You can’t go a block in Tremont without seeing Sign Guy birds swarming telephone poles, mail boxes, garbage cans or any surface suffering from a lack of the brightly-colored characters that have become synonymous with the neighborhood.
“It’s the ambassador of Tremont,” says Dave Witzke, who works under the name the Sign Guy. “I don’t know,” he immediately relents.
He’s been drawing birds endlessly for over a decade. Now that he’s looking to copyright his character, the bird may be going legit.
It’s been a long road to get to this point. From a young age, Witzke has made street art, almost compulsively. Back in his hometown of Perry, he fell in love with graffiti and gathered his first crew, beginning a lifelong adventure with the art form.
The Sign Guy brand — a path an old friend suggested — was a more mainstream, fun way for him to stay out of trouble. At first, he’d sneak around Tremont, screwing his signs to telephone poles at night with a manual screw driver. Then he realized people didn’t mind when they saw him putting up art. Actually, they’d stop and talk to him, excited about his work. So he started hanging pieces in the morning before his day job, upgrading to an electric screw driver.
Pointing out a circular wooden piece that’s been up for years — now almost completely faded — he laughs, imagining himself standing there attaching it manually.
At first, he painted butterflies, winged worms and flowers.
He worked at a nursery and remembers, “I didn’t know what to paint, so I started painting on found objects throughout the city.” Scrap metal and wood dumped throughout the community became his canvas. Witzke wasn’t even sure what he was going to do with the paintings piling up in his house, so he started hanging them up around the city.
Over the years, affixed to phones poles and hung from telephone wires by chains, have been random fake advertisements; lost cat fliers; cats and rabbits with huge teeth and claws eating birds or hiding under bridges. Fire-breathing cats and birds in planes. The first bird in space.
After his first show at the Mutt Hutt in 2006, Witzke realized he could make money with his work, which already had a following by then.
“The bird character is the one character that took off,” he says, sitting in a booth at Edison’s Pub, behind which there’s a large bird mural. There are also murals near the Lincoln Park Pub; a new one on the abandoned house painted pink near W. 14th Street; on food trucks; in the flats; in Ohio City; residential projects. A dizzying amount of paintings and installations everywhere. Too many to keep track of, but Witzke says he has them all catalogued.
At Edison’s, workers walking past him stop to ask about commissions he’s working on, or ask him to price out custom work. He gets more commissions than he can keep up with. Still, he keeps his day job for now.
“Making birds doesn’t have a 401k or health benefits,” he says.
But maybe if he successfully copyrights them and sells licenses to people who want to put them on coffee mugs or t-shirts, or use his murals in backdrops of photos or videos, he could make a full-time gig out of it. More importantly, he’ll be able to stop people from profiting off of his work illegally.
“I never thought I’d be doing it this long,” he says, looking back over an unexpected and dedicated career.
NOTE: Look for the Sign Guy’s work at the Doubting Thomas Gallery’s May 11 Conspiracies show, also featuring David Steckel and Fade Resistant. He’ll also have booths at arts festivals this summer, including the Hessler Street Fair. Follow @thesignguy1972 on Instagram for updates or to purchase artwork directly.
#streetart #clevelandstreetart #thesignguy #lowbrowart
One Response to “Hanging Out With Tremont’s Sign Guy by Nicole Hennessy”
Shy Guy Signs He Likes You
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