Street View: Urban Hellscape
Street View: An Urban Hellscape: A visual discovery and celebration of urban grit told through textiles. By Alyson Beaton
Walking down the street on any given day, I pass an auto parts store covered with illustrations of every auto part on offer within the store including, but not limited to: nuts, bolts, widgets, tires, etc…. Each graphic is painted in a two tone color scheme: yellow and red. The graphics are half heartedly applied to a building that was once beautiful, a three flat greystone with a ground floor retail space that is now an off brownish gray color with a front door that adorns a rusted metal gate with at least seven locks. Around the corner I walk past a beautifully restored 2 flat building that has been converted into a single family residence. The house is for sale for 2 million dollars.
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I drive down the street on the way to my studio, driving past a cluster of old buildings, some with historic plaques dating back to 1910. The small storefronts have had many many lives but are now adorned with a cluster of street art claiming the space as an urban corner. Adjacent to the building is a huge dirt lot and three more randomly placed buildings, one claimed as a used car lot, a barber shop that looks only partly in business, and a pawn shop, and on the other side a 1990’s strip mall with a collection of shops like the Dollar Tree and Popeyes Chicken. Across the street, construction fencing is surrounding not one but two multi acre sites with six cranes in the air. There is no usable sidewalk in sight but people are still walking down the street, confused.
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I am walking down the street, I have just left a brand new complex that has been recently rebranded. It appears to be an old factory of sorts in a seemingly “good” location, right on the water, perhaps for new up and coming industries. I see loads of vacant space next door just begging to be used, most likely reserved for a tech start up, but every inch of the space I am in is occupied as we weave up stairs and down small hallways. As I leave this revitalization dream, I pass parking lots full of cars that don’t appear to have been put there intentionally and am seeking a path to the nearest subway train to go back into the city. I walk past buildings with businesses I don’t recognize, check cashing places and beauty salons, all with some sort of handmade curtain that would resemble a bed sheet, and vinyl signage adhered to the glass.
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I walk down a street that I have been on many times before, but this time the street is completely different. The construction fencing and cranes that had been here for years are all gone and in their place parks a new museum, high end shops and urban trail. This space is now a playground for the uber rich and consumers seeking an up scale experience as an architectural wonderland with an escher-like spectacle that is blocked from public consumption due to the high rate of teenage suicides that have taken place there, apparently caused by the sculpture itself.
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The cities we live in are in constant change but all share the same DNA and life cycles, development and redevelopment. Gentrification, walkability, independent businesses are all things that define our urban cores along with the homeless under blankets behind any crevice out of sight. Our cities define our times, they are the places that unite us in crisis, where we march in the streets in mass messaging, they are the places where you can’t choose your neighbors, they are the places that allow us to express ourselves freely and snag whatever we want if we want it badly enough.
The Street View Collection: Urban Hellscape is evidence of those ephemeral moments that define our cities, the median meadow that appears only once a year transforming a previous civil engineering design element for traffic flow into a beautiful scene. The glimmer of light that reflects off the glassy buildings when the sun is just right, the moment when the city lights up as day turns into night, the odd spray painted messages that appear on the ground mysteriously a code that only the workers can read, and the street art that reclaims a vacant structure often times just for a short moment before a new tag appears.
Collection Prints: Urban Code, Hellscape, Median Meadow, Glimmer, City Glow, Grit, Open, Scribbles.
Urban Design: A Textile Collection
Urban– Design: A textile collection
Awarded the ICFF Editors Award for Materials and Textiles 2021
When I lived in Chicago years ago, I distinctly remember people saying that everyone in Chicago has an architectural vocabulary, even the cab drivers can tell you about Louis Sullivan and this city that was planned by Daniel Burnham. The idea that a city can be designed for people, all people, to live in and flourish. Fast forward to the 20-teens, a time and place where small towns are booming, and as they grow the city planning has changed. In this new city the spaces that, in Burnham’s plan, are public, equitably distributed and cared for by the city, are now falling under private stewardship allowing these half public half private spaces to limit its use to those who are allowed. The place where I live, Austin, Texas is one of these cities.
As I collected inspiration for the Urban– Design collection that I launched at ICFF in November, I dug deeply into the archive of conversations I have had with neighbors and things that are causing people to talk. I am in a city that is transforming before my eyes, with old and new ideas colliding, creating a conversation among even the most average person that turns toward words like gentrification, land codes, urban trails and a new transit system in a place defined by roads and highways. All of this change is leading to high housing prices, and mass waves of newcomers from big cities looking for a slower life. This rapid urbanization affects everyone who is here, as regular citizens are constantly asked to come together in the form of neighborhood associations, normally in place to make decisions about lawn care and where a new stop sign needs to be, are invited to decide if a developer who has dollar signs in his eyes should be granted a “variance” to build a thirteen story building right next to a single story ranch house. Everyone is invited, and everyone is affected by the outcome.
I set out on this mission of design, as an observer of our culture, the subject that surfaced, urbanization. The history of this movement dates back to the destruction of our first city, NYC by Levittown and the first interstate highway designed to cut through the ghettoized city designed to get people of one race out of it as quickly as possible. The cities and how they evolve are the philosophy books of our time. The things that shaped our cities of the past are that of a social order, our cities are the places where people are, and where we will continue to be as cities everywhere are growing by leaps and bounds, constantly creating a conversation and patchwork of ideas about how these places will evolve and what is the correct way to do it.
As a designer, I find myself constantly making artifacts that are visual diaries and evidence of these places. Using screen printing and fabric as my medium, in the most appropriate form to express my subject, referencing that of street artists and pop artists, getting the work out as quickly as possible, applying in unassuming ways to surfaces and objects that no one would imagine could hold hidden messages of a new movement: the revitalization of the city.
The Urban– Design collection is that of a walk down the street, illustrated moments, like the overgrown foliage that no one maintains, creating a wall only in the summer months where it previously was not. The collection is based on the ideals and implementation of urban design that has aged, changed, been redeveloped and will become something that ultimately the people own through living in a place in time.
This collection was previously un-named, but has now taken the form of the following prints:
Break the Grid, Patina, Community Greens, Public Spaces, Tributary, Encounter, Wander.