On The Trail of A Tagger

Sean Lowe was at his gallery, Camp/Us (2883 N. Milwaukee), today so I went over to see if he’d had any luck finding the culprit who tagged the James Jankowiak butterfly mural on Corner. On my way over I saw that the Eagle printing building had also been tagged with the same “4” in a circle. The staff at Camp/Us had already cleaned off the tags on 2901 and 2905 N Milwaukee and said they would clean that one off, too. ​

According to Sean, the night of the tagging, Saturday, there was a party at Camp/Us for a well-known artist from Mexico who was in town to promote his new paint line. Out of the 35 people there, only three were local. The rest were from Texas and Mexico. When Sean heard about the tagging he said he wondered how he was going to track down whomever did it because he assumed it was one of the visitors, but when he saw the tag, he was dismayed to realize it was one of the locals who were at his party.

Sean was both apologetic and angry that someone he had welcomed into his gallery would violate the strict code followed by taggers. “Local guys are supposed to respect murals,” he said. “I don’t know what they were thinking when they went out that night and did that.” He added that Caspar, Jankowiak’s former nom de guerre, isn’t “in a street war with anyone” which makes the tagging even more senseless. “Stamping someone else’s piece is the most disrespectful thing you can do because it’s ruining something that took people hours to do.”