BRATTLEBORO — After two years of hard work, Brattleboro artist Scot Borofsky has completed another section of his ambitious “Brattleboro Downtown Pattern Project” with a collection of 10 site paintings of patterns on private walls on Flat Street.
The designs Borofsky used in this group of outdoor artworks were inspired by the patterns found in the ancient cultural artifacts of Native American and African art, including their beadwork, weaving, pottery design, and architectural decoration.
He says he reinterpreted these patterns through the medium of spray paint, carefully considering the color palette of each mural with its location.
All the pattern murals on Flat Street are supported through donations. In the Moment Music sponsored the pieces finished in 2012; this year the Brattleboro Museum & Art Center has provided $200 in “BEAN Grant” money. Sherwin-Williams provided $100 in outdoor primer paint, and $197 was raised at Gallery Walk through public donations.
“I sat there with my leprechaun's pot by my side asking for support for public art,” Borofsky explains, “and I was overwhelmed with the generosity of the people walking by.”
Although the Flat Street project is new, Borofsky's work should be familiar to the people of Brattleboro.
His large mural “The Wall of the Americas” on Frost Street was beloved by many in town. It was inspired by the art of ancient cultures ranging from indigenous New England to Bolivia, as well the pre-Columbian architectural site he visits during his annual winter trips to Mexico.
The exacting output of some 75 cans of spray paint, the mural was finished in July 2009 and became a prominent fixture of Brattleboro - until it was blocked by the construction of a new structure built in front of it by Cultural Intrigue.
Doing more than his part for local culture, Adam Gleb, owner of Cultural Intrigue, then commissioned “Frost Street Pattern Project,” a work independent of the Flat Street Project:
Borofsky painted seven murals on the façade of Cultural Intrigue's new building during the summer of 2012. With its initial stage taking more than 250 hours of painting, the murals of this ongoing project depict colorful figures and animals created first as water color studies.
Through his outdoor murals, Borofsky notes he has become a visible artistic figure in Brattleboro. He doesn't take that lightly.
Born in Brattleboro in 1957, Borofsky attended Brattleboro Union High School and then Interlochen Center for the Arts, a privately owned, 1,200-acre arts education institution in Interlochen, Mich. He earned a B.F.A. from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1981, after which he studied at the Brooklyn Museum on a Max Beckman painting scholarship.
“I don't think I would have moved to New York if I hadn't gotten that scholarship,” Borofsky says.
He thrived in Manhattan's arts scene of the 1980s, and was a seminal public street artist since that movement took root in the East Village.
A contemporary and leading light among a group of fellow young artists such as Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat, Borofsky painted 25 “wallworks” throughout the city. He was featured in a solo gallery show in New York, and in the mid-1980s was represented by Mokotoff Gallery.
“I was inspired by work being done by Haring at that time,” Borofsky says, “or at least I thought I was. I was more drawn to the design backgrounds of Keith's painting than to its figures. It recently has come out that Keith mostly did the figures, leaving those backgrounds to another artist, LA2/LAROC, the tag name of the graffiti artist Angel Ortiz. He actually was my inspiration.”
Borfosky's outdoor work was one of the first bodies of street art to be reviewed by a major art magazine: Arts Magazine, in January 1986. Borofsky's work is featured in three books on the street art movement.
When Borofsky returned to Brattleboro to raise his family, he brought the art of wallworks with him. In dedicating himself to refiguring Brattleboro's landscape, he has made his mark here for sure.
His work was the subject of the exhibit “Studio in the Street/Street in the Studio” at the Brattleboro Museum & Art Center in 2007.
In 2012, with Ken Hiratsuka, he participated in a gallery show in New York City at the Dorian Grey Gallery: “Of Line and Zen: Roots of East Village Street Art.”
With the Flat Street project wrapping up, Borofsky now has his eyes on the Harmony Parking Lot on Elliot Street. Unlike the walls in his former projects which were owned privately by individuals who could simply give Borofsky permission to use them, here the space is public, which complicates the way forward, but not overmuch.
Borofsky secured permission from Brattleboro interim Town Manager Patrick Moreland to proceed with the upper Harmony Lot strip walls.
“I don't know when such a project will be finished,” Borofsky says. “And anyway, I want now to celebrate the completion of the Flat Street Pattern Project, which was conceptualized separately, and done over two years.”
For every mural project Borofsky undertakes, the spaces on which he choses to paint are often small and out-of-the-way.
“I leave those big, obvious walls for others to do their public art,” Borofsky says. “I identify with unconsidered surfaces, like you might see on a highway or parts of a neglected building. These blank surfaces have a context all their own, which speaks to the artist in me.”