If you ever get lost in your feelings, just follow the signs to help you along your way… you’ll see what I mean in a moment, and soon you’ll be able to see this message throughout the city.

On September 27, the Albright-Knox Art Gallery welcomed world-renowned graffiti artist Stephen ‘ESPO’ Powers to speak on his Emotional Wayfinding project as part of the gallery’s Voices in Contemporary Art speaker series. The talk was introduced by Albright-Knox Deputy Director Joe Lin-Hill and moderated by Arron Ott, the gallery’s curator for public art and Zach Boehler, the gallery’s project coordinator.

Powers discussed his evolution and the development of his craft, including the process of falling out of love with it and then back in love. Before delving into sign painting, Powers got into graffiti during his sophomore year of high school. The controversial art form, he explains, allowed him to find what he had lost in formally-structured drawing classes.

“Graffiti presented line, color, design and adventure, and I didn’t need to listen to a teacher tell me what to do and react to what I was doing, so I was freed again,” he says.

Onstage with Powers, Ott and Boehler was a vintage steel sign with a neon, legged house, an image similar to some of Powers’ past cartoon-esque stylings. During the Q&A session that followed Powers’ talk, he offered some intriguing history about the sign.

Before the sign was given new life as a work of art, it was a product of the local (and historic) Flexlume Signs Inc. on Main Street, created in the mid- to late-1930s. It first served to advertise for Leslie Blau Inc., a real estate agency based in Newark, New Jersey. Powers found the sign in an auction catalog, bid on it for $100 (“It cost $500, I think, to deliver,” he joked) and worked with a friend at a neon company to repurpose it.

The sign was named Home Run, but Powers prefers to call it Run Home; not just because of its visual depiction but because its journey through time and space led it back to its homeland, right here in the City of Good Neighbors. The sign is still awaiting a permanent home in the city, by the way, so we'll have to wait to see where it will go when it finally stops running.

During his talk, Powers also unveiled the first ten Emotional Wayfinding signs, featuring lines from a poem by Robert Creeley (1926-2005), an author, poet and former professor at the University at Buffalo. The poem is called For Will and was written by Creeley for his son Will.

The collaboration that would arise between Powers and Will for these signs is nothing short of kismet. “Will was pretty easy to find and it turned out that Will, of all places, lives in Philadelphia, where I’m from; and Will, of all people in all places, is friends with a childhood friend of mine,” Powers explains.

Each sign, easily attributable to pedestrian life, could stand alone as a crafty reworking of a common street sign. When put together, however, they present Creeley’s poem in its entirety:

Steady, evening fades

Up the Street

Into sunset

Winter sits quiet here

over the lake

Snow piled by the road

The walks stamped down or shoveled

The kids in the time before dinner are playing

Sliding on the old ice

The dogs are out walking

and it’s soon

inside again

with the light gone.

Time to eat

to

think of it all

Over the summer, Powers also brought an array of public art here to Buffalo in collaboration with the Albright Knox’s Public Art Initiative. The artist and the gallery teamed up with LAMAR Outdoor Advertising to feature ESPO’s work on numerous billboards around Erie County. 

Billboards and signs are appropriate channels for Powers’ art because he has something to advertise; it’s neither himself nor his ‘brand’, however. Instead, he advertises love, nostalgia, recognition, awareness. His messages are the types of things you should see promoted in a society inundated with ads for product after product. He combines the advertising structure of retail and directional structure of informative signs to encourage us to be consumers of sentiments instead. His signs are perfect examples of when aesthetic meets function.

Five of the billboards from Emotional Wayfinding appeared as postcards featuring recognizable and historical Buffalo imagery, such as the infamous Blizzard of ’77, the Peace Bridge, vintage architecture, the city skyline, and, of course, the façade of the Albright-Knox (in spring, as cherry blossom branches hang in the foreground). The inspiration for the postcards came from Powers’ desire to learn what Buffalo is all about, and who better to ask than locals?

He handed out postcards at a festival asking people to describe what they love and hate about the city (there’s even a virtual version on the Albright-Knox’s website if you want to share your thoughts!), and those responses helped formulate ideas for the signs. With Emotional Wayfinding, Powers combines the sentiments of Buffalonians with his signature artistic flair.

His texts are straight to the point, with each message in all caps, not shouting, but declaring; needing to be recognized and received. There’s both stability and vulnerability in each letter of his signature light and semibold fonts.

Powers draws inspiration from love songs, and this is clear in the words of his works, which read like lyrics; simple but familiar tunes that evoke feelings of nostalgia and good, old-fashioned love. His pieces represent timelessness in an age of impermanence. 

His messages have not always beeen received with a warm welcome, however. His journey as an expressionist reflects the transition that has been going on with public art over the past few decades. Amid the praise of public art initiatives and glory for the artists who produce the art, there’s a bittersweet contrast between public art and graffiti, illustrators and taggers, gentrification and vandalism. Powers, who was charged with criminal mischief in 1999 for one of his pieces (which still stands today), spoke about this paradox of illustrators and how they’re categorized by society.

“Not everybody wants to be an artist;” he said. “Graffiti’s its own thing. Plenty of people are perfectly happy just writing graffiti and doing what they do. “

From prosecution to praise, Powers has rightfully earned respect as a legitimate artist, although he never needed the validation. In fact, he remains hesitant even today to call his own work ‘art.’ Maybe it’s because of the legal ramifications he has faced, the discouragement of his craft by his grade school teachers and an unevolved society’s disdain for ‘defacing’ structures and buildings. Or maybe it’s because he’s just that humble.

Powers is an extremely relatable and personable guy, dropping quips during his talk that made the audience erupt with laughter. He could just as easily be a comedian as an illustrator. One thing I learned is that Powers isn’t just a visual artist, he is an artist of words, both spoken and written.

After his talk, I had the pleasure of speaking with Powers, and I was able to learn even more about him and Emotional Wayfinding, including the origins of the profound term and its special connection to the Queen City. He revealed that his acclaim as a sign painter led to requests for wayfinding signs for different establishments; his creations weren’t made for navigating physical spaces, however, but rather intrinsic ones.

“It’s important, but it’s boring work; I don’t do it,” he said of producing signs for more conventional purposes. “So I tell people, ‘no, I do emotional wayfinding. I don’t do that stuff.’ So it was this catchphrase that we had that was just kind of floating around, but Aaron loved it and he put it to good use.”

Indeed, we have Mr. Ott to thank for making Buffalo, New York the official home of ‘Emotional Wayfinding.’ “It was first appreciated here,” Powers said. “It’s like when a record breaks somewhere, when a film’s a hit record; so it’s important that it became a hit record here.”

He revealed that despite his lengthy and successful career a visual artist, he actually considers his greatest talents to be literary.

“I always thought I was a better writer than an artist, and nobody agrees with me, but I still feel that way,” he told me. “I have a writing mind and I have a visual mind and I know when I’m doing both, sometimes there’s an overlap but different things in my brain light up. There are definitely different neural pathways that are being activated, so I feel like if I do one or the other, I’m kind of not being true to the whole thing.”

Although the postcards filled out by locals helped give Powers a sense of what Buffalo is all about, he’s still waiting to hear the city’s true story in its entirety. To experience the real Buffalo, you have to see it for yourself; words aren’t enough. The artist shared this sentiment with me when describing his time here.

“It’s the things that happen on the way to where we’re going, and the things that are happening on the side that are so interesting, that are really just Buffalo really revealing itself,” he said. “It’s a small city, man, people are really looking out for each other.”

“Everybody’s good on Sunday, I want to find out what everybody’s like on Saturday or Tuesday, when company’s not over,” he added.

The title of Powers’ 2014 book, a collection of various murals by the artist, encapsulates the true sentiment of his contributions and public art as a whole: A Love Letter to the City.

Be sure to look for more 'love letters' from ESPO in the form of 100 Emotional Wayfinding signs that will be hopping up around Erie County throughout the year.