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Have you noticed that Bella Vista seems really angry at a guy named Joel? Walking around the neighborhood, you can find street signs and graffiti that say things like “Joel sucks!” and “F— you, Joel” and “Joel, buddy, get laid, please! Stop being such a nerd!”
“At first, I was like, ‘Hey, this interferes with my self-perception as a pretty decent guy,’” said Joel Palmer, an 80-year-old resident and the Joel in question. “But now, it’s just like, ‘All right, you know, you put them up, I’m just going to paint over them.’”
Palmer does not necessarily seem like the type of person who would draw anger from his neighbors.
He is an active community member. In the mornings, usually between 7 and 10 a.m., he takes a walk around Bella Vista and picks up pieces of trash.
“I’m supposed to walk 6,000 steps a day,” Palmer said. The trash clean up helps him stay fit. It’s a win-win.
Palmer is also on the civic association and works to plant new trees in the neighborhood. His small business Action 135 helps restore and rebuild blighted buildings so that they’re usable again. He believes in community activism and describes himself as liberal. “My politics are to the left of Che Guevara,” he noted.
However, his neighborhood beautification routine involves one controversial act that is leaving some bitter — the covering up of graffiti and street art, specifically with green paint. The neighborhood now has tons of green splotches.
“Some of [the stickers] just peel off, which is good actually, and you just ball them up and collect them and throw them in the trash,” Palmer said. “The tags are sometimes done with markers or pens. Some of them are done with spray can, stuff like that. I spray over with a spray can of either gray or green or silver paint, depending on what the color of the background is.”
To Palmer, graffiti and street art is something someone has selfishly left behind. And just like a piece of trash, he believes he is doing his civic duty to clean it up. When he sees sticker art or graffiti on a telephone pole or the back of a street sign, he gets to work.
“All of this is on city property,” Palmer said. “Which is my property and your property and their property. It is not on private property. It’s on nobody’s house.”
Some neighbors, however, feel that Palmer’s paint is actually making the neighborhood look worse.
The shifting story of street art in Philadelphia
The reputation of graffiti and street art in Philadelphia continues to evolve. Jane Golden is the founder of Mural Arts, redirecting graffiti and street artists’ energies into city sanctioned murals. While she has always felt admiration for local artists and free expression, she recalls the headaches that rampant illegal art meant for Philadelphia in the ‘80s and early ‘90s.
“It was way worse,” Golden said. “It was everywhere, and I think people felt like it’s not going to go away.”
“We were working really closely with community groups who hated graffiti and felt it was overwhelming and it was blight,” she added. “And you know, store owners would have to go out of pocket and pay to fix their walls.”
In fact, even Philly’s own Darryl McCray, aka Cornbread, has changed his tune. Widely lauded as the first modern graffiti artist, he now calls himself “anti-graffiti.”
“Philadelphia looked like a war zone,” McCray said. “Graffiti was everywhere, and one of my slogans is… you start this shit, you need to clean it up.”
Golden, however, noted she’s watched the graffiti scene ebb and flow, with an uptick during COVID and in recent years. Today, many Philadelphians are embracing street art, lauding artists for their craft.
According to Architectural Digest, a wheatpaste from the artist Banksy increased the property value of a L.A. building by $14 million. Tattooed Mom has long been a popular haven for street artists around the city, and sanctioned Step Outside shows featuring graffiti and street artists are going strong. WHYY even produced a whole podcast series celebrating public and street art in Philadelphia.
While Golden does not condone illegal artwork, she can appreciate its merit.
“This is a city, and it’s moving and growing and changing,” she said. “Some things I like, some things I don’t like, and that’s okay… I enjoy street art. I enjoy looking at new pieces, and I enjoy going through the city and seeing the murals because I feel it all in some way makes our city really alive.”
The case of Praise Dobler v. Joel Palmer
In Bella Vista, sticker artist Praise Dobler is leading the charge against Joel Palmer’s green paint.
“I do what I do because it’s fun, and then it’s just a way to connect with the city,” Dobler said. “There’s a lot of haters, but there’s also a lot of connection, and it’s part of the urban landscape, whether you agree with it or not.”
For Dobler, the campaign against Palmer is a fun way to troll an out of touch “old fogey.”
The artist has posted stickers around Bella Vista saying things like “Joel is a known eater of boogers” and “Joel: repent now and Praise Dobler, nerd!”
Palmer is not Praise Dobler’s only adversary, the artist also singled out a person in Northern Liberties, who takes a grinder to the work. What’s more, Dobler is not the only one creating anti-Joel artwork, just the most visible — calling out Palmer on his Instagram account.
“If he was really concerned about beautifying his neighborhood, he would try to match colors,” Dobler said. “He’s definitely one of us. You know, inadvertently.”
In other words, Dobler believes that in covering up street art with green paint, Palmer has become the very thing he hates.
“If the right cop drives by and sees Joel with his little can of green spray paint, maybe they’ll pull him over,” the artist said. “Technically, he could get booked for defacing public property.”
For his part, Palmer noted that he does use different spray paint colors, not just the green. He also removes graffiti and stickers outright when he can. Dobler’s work, he said, is crude and contains profanity, which children can see. He does not agree that he is creating graffiti, because he works in broad daylight.
However, Praise Dobler often posts his stickers during the day, too. Some mornings, the artist even puts them right outside of Palmer’s house. One recent addition read “F— Joel. All my Doblers hate Joel.”
Praise Dobler also accused Palmer of taking down posters and flyers in the neighborhood, including those for missing pets. Palmer noted that the posters are also often illegal advertisements, and he takes down the missing pet ones “only after they have been up several days.”
The green paint is also starting to upset some Bella Vista residents, who don’t have any say in the matter. Tim Johnson is an event planner in Bella Vista. He called the cover-up job “really, really sloppily done.”
“Who is this vigilante who is taking it upon himself to decide what is and what isn’t art and what belongs where?” Johnson asked. “It wasn’t like this green paint was meant to blend in with things. It is painted on some things that are green, but it’s just kind of thrown haphazardly everywhere.”
While Johnson found Praise Dobler’s work “kind of corny” when he first encountered it, he’s since learned the deeper reasoning behind it and come around.
“It’s some guy’s art,” Johnson said. “It doesn’t bother me at all. It is kind of a uniquely Philly thing, and there’s all kinds of street art in Philly that I think are just unique.”
“The name of the game”
There is a standoff happening between Palmer and Dobler. For his part, Palmer pledges to keep covering up graffiti and unauthorized art.
“This neighborhood is going to look nice,” Palmer said. “I buy a couple of cans of green spray paint at Lowe’s. I’ve got a little spray gun attachment, and I can go over there and I can knock out in 10 minutes what takes him all night to put up.”
On the other side, Praise Dobler pledges to keep putting up stickers.
“If you don’t like something, the more energy you give to it and the more you try to erase it, the more it’s gonna fuel us to come back harder and more prolifically,” Praise Dobler said. “We’ll go right back over it.”
Dobler understands the irony at work here.
“I know they feel the same way about us,” the artist said. “Like, who do you think you are, going around my neighborhood and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah? So it’s like a cat and mouse type of thing.”
In many ways, the ephemeral nature of street art is part of the medium’s DNA. A version of this dynamic plays out in all Philly neighborhoods.
“If you put your [work] on the street, you got to expect it to be gone within less than a day,” said artist Doomed Future, who runs the Step Outside shows. “It’s a blessing if it rides for a week, a month, a year. I mean, that’s the name of the game.”
Everyone has a different limit for their street art and graffiti tolerance. While you might be okay with a wheatpaste on a dilapidated wall with a political message you align with, you’d probably draw the line at someone spray painting vulgar language on your car.
Praise Dobler first learned that Palmer was behind the green paint after Palmer posted on a community Facebook page that he had used the paint to cover up a swastika. In other words, even Dobler could point to one instance where the paint was “a good thing.”
Jane Golden is stepping down from Mural Arts full-time in August. She’s spent her career trying to balance the needs of city creatives looking for a public outlet and citizens who feel protective over shared property.
“The question is how do we create and do it in a way that is balanced so we’re able to be in a city where we’re surrounded by creativity and color and the brilliance and talent of artists,” Golden said. “But we also take into account the people that live here, their property, how they value it.”
Golden believes in the power of talking face to face with your neighbors. Like this one instance, for example, when a person kept spray painting over city commissioned murals.
“I was able to track him down,” she said. “And I talked to him. I just called him, and I just said, ‘Look, this is just so irritating. You know, you’re writing on art. I don’t know why you’re doing it.’”
She wondered if the person would be interested in creating a mural instead of defacing one.
“He came back some months later, and he had an idea for a project, and he’s starting that project,” she said. “So, I love when that can happen, when there’s sort of a meeting of the minds.”
“As someone who was a city employee for a really long time, an assignment to myself has always been to try to see things from many points of view.”
