Here’s part of an interview posted at nationalheadquarters.org with artist Ray Noland, who now lives in Asheville and was recently chosen as one of three local artists to have their work featured on an Asheville city bus. Loyal reader Tim Peck brought the interview to my attention.
I met Ray Noland last summer at a panel discussion featuring other local artists and curators, for which he was a participant and I a moderator. But I’ve admired his work for the past few years now, ever since I’d moved to Pilsen from Hyde Park in the summer of 2007 and started seeing his Go Tell Mama! street art campaign: a colorful and startling series of pro-Obama posters and stencils made manifest all up and down the neighborhood, most conspicuously on the newspaper boxes lining the basketball courts only a block away from my house. I Flickr-ed the images to learn their origins, and discovered the elusive and ubiquitous artist behind the alias “CRO.” What began as a passing curiosity quickly grew into fascination, and I found myself following CRO’s work on the street and online on the regular. When Mr. CRO somehow showed up to a party and art exhibition I’d held few weeks later (actually, the first ever “NATIONAL HEADQUARTERS” event), I was far too embarassed to introduce myself. Cut to two years later at said panel discussion, where the artist known as CRO proved himself as thougtful and well-spoken as he was mysterious. I finally got to introduce myself for real and was fortunate enough to make friends before he flew the coop last September.
As much as I’d like to, I can’t pretend to know him well. But what little I do know is that Ray is making some of the most iconic and important art to come out of Chicago since Carl Sandburg wrote about a “City of the Big Shoulders.” CRO is currently in Asheville, North Carolina, fundraising for a new street art campaign combating the ignorance and idiocy that is the Tea Party Express. Can you dig it?