A coffeepot with the message “Stay Up” is stapled to the wall. This spray-painted sign is not a commercial for the caffeinated generation; it’s Camela Christopher’s street art.
Christopher heard this phrase one evening outside the Rainbo Club in Wicker Park. After she saw patrons being rude to a homeless man nearby, she struck up a conversation with him. Encouragingly, he told her to stay positive by saying, “Stay up!”
“I was so moved by it,” Christopher says. “I’m walking away and someone who obviously has it so much worse than I do at that moment is telling me to stay up.” She made a stencil of the phrase and began spray-painting it on signs around Chicago.
Christopher, a 2005 Columbia BFA graduate, has had successes with commissioned paintings and experimental films. She has also done some editing work at Chicago’s Edit Diva Media, and has sketched animations for a new kids’ video. But these legitimate jobs don’t keep Christopher off the streets.
“It’s easy to get distracted,” she says. “My teachers told us, ‘Eighty-five percent of you will not be making artwork five years from now.’ I’m [in] the 15 percent that’s inspired and creative and motivated.”
Her street art is mostly stencils with different phrases that seem simple but have multiple meanings. When her work started disappearing, she felt triumphant, not disappointed. “Success to me right now is people stealing my posters off the side of the wall, or finding my stickers and peeling those off and putting them in their house,” Christopher says.
Former Chicago street artist Josh MacPhee, author of Stencil Pirates, says street art in Chicago has had a rocky history, mostly due to Mayor Richard M. Daley’s beautification campaign. Signs and graffiti are immediately taken down or painted over, making the work of those brave enough to continue even more prominent. “That’s one of the reasons [graffiti] is sort of powerful in Chicago,” says MacPhee. But he also warns, “Once you start, it’s hard to stop.”
Christopher’s work reminds MacPhee of street art from the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, which was designed to create a dialogue with the city’s residents. Though street art may be fleeting, MacPhee says that a sign posted at the intersection of Milwaukee, Damen and North avenues will reach significantly more people than a month-long gallery show.
Christopher hopes to have a one-woman show in a gallery some day, but says street art will always be one of her favorite avenues of expression. “Those things that you can’t see in a gallery, but just happen around you,” she says. “That’s art, too.”