I usually love graffiti tours. I have taken them in every major city that I have traveled in.
This tour was one of the worst guided tours – graffiti or otherwise – that I have ever taken.
The tour was led by Eddie, or Staff 161, who is a pioneer in the graffiti art movement. I know this because he told us over and over again. Whenver he would run out of things to say (which was all the time) he would just repeat that he was a pioneer of the industry, and that in order to be a street artist you need to have the “Respect of the streets”. He must have said “respect of the streets” over 30 times. I have no doubt that he was instrumental in graffiti's history, but that does not a good tour guide make.
I have always loved these kinds of tours because you get to walk around a neighborhood and learn it's ins and outs as you go. Not so with this one. We basically walked slowly, within a three block radius of the sutdio. For an hour and a half. Even that would have been okay, if I were learning something interesting. Which I was not, at all.
This guy basically spent our time going from one piece to another, reading the artist's names, and telling us where they were from. Spain, France, London, etc. Once that was done, he would point out things in the piece. “This peice is nice because of all of the colors. A lot of artists put cultural stuff in their peices, things that represent them. Here we can see a feather. And a pearl. And bright colors. Like green and yellow and blue and red...” and after he had finished basically playing eye-spy he would just trail off and say something hypothetical. “This guys is a really good artist so... he probably has a fine arts degree. Or something.” He didn't even know! He was just throwing out random guesses, and pointing out random shapes and colors. This is not something that I needed to pay $20 for.
The cherry on the sundae was when we got to a peice, and Eddie said, “Yeah, apparently this guy died the other day. I saw something about it on facebook.” Nothing else. No details, no information, he didn't even check to see if that statement was true. He just rattled off something he saw on his newsfeed in passing. This guy clearly didn't care about having anything interesting or accurate to say to us. He ended the tour 20 minutes early by saying, “So... is there anything else you wanna see? You good?” and I was honestly glad to be out of such a crappy tour earlier than expected.
Next came the workshop, which we had pre-paid for. It was with Leaf, who was very cool and gave us more information in the first 15 minutes of meeting him than Eddie had done in 2 hours. Just beware, the colors you use as “practice” colors actually end up in your final peice, even though he assured us they wouldn't. So if you use a color that you don't really like – like I did – that's what's going on your living room wall.
About halfway through the workshop the boss, Gabe Shoenberg, came into the room. He didn't introduce himself at all, he just sat on a couch and awkwardly watched us while making snide sounding comments about our peices. It made me super uncomfortable to be watched in a small room by some dude I don't know, who didn't even bother to say hi. I think he was trying to be friendly and “jokey” but it really missed the mark.
And then, the piece de resistance. The art is done, we're all happy, now what? “Oh, it needs to dry properly” we were told. Okay, can we come back in a few hours to pick it up? “No, we'll be closing soon.” Their suggestion was that we hold our giant, 6ft x 6ft (if not bigger) canvases open, in the breeze, while we walk around Brooklyn for the next couple of hours. When I asked for a bag or tube to roll it up in, they said they didn't have anything.
DUDE. Your tours are full of tourists. We planned to spend the day out and about, I'm not going to travel for 2 hours on the bus to bring my canvas back to my hotel, nor am I going to wander around for the entire rest of the day and night with a giant, heavy, canvas that I'm not supposed to fold or roll too tightly. What did you expect? You cannot honestly say that you didn't think about this?
After seeing my expression, Gabe reluctantly brought up that they sometimes ship canvases home to tourists so they don't have to deal with carrying it around. Then he tried to make me pay for the shipping. After I stared incredulously for another minute, he relented saying that he would pay for the shipping.
This tour made me so angry that it could have easily ruined the rest of our day in Brooklyn. Pros were being able to see cool art, learning how to use a spray-can, and having a genuine peice of graffitti art that I helped to create. Cons are too numerous to name, but they include an awful, boring, lackluster tour guide who didn't seem to care about giving us any information, accurate or not; not walking more than a three block radius; the tour ending early – even though I was glad it was done; a startling lack of planning regarding how tourists are supposed to manage with their canvases after the workshop, and finally a creepy boss who only reluctantly offered solutions after we refused to accept spending the rest of our day bogged down with our art.
Graffiti tours, in general, are awesome. This one is far from it. Do yourself a favor and go find another one.