#Stick em up documentary movie#

'We've been so caught up with making a film we haven't really thought past today.'

During the Q&A, Luster said he plans to hit the festival circuit. He also talks about scaling back his work to small stickers and flyers.Īs for the filmmakers, last night was just the first step in what will hopefully be a national promotional campaign. During the film, he contemplates moving to a new town where he has less notoriety. He was careful to distinguish himself from so-called 'graphic artists' and other wheatpasters who compile their work mostly in Photoshop.Īnd yet, Give Up's popularity has become somewhat of a liability. Give Up, who makes enough money selling his posters and other works online that he doesn't have to work a traditional job, was also questioning the nature of 'art.' He takes his own pictures with a film camera, photocopies them, cuts and pastes them into collages that he them blows up at the copy shop and screen-prints into large posters for wheatpasting. 'There are places where it's perfectly appropriate to be covered in art,' he said. Famed street artist Shepard Fairey, creator of the Andre the Giant campaign in the 1990s and perhaps best known for his Barack Obama HOPE poster, talked about almost getting detained while on a bombing trip to Houston. So what is art? Even the artists weren't immune to the debate. 'Everything here is truly artistic,' he said, adding that the scope of the law determined what was acceptable and not acceptable.Īfterwards, Art Attack overheard Lovell telling another audience member that she owns a few pieces of Houston wheatpaste posters. Yet the removal of unsanctioned art 'costs $2 million a year at a time when we're having to lay off employees.' Lovell said the downtown Houston Public Library now offers three walls for the display of city-sanctioned street art. A Q&A session with the author after the screening turned into a political debate. Garcia boldly proclaims that he'll arrest anyone he sees partaking in the delightful term 'criminal mischief.' Yet for them to show up at the theater in front of a largely pro-street art audience took some cajones. In the film, all three rail against street art as a destruction of private property.

#Stick em up documentary movie#

Bradford, a former police chief, were in the movie and the audience, as was Sheriff Adrian Garcia. 'The streets become your gallery,' says street art collector Alejandro Arboleda.Ĭity Council members Sue Lovell and C.O. Another, Give Up, whose images of razor blades have covered the city for years, says he wouldn't make art if he had to do it in a gallery. 'I'm on a city beautification process,' one anonymous artist says. What the movie does address is the war between street artists and the city, and how, in some cases, the subversive aspect itself is what motivates the work. 'That'll be part two,' he said after the film. As a result, the movie doesn't even begin to address stencilers like Coolidge or painters like ACK!. He had so much material, in fact, that he decided to focus strictly on wheatpasters in Houston.

Over nearly three years of shooting, filmmaker Alex Luster captured 55 hours of material, which was whittled down into about an hour and a half. In several scenes, police cruisers and motorcycles are shown drifting by while the wheatpasters work unnoticed.

The documentary, which leans heavily towards the side of the street artists, starts with a Picasso quote: 'Every act of creation is first an act of destruction.' Much of the movie thereafter is filled with footage of blurry-faced wheatpasters 'bombing' abandoned buildings, ugly billboards and metal junction boxes at busy intersections. Last night, River Oaks Theatre was a who's who of social media advocates, City of Houston elected officials and, more than likely, a few of the city's anonymous, unrecognized street artists for the premiere of Stick 'Em Up!, a documentary about Houston's street art scene that was almost three years in the making.Īnticipation for the film was so great that co-presenter Aurora Picture Show was forced to add a second screening and then a third after the first two times sold out. Check out our slideshow from last night's Stick 'Em Up premiere.