Artist
In 2000 Powers gave up graffiti to become a full-time studio artist. His work has been shown at the prestigious Venice and Liverpool Biennials, as well as numerous shows at New York City's Deitch Gallery. In 2003, Powers designed the artwork for Tommy Guerrero's third studio album Soul Food Taqueria. In 2005 he curated "The Dreamland Artists Club", a project in which professional artists helped Coney Island merchants by repainting their signs. Powers first solo museum exhibition was in the fall of 2007, at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts which showed much of the work he had been working on at his Coney Island sign shop. The show attracted attention in New York and Philly and in the beginning of December ESPO graced the cover of the art magazine Juxtapoz, where they wrote that, “In 10 years time, Stephen 'ESPO' Powers’ name will reside next to Crumb, Robert Williams, Basquiat, McGee and Warhol as those who truly changed the way art is defined and displayed. As 2007 comes to a close, we couldn’t think of a better artist to honor.”
In 2008 he returned to Coney Island to create the Waterboarding Thrill Ride, a waterboarding themed installation meant to draw attention to America's policy on torture.
Powers was a Fulbright scholar in 2007. He used the grant to create murals in Dublin and Belfast's Shankhill area, with the assistance of local teenagers. His work in Belfast was inspired by the area's political murals; Powers told the New York Times that he was "taking the form of the murals, which are insanely powerful for all the wrong reasons, and trying to retain some of the power and use it in a really good way.”
Power’s most recent project is a mural project in Philadelphia about the complexities and rewards of relationships, titled A Love Letter for You. ESPO and his crew painted more than 50 murals along the elevated train along Market Street in West Philly. The project, sponsored by a $260,000 grant from the Pew Center for Arts and Heritage through the Philadelphia Exhibitions Initiative, and produced by the Philadelphia Mural Arts Program, has generated positive reviews from both the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal.
The accompanying book A Love Letter for You, shot by photographers Adam Wallacavage and Zoe Strauss, was published by Press and is now available. It is distributed by DAP in New York City.
Powers is also the author of a book on graffiti's history, The Art of Getting Over, published by St. Martin's Press in 1999, as well as the graphic novel, First and Fifteenth: Pop Art Short Stories, Villard Press, 2005. ESPO’s exploits as a graffiti writer in the late 90s and his transition into a studio artist are documented in the 2009 book Graffiti Lives, by Baruch College Assistant Professor Gregory Snyder. You can also see ESPO painting one of his famous gates in the Videograf Productions video Graf Core 1.0, and you can hear ESPO making a cameo appearance as a voice-over artist in the international television series, Kung Faux.
In 2012, Powers designed the artwork for JJ DOOM's album Key to the Kuffs.
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Famous quotes containing the word artist:
“No artist is ahead of his time. He is his time; it is just that others are behind the times.”
—Martha Graham (1894–1991)
“A person taking stock in middle age is like an artist or composer looking at an unfinished work; but whereas the composer and the painter can erase some of their past efforts, we cannot. We are stuck with what we have lived through. The trick is to finish it with a sense of design and a flourish rather than to patch up the holes or merely to add new patches to it.”
—Harry S. Broudy (b. 1905)
“Any man who can write a page of living prose adds something to our life, and the man who can, as I can, is surely the last to resent someone who can do it even better. An artist cannot deny art, nor would he want to. A lover cannot deny love.”
—Raymond Chandler (1888–1959)