Levis Remembered Found Portraits, Blackbird

He Was My Friend and Winter Photos contributed by Matthew Myers and Mathias Svalina

One cool spring afternoon a friend and I were walking along Park Avenue, in Richmond, Virginia, when this small piece of street art caught our attention. At first I thought the man in the image was an early Parisian Hemingway, but, upon closer inspection, my friend excitedly confirmed it was another Larry Levis tribute, one of many street signs—always with the same stencil—that have been appearing intermittently on the East Coast in urban areas over the past few years. This piece, with its familiar tableau of Levis’s shoulders, chest, and mustachioed visage, was (and I say was because vandals recently destroyed it) about 8" by 8" on plywood, attached by two nuts and two bolts below a dilapidated parking sign, close to the intersection of Park Avenue and Harrison Street. So, fueled by the presumption that street art has no permanence (despite its beautifying aspect—especially in low-income, dilapidated inner-city areas—street art is considered, by law, vandalism), I ran home, grabbed my digital camera, and dashed back to take a series of shots, two of which appear here. We believe the words embedded in the pink background are taken from the Levis poem, "Boy in a Video Arcade."

This neon-bright combination of symbols and snowflakes on the backside of the piece is the artist's signature. On all of his work you will find the snowflake image somewhere, occasionally on the reverse side, away from the artwork, and other times it is incorporated into the piece.

This final image is a 2007 photograph contributed by Mathias Svalina who found the artist’s work in Fuquay-Varina, North Carolina. The text is from Larry Levis’s poem “Winter.” The forementioned symbol and snowflake signature appears on the face of the work as it does on the found Levis portrait published in Blackbird v6n2. —Matthew Myers

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