In the pre-dawn hours on June 7, a small group of local artists erected a temporary art gallery beneath the train tracks and Bend Parkway underpass at Greenwood Avenue.

The colorful works of art, about 40 in all, were posted at eye level and included painted images of large insects, an owl with antlers, furry creatures, even a large cat wielding a heart from which dangled a ribbon bearing the words “free art.”

Such street art is made by artists whose works could hang in a gallery; it isn’t just tagging, in which the “tagger” plasters their pseudonym, or “tag,” on any available surface, such as mailboxes, fences and trains. Street art, which can include painted stickers called “slap ups,” is often created in advance of being posted, usually on barren concrete walls along thoroughfares or other public spaces.

In recent years, street art has become a visible presence in cities like London, Toronto, New York, Los Angeles, and now — like it, love it or hate it — Bend.

The installation of the “Greenwood Gallery” exhibit, as a hastily stenciled sign dubbed it, coincided with the June First Friday Gallery Walk, a monthly event for which galleries in nearby downtown Bend stay open late and draw patrons with art, live music, food and wine. In contrast to the monthly exhibits at private galleries, Greenwood Gallery was a blink-and-you-missed-it affair.

In places like Bend, street art falls into a gray area of its own: the intersection — or collision — of vandalism, graffiti and art. Like beauty itself, which of those categories it fits into seems to be in the eye of the beholder.

By the following Sunday, June 9, the colorful artwork had been removed or covered with gray paint by a group of youth doing community service.

The street as gallery

The Bend street gallery was the brainchild of artist Julie L. Friel, a multi-media artist and Bend transplant from Miami. Friel is a member of artists collective Central Elements, and her profile on centralelements.com describes her work as “derived from plants, animals, and people. They are anthropomorphic figures with big human emotions.”

A 2011 profile of Friel in the South Florida Sun-Sentinel said she “gracefully walks the line between gallery and street.”

Upon her arrival in Bend a year and a half ago, Friel noticed her new home was lacking in the kind of edgy, urban art that had become a fixture in her former home.

She began making acquaintances in the art scene, and setting out on her own occasional 3 a.m. runs to slap up a wheat paste piece, wheat paste being the homemade paste of flour or starch and water that street artists use to affix their works to concrete.

When some of her Bend art scene acquaintances balked at the Greenwood Gallery project, Friel said, she divided the group into two: one group of those who would help do the cooking of the wheat paste — “just like ‘Breaking Bad,’” she joked — and a small group who would do the late-night installing.

“We had artists from California and Florida send their work,” Friel said. “Amazing pieces. Yet we all knew this was temporary. But our goal was to have it up for art walk.”

One of the artists Friel approached to participate is Los Angeles artist Alexx Thompson, 43. “I know a lot of people have negative connotations towards it,” Thompson told The Bulletin.

“I find it really important, especially political art. There’s a lot of stuff the public wants to say but doesn’t really have a way to say it,” he said. “I think it beautifies a place.”

Thompson said that when he visited Berlin, parts of the city would leave up street art.

“Everywhere you go, it’s layers and layers of art. Giant murals and pictures everywhere. You’re entertained at stoplights by just looking at colors and designs everywhere. It’s varying degrees of artistic ability, but it’s all just human beings expressing themselves.”

Like building sand castles

By its very nature, street art is far more ephemeral than standard gallery exhibits.

“It’s expected that it’s going to be temporary,” Thompson said. “It’s kind of like building a sand castle that you know the wave’s going to come and take it away, but you get a moment of beauty and the joy of your masterpiece.”

The payoff is that it gives artists a place to show their work.

“A few people (can) decide what is art and what isn’t,” Thompson said. If “a couple of people who own galleries decide that your art doesn’t deserve to be in their gallery, then nobody gets to see it.”

A street artist can respond to such exclusion by saying, “I’m going to put it up on a wall, and the world is my gallery,” Thompson said. “I like that idea.”

Street art can offer humor or provocative comment on society, convey political messages or offer a little beauty to passersby. The pseudonymous Banksy has become internationally famous for works that varyingly fit into all those categories. His satirical, cutting-edge, two- and three-dimensional works in England have depicted a soldier up against the wall as he’s frisked by a young girl in a dress, a pressure washer removing primitive paintings of horses and human figures like those found in French caves. “If graffiti changed anything — it would be illegal,” Banksy was quoted, a rephrasing of anarchist Emma Goldman’s saying “If voting changed anything, they would make it illegal.”

Thompson said street art “is a good way to get the heartbeat of how people are feeling, or how people who feel they don’t have a voice, who aren’t going to be invited on CNN to talk about what their neighborhood is like.” For them, “walls (are) an opportunity.”

Friel, 39, holds an art degree from Florida International University and is represented by Hardcore Art Contemporary Space in Miami. She’s won art competitions, and strongly believes that street art is legitimate art and not graffiti.

“It’s better than that train above the same place filled with tags and graffiti,” she said.

Bend mother Jeanie Morton toured the gallery before its demise.

“It was so nice to see artwork that was more accessible to everybody,” she said. “It was nice because I felt totally comfortable bringing my son,” Billy, 14, who has developed a keen interest in drawing and art.

“There was nothing offensive. It was bright and cheerful. It just made the underpass actually pleasant to walk through,” she said last week.

One of the intentions of the Greenwood Gallery was, Friel said, to show there’s “a much younger art out there. It is fun, playful and intellectual work.

“The nice thing about Greenwood Gallery was that it — it wasn’t kids’ art — but made kids feel like they could have a say in the art community, if that makes sense.”

An office manager for TBD Advertising, Morton said, “I used to work over by Tin Pan (Alley) and there was some tagging, and there’s such a huge difference.

“And it’s hard for the city, too,” Morton said. “I’m sure they understand the difference between art and tagging — but I can also see their point of view. But it’s a shame to just cover up this work. I can understand covering up the tagging, but for the actual artwork it was a shame.”

After visiting the gallery, her son Billy attended the recent arts camp organized by Rise Up, an international arts organization based in Bend cofounded by Jesse Roberts.

“He just graduated from middle school, and (for a gift) he was originally wanting a longboard, and he saw Jesse’s (camp) online and he said he wanted that instead,” Morton said. “I think it’s a great way for kids to express themselves.”

The curriculum for the first week of the camp included street art and murals. The second week focused on music. For art instructors, he tapped the likes of Tunisian street artist Va-Jo.

“I think it’s the pinnacle of modern art, personally,” Roberts said of street art. Convincing the average person “that there is a huge difference between graffiti and vandalism versus street art,” he said, is a matter of “education.”

Cleaning it up

Deschutes County Juvenile Community Justice provides the paint removal service, according to Jim Smith, supervisor of the department’s community service program.

His office has a graffiti hotline at 541-385-1720. Paint is supplied for the program by way of a verbal agreement with the City of Bend Public Works Department, Smith said. If the graffiti is on private property, the property owner is encouraged to buy the paint, “but we will still do the removal if they can’t afford it,” he said.

When a call comes in reporting fresh graffiti, a community service crew is scrambled and sent to remove it — usually within three days. Smith has been keeping statistics on the referrals he receives since 2006, when the county received a gang prevention grant. “We do about 20 sites a month. We’ve done over 1,300 site cleanups since we started documenting in July 2006,” he said.

The majority of what they remove is tags, but, Smith added, “I would say that in the last year, we’ve seen more of the stickers that they’re applying. This (Greenwood Gallery) is the first time they’ve been more visibly appealing.”

Lt. Chris Carney of the Bend Police Department brings up the “broken windows” theory when discussing the quick removal of graffiti.

“It’s an old theory, but basically, if you go to neighborhoods and you leave things broken — so people break a window — it just attracts the next one to do it,” he said.

“Graffiti’s the same thing. If you leave the graffiti up, it just seems to attract more graffiti. However, if you clean it up immediately … the tendency of that to become the staple for that area really goes down.”

Sanctioning street art

Friel said she’d like to see a public street art zone where street artists could ply their trade. “I really want Bend to have a gallery that works (like) the work that is happening in every city,” said Friel. “Why not free those walls up? Artists could submit ideas, and (the city) can choose. Hopefully no landscape painters. There’s enough of that (in Bend).”

“That,” said Kurt Chapman of the City of Bend, “would be a policy decision that city staff would have to fully vet and then present to the City Council, and I have not heard of any discussions in that area.”

“At the beginning and the end of the day, they’re defacing private property,” said Chapman, who, when he heard the term “street art,” asked “Is that a euphemism?”

Friel notes, however, that there are rules among street artists: Never post on personal property, including fences that are part of a home; never post on churches; and never on the walls of mom-and-pop shops.

However, she added, “corporations and public spaces belong to the arts.”

As far as official channels are concerned, street art is tantamount to graffiti. Carney cited the February arrest of a suspected tagger for 223 counts of unlawfully applying graffiti.

If the amount of damage by a single graffiti artist — and it can be proven the damage is the work of a serial artist or tagger — exceeds $1,000 in damage, it’s a felony, Carney said. In the news release announcing the arrest, it was estimated the cost of removal of the tags would be higher than $10,000.

Morton, mother of a budding artist, acknowledges the difficulties street art can present.

“You want your kids to be able to express themselves, but in the same respect you have to respect authority. I don’t tell him to go out and do it, but I feel that if that’s the worst thing he’s going to do, I’m not going to get super upset about it,” she said. “But I wouldn’t want him doing something on personal, private property.”

There may be some other outlets opening up for street artists. Roberts of Rise Up recently collaborated with Visit Bend to develop a sanctioned approach to street art: the new Tin Pan Alley Art Collection, which features work by local artists such as Megan McGuinness, on the walls of the downtown Bend parking garage and eventually nearby Tin Pan Alley.

“For the past couple of years, I’ve been working with the State Department as part of this art diplomacy program in the Middle East, and I’ve had a chance to work with street artists in that region, and do street art myself,” Roberts said. “I’ve also wanted to do something in Bend.”

When he offhandedly mentioned the idea of putting some form of street art up in the Bend parking garage to Doug LaPlaca and Valerie Warren at Visit Bend, they took off with it.

There will be a total of eight commissioned pieces in the display, with forthcoming pieces to hang on exterior walls in Tin Pan Alley. Artists involved are paid a minimum of $400 for their work, LaPlaca said. “The long-term vision at this time for the program is that we would have a new collection of art in those frames every year.”

As he envisions, departing art could be auctioned off at the opening of the next year’s new art, LaPlaca said. “The idea is that 100 percent of the expense in this program would be paid for by revenue generated from the program, and private donations.”

LaPlaca — who saw Greenwood Gallery and said “I loved it” — said the City of Bend was highly receptive to the Tin Pan Alley Art Collection. “The City was incredibly supportive and enthusiastic throughout the entire process. They continue to be supportive and excited about the idea of creating a vibrant and unique space for public art.”

“I think that this is a new and exciting day for public art in Bend. This program is just one of several that will carry on the amazing tradition Art in Public Places started,” he said, referring to the nonprofit that has been placing public art around Bend, and in its roundabouts, since 1973. “It will be exciting to see where this can go.”

“It’s a little bit different than traditional street art,” Roberts said. “I think it’s kind of step one.”

Roberts said he’s also talking with The Old Mill District about creating works for Les Schwab Amphitheater that could be taken down and stored in winter.

Keeping it real

However, Friel said she doesn’t consider those kinds of projects authentic street art.

“It’s just (commissioned) art that they put outside. I would never consider that for myself. I respect the artists. However, I seek a broader audience where 1,000 people can see my work in one day,” she said.

Friel said along with seeing walls in Bend approved for her brand of noncommissioned street art, she’d like to organize an art battle, a kind of performance art pitting five or so artists against each other while a DJ pumps beats. The crowd would crown a winner, and artists could sell their creations on the spot for whatever people have in their pocket.

“I just really want to push an art so loudly that people and galleries have to take notice. And I know it is possible,” she said. “We have a very dedicated group here with lots of ideas.”

“Whether it’s a giant picture of two people holding hands or a giant chicken,” artist Thompson said, “I think life would be extremely boring without street art.”