Reading the Streets: Steve Powers’ ‘Love Letter to Brooklyn’

NEW YORK – I first saw the large gray and black messages walking through a surprisingly ghost town-like downtown Brooklyn early on a Saturday morning. In capital letters, in and around a Macy’s garage and the Fulton Mall, are the phrases “Euphoria,” “Is You for Me,” “I Was Nurtured Here,” “I am Made to Leave,” and my current favorite, “Busy as a Brooklyn bound B.” Aside from particularly creative and colorful tags, I usually respond more to pictures than words when it comes to visual art, but there was something about the height and the scale of these phrases, their rawness that forced me to stop and look up.

I’m glad I did. Even when the words appear to be straightforward, artist Steve Powers adds a little twist, something perplexing, but often funny and fascinating. Above the words “Onward and Upward” is a fist, which I expected to be rising up in joy or power, but on a closer look appears to be calmly holding a spoon. Instead of a call to action, it inspired a call to eat.

The piece, commissioned by Macy’s, was inspired by conversations with Brooklyn residents and Powers’s own time in the city. While based in Philadelphia, where he’s done a similar love letter series, he spent some time working in Coney Island in the 2003 and 2004. Before he received commissions for legal pieces, Powers was a graffiti writer who went by the tag ESPO. As ESPO, Powers painted poems on roofs and buildings in his hometown of Philadelphia and Syracuse. He also painted a series of quotes by ad man David Ogilvy onto the walls of the New York Ogilvy & Mather offices.

Wherever he paints, Powers is committed to the work remaining a reflection of the community it lives in. As part of his commitment to keeping it local, Powers and his collaborators even used rollers and house paint from a nearby Lowe’s.

Love Letter to Brooklyn is located on Hoyt Street between Livingston and Fulton streets in downtown Brooklyn.

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