Beast is a savage on the streets, though she doesn’t look the part. The 20-year-old SF State student’s innocent smile and slender frame wouldn’t arouse the slightest bit of criminal attention, that is, until you check her handbag. The sweater sticking out of her purse keeps the five spray cans and folder of stencils hidden. So far, in her two years of stenciling on the streets, cops haven’t caught her white, black, blue, pink, gold, or red-handed, though her fingers stay coated in paint.

Armed with a spray can in her right hand and cigarette in the left, this midnight marauder nonchalantly prowls the streets for a vulnerable target. She finds a well-lit spot on a sidewalk in Lower Haight – perfect for her four-layered stencil of a machine gun clad Hello Kitty – and attacks. She pulls out a black can and a stencil outline of the iconic Japanese character and sprays. She fills in her dress with blue paint, her body white. Just as she’s about to fill in the machine gun green, she hears a car. It’s a cop.

As the patrol car approaches, she stands up as if waiting for a ride. Taking a drag of her cigarette, she smiles at the officer. He nods his head and keeps driving. Sucker. She finishes up her piece, packs her bags, takes another drag, and moves to the next spot.

Remaining stealth is key since graffiti is a felony in California. Because of this, more street artists are turning to stencil art’s speed, efficiency and neatness as a means of expression. The Mission and Haight Ashbury neighborhoods lead San Francisco’s stencil scene with dozens of artists contributing their work to the galleries of the streets. On Valencia Street alone, pedestrians can view everything from the stenciled Orwellian equation “2+2=5” to images of jazz artists stenciled on vinyl records and nailed to wooden posts. All it takes is a piece of cardboard, an exacto knife, a can of spray paint and one of the rare empty spaces that hasn’t been infiltrated by corporate advertising. And an idea with the potential to change the gait of pedestrians, one to make them stop and think.

“Nobody expects a girl,” says Beast, whose trademark is “The Beast Girl,” a female with devil horns, who resembles the artist herself. “I could be wearing some flashy clothes with a spray can in my hand and the cops go past me and wouldn’t stop me at all.”

Stenciling is an ancient cave art, according to Russell H., a self-proclaimed “Certified Stencil Geek” and curator of the community website StencilArchive.org. He says stencils as street art emerged as an underground counterculture movement of the 1960s art scenes in Paris, New York and other major cities worldwide, as a means to convey political messages.

“Stencil art is a legitimate form of expressing yourself and your political beliefs. It may be illegal but it’s definitely legitimate,” says Russell, whose website has had 5,000 image uploads from across the globe since its 2002 inception. “You can’t afford the billboard, so you just make the stencil and put the stencil up all over your neighborhood.”

In San Francisco, street stencils were pioneered by the SF Diggers, a legendary anarchist street theatre group. They were popularized by San Francisco’s historic punk rock scene and its do-it-yourself street advertising. While traditional tags are simply names of artists out for street fame, most stencils are anonymous and have political messages attached. They were utilized during South Africa’s anti-Apartheid and Central America’s Sandinista movements as a mode of expression to lash out against the government.

“With stencils, it’s like a picture and anybody can appreciate it,” Beast says. “Anybody can walk down the street and think, ‘Oh shit, Hello Kitty’s got a machine gun, that’s pretty cool.’ With a tag, people think it’s just ugly.”

Beast, originally from L.A. got into stenciling through an ex-boyfriend who was a graffiti artist. She started doing them on clothing but, while the city slept, the streets kept calling her name. For the last eight months, she’s been getting up all over SF.

If she were to get caught, that is, if her hypnotic smile ever fails her, she could face a pretty hefty fine and possibly jail time. According to Officer Christopher Putz, who has been with the SFPD Graffiti Abatement Program for four years, graffiti is considered a felony if the damages total more than $400 and the artist could face up to three years in jail and a $50,000 fine.

Adam5100, an Oakland-based artist, who uses multi-layered stencils and spray paint on canvas to create photorealistic paintings, keeps a stencil kit consisting of an ordinary shopping bag, a shoe box with the stencil cut into it and a spray can. When he places the bag on a sidewalk, pretends to shuffle through it, and walks away, no one suspects that he has just done graffiti.

Now focused on gallery art, Adam5100 doesn’t hit the streets as often. He started as a tagger eight years ago and progressed into stencils, leading his own “Man-Made Apocalypse” campaign to “make everyone realize that we are gonna be our own demise.”

“I don’t know if anyone got that message,” says Adam5100, who has been commissioned by the K-Swiss shoe company to participate in the K-Spray China Tour ‘06 stencil art exhibit. “I wanted to start a dialogue, open it up for discussion instead of trouncing through without thinking about shit.”

Aside from sparking thought and creating a dialogue amongst pedestrians, stencils and graffiti are generally interactive and open up street conversations.

“You have an empty wall. You put a sticker or a stencil up and two or three weeks later, ten other artists have come by and added to the conversation,” Russell says.

Recently, Adam5100’s roommate made a stencil of Condoleeza Rice with a speech bubble with the words “Condoleeza says” popping out of her mouth. People began filling them in. Several weeks ago, Russell himself started a conversation on a wall on the corner of 18th and Valencia Streets with a stencil of a dragon. The conversation wrapped around the corner and continued into the alley with graffiti artist Big Kid Fun and others adding to it.

“Stenciling is a way to get a tighter picture up on the wall quick,” says Adam5100. “There’s
a lot of anonymous stuff out there just to kinda fuck around with the environment. It’s kinda like
approaching graffiti in a street art sense, not necessarily art of the street.”

Most stencils are unsigned and contain images of famous icons. One of the most famous is Shepherd Fairey AKA Obey, known for his popular stickers, posters and stencils of Andre the Giant, which led to the creation of his own clothing line and marketing firm. Banksy, a London-based international stencil artist, has also gained a devout following for his strong social and political messages. He’s done artwork across the globe, from San Francisco to the West Bank and Gaza in Palestine.

Regardless of how popular stencils have become, they’re still illegal. As a result, most stencils are done on sidewalks because they’re easier to conceal. Despite common belief, sidewalks are not maintained by the city. “The person who owns the property has to maintain the sidewalk,” Officer Putz says. He believes stencil artists hit the sidewalks because they’re harder to clean. You can’t paint over graffiti on the sidewalk so you’d need a brush and hose or a steam cleaner to remove it.

From the artists’ perspective, stenciling is easier to get away with and people are more likely to notice them. Cops won’t bother making arrests or getting buried in paperwork and owners won’t go through the hassle of removing something off the sidewalk that will eventually fade with time. Even though everyone wants to get up and have their work seen, some pieces are buffed overnight. For some, that’s the fun part.

“I like the impermanence of it,” Russell says. “It goes away, gets painted over, fades away. Sometimes it’ll stay up for three or four years.”

Beast was disappointed to see her stencils of paper cranes alongside a SF State all disappear overnight.

“They were pretty,” she says. “I’ll just have to do it again.”

CONTACT MARHARAJ AT ZONE209@SFSU.EDU