He's got my vote

Along a stretch of Mass Ave. in Boston, signs, parking meters and even a mailbox or two are covered in the sticker you see above. “VOTE FOR TYPOE,” it says. They struck me as curious for two reasons: One, unlike stickers for bands or some HappyScrappy stickers you may or may not have seen around the city, this sticker doesn’t invite the viewer to do anything. In fact, if you wanted to vote for TYPOE, you wouldn’t know how. And two, I know a guy named Ty Poe. He’s in my college circle of friends. These aren’t his, he doesn’t live in Boston, and I bet there aren’t many other people named Ty Poe. So what the hell is going on?

After talking about this with some friends, I took to Google and, I think, cracked the case. The stickers are also in Miami (see bottom right), and there’s a graffiti artist in Miami named TYPOE. He’s pretty good, although be careful about looking at the collected work: On some pages, the graffiti guys stop painting walls and starts painting women’s bare breasts and butts -- as wise a change in canvas material as I’ve ever seen, although I suppose not as accessable to the general public.

More notable, though, is that TYPOE is apparently part of a graffiti crew called TCP; that also happens to be what’s on the flag the penguin in the sticker is holding. You can see the artist and crew’s name listed underneath all the stuff he does; here’s one that even includes both names on a graffiti’d wall, and here’s a softer side of TYPOE.

I’m still unclear about how these stickers got here, but I suppose it’s easy enough to assume: Maybe some of the TCP guys came up to Boston and had some stickers on hand. Maybe there's a national graffiti campaign I'm not aware of. Maybe he’s got a fanbase. Either way, it makes a lot more sense than my first theory, which was that the stickers were somehow related to ocean exploration.

Posted by Jason Feifer at April 10, 2007 03:52 PM