buildings and construction sites, and you'll get at least five answers. He says it's to liven up the city, make a statement about urban blight, create a scavenger hunt and just say what's obviously said by blanketing the city with anarchistic clenched fists branded with the words "LIBER-8 ME."

But woven throughout all these intentions is the idea that, Ebersole says, the greater portion of the Philly art scene is not hospitable to people like himself. He says the galleries and art spaces have become pompously exclusive with a fixation on financial markup, and the only venue that offered itself to him was the city. What is really being liberated, then, is art from galleries.

"I got here and it was like a goddamn desert," says Ebersole, who returned to Philly in 2006 after living in West Chester for seven years. "Even in terms of outsider, critical art, it's a pattern, it's the same thing," he says. "It's somebody building a fucking tree house or taking a picture of someone's ass. Really good art is generally not in a gallery."

So after two street installations (the first in November 2007; the second this January) and a vow to stay true to the essence of street art, it surprises even Ebersole that he has a gallery show booked at Bambi Gallery this weekend. The show will feature an array of different fists and photographs of them taken by Jared Castaldi while they were installed throughout the city.

All of Ebersole's work is a product of his first-generation punk rock, anti-establishment ethos. The most prominent piece in his Fishtown dining room is a wall-size plywood and Masonite fist and star underneath the words "Rise Above." He and Castaldi are working on Barred for Life, a book about the meaning Black Flag tattoos have for their bearers. (Ebersole recently covered his own small Black Flag tattoo on his calf with a bigger, newer Black Flag tattoo.)

As loath as Ebersole has been to place his work in the confines of a gallery, it's the only chance many viewers have to see the LIBER-8 ME project: No more than a few days after Ebersole has screwed the fists onto building exteriors, they've almost all come down. Half the time, they've been looted as souvenirs by admiring passersby. The rest have been vengefully torn off by angry landlords and others whom Ebersole thinks have not yet learned to see street art as anything other than vandalism.

And with aspirations to return to graduate school (he already has a master's in geology and taught science at the School at Church Farm in Exton from 1999 to 2006), Ebersole, 41, is reaching the point when his art is not worth risking a criminal record.

"I've had friends who were jailed doing similar stuff and I want none of that," he says. "I've never been arrested, but I have been scared shitless [by cops]."

In West Chester, he started the Renegade Art Coalition, a semi-organized group of artists known for their offbeat shows and anarchist bent. But it wasn't until he came back to Philly that he could work in an urban environment less hostile to street art.

Ebersole may be the creative fountainhead of LIBER-8 ME, but the project is a multi-man effort. After Ebersole carves the fists, he sends them out to 10 different artists. While Ebersole paints his fists in sets of five with one design to a set, his collaborators make each fist unique, painting colorful polygons and textures, then send them back to Ebersole to stencil in clenched fingers and the "LIBER-8 ME" signature.

Seeing the fists in a gallery is like watching lions in a zoo, out of their natural habitat and confined to a location antithetical to their existence. Ebersole comes off as uncertain about the decision to move his project in the opposite direction of its original intentions. Even though Bambi doesn't have the same "agenda" as the Old City galleries, says Ebersole, his street art will still be exhibited indoors. The pieces will also be for sale during the show's curiously short run.

"I'm doing a gallery show," he says while stenciling a fist, "for a project that was meant to make people look at abandoned buildings."

(andrew.thompson@citypaper.net)

"LIBER-8 ME," Fri., Sept. 26, 6:30-10 p.m. (with reception) and Sat., Sept. 27, 11 a.m.-5 p.m., free, Bambi Gallery, 1817 Frankford Ave., 215-423-2668, bambiproject.com.