the street is our gallery

Scout/Pines brings his work out of the shadows and into a gallery for a show of new paintings that debuts at Time & Space Limited

For painter Scout/Pines, the street is a canvas. The Chatham, New York-based artist surreptitiously places his stencil-art paintings on abandoned buildings in distressed communities. There, they usually disappear fast—unscrewed by collectors or lucky passers-by.

His pieces—painted with spray paint or house paint on reclaimed plywood or old metal—depict real-life people on the periphery: the have-nots, the overlooked, the marginalized. He tries to place them in historical context, in neighborhoods similarly forgotten and neglected but where the art will have meaning to people living there.

A painting done in tribute to the victims of the Charleston church shooting, for instance, went up in Harlem. “It was two or three in the morning,” Scout/Pines recalls. “I waited until it was quiet to put it up. I heard this woman yelling ‘Excuse me.’ She followed me down the block and was very persistent. She said, ‘Did you put this up here?’ When I said I did, she said, ‘I love it. It’s beautiful. Keep doing this.’