noooo!
Street Muralist May Soon Be Looking at Jailhouse Walls
By IAN URBINA
Published: June 12, 2004
The lawyer for James De La Vega, a well-known muralist from East Harlem who was convicted on misdemeanor graffiti charges this week, said yesterday that his client deserved community service, not jail time, and that he planned to appeal.
"This verdict was entirely unjustified," said the lawyer, Daniel J. Ollen. "We definitely think this case deserves a second look."
Mr. De La Vega, 32, who was arrested on July 17, 2003, while painting without permission on the side of a Bronx warehouse near Willis Avenue and Bruckner Boulevard, was found guilty on Thursday of attempted criminal mischief, attempted making graffiti and possessing graffiti instruments. He is to be sentenced in Bronx Criminal Court on July 29 and faces up to 90 days in jail.
During his two-day trial, about 25 supporters sat in the back of the courtroom, some of the them wearing "Free De La Vega" T-shirts. On the second day of the trial, a court officer asked them to turn the shirts inside out.
During the trial, Mr. Ollen called his client "an artist, a teacher and a neighborhood icon" who was intending to improve the warehouse, not damage it. In a telephone interview yesterday, Mr. Ollen said Mr. De La Vega's "sole purpose in life is to make things prettier and more visually thought-provoking, not to lessen their value."
But an assistant district attorney, Karen E. Antoine, argued during the trial that intent was less important than the fact that Mr. De La Vega did not have permission to paint on the side of the building.
Several months before the trial, the Bronx district attorney's office offered Mr. De La Vega a plea bargain involving a year of probation and no jail time in exchange for a guilty plea, Mr. Ollen said. But Mr. De La Vega refused, partly on principle and partly because he expected to win if the case went to a jury, Mr. Ollen added.
On the first day of the trial, the district attorney's office reduced the charges to Class B misdemeanors that removed the possibility of a jury trial. "We thought this was a really underhanded tactic," Mr. Ollen said.
In a statement after the trial, the district attorney's office said: "It's a simple proposition. You need an owner's permission to paint on his or her property. The quality of the artwork does not change that fact."
Mr. De La Vega, who received a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Cornell in 1994, is well known in East Harlem where his chalk drawings have appeared on sidewalks throughout the neighborhood.
Portraying feelings of entrapment and unvanquished love, Mr. De La Vega usually drew images of fish staring longingly at each other from separate bowls. Mr. De La Vega also scrawled various aphorisms on trash cans and buildings around the city: "Beauty magazines make my girlfriend feel ugly," was penned on the sides of fitness clubs on the Lower East Side. And "The best remedy for a cheap person is to have him pay for everything," was written on the walls of banks and expensive restaurants near Wall Street.