Mysterious “hornheads”

Recently, I noticed the  series of horned, cartoonish cut-outs in my walks around the east side. I spotted them on garbage cans, electrical boxes, and on the side of the Marsupial Bridge. My curiosity grew, so I snapped a picture and posted it on my Facebook page, putting out a call to help me find the person responsible.

One of my friends — a local musician — recognized the images and supplied me with a name: Sedgwick. Thanks to the power of the underground network that is Milwaukee, I get connected.

“You’re not a cop are you?” Sedgwick asks me in my first phone call to him. After assuring him that I was definitely not a cop and would keep any revealing information off-record, we set up a date for me to interview him and then shadow him on the street.

His concerns are understandable – in the past he’s had to drop what he was doing and run from the law. He recalls working on a mural with his friend “Oreo” on some abandoned buildings near the train tracks in Bay View.

“Sure as shit, an hour into our piece the f***ing cops show up and we were like, ‘lets book it!'” he tells me, elaborating. “We took off in different directions; I went up by an industrial area and snuck into a factory. The doors were open and I hid behind a locker. I was sitting there for like an hour.”

More recently, Sedgwick was issued a $350 ticket for vandalism, he says, after a police officer followed a trail of hornheads that led to him.

ARTIST ON THE RUN

The street artist known as “Sedgwick” compares spaces he would like to paint to pop stars he’d like to bed down with– some spaces are “kind of like Melissa Etheridge” he says, shrugging, while others are like Paris Hilton. His ultimate celeb crush is Halle Berry, and by this he also means the North End Water Tower. More about this particular lust later, but first Sedgwick wants to get up close and personal with Megan Fox.

“Megan Fox” is a pair of metal doors behind the empty building that used to house the Good Life restaurant on Humboldt Avenue. I follow as he sneaks through a back corridor, and when we arrive at our destination, Sedgwick opens a backpack. Inside is a yogurt container filled with wallpaper paste, which he swiftly begins slapping on the doors with a paint brush. His arm move smoothly, side to side and then up and down. Next he pulls out a stack of photocopies of the character he’s created.

Sedgwick doesn’t have a name for the shifty-eyed, block-toothed face sprouting horns, so I’ll refer to it as “hornhead.” He begins smoothing the sheets of paper directly onto the doors, and then brushes a layer of the paste over them.  Within a couple of minutes, the entire door is covered in an exploding collage of faces.

Some people would call this “street art;” others would say it is vandalism, plain and simple. Because of  the latter, Sedgwick adjusts a bandana over his face so I can take a picture before parting ways.

By day, Sedgwick is a working man. He cooks at a local restaurant and occasionally does landscaping jobs. He lives with his girlfriend. I ask how she feels about his clandestine activities.

“She’s alright with it. She knows I’m passionate about it, so she doesn’t knock it.” To confirm this, he calls to her into the room, and she leans on the table near us. “I like seeing it around; I get bummed when I see it’s gone,”she says. “It’s like a secret I have that no one else has.”

Sedgwick also enjoys the secret, but sometimes wishes he could share it more openly — only a couple of people know what he does.  He occasionally uses spotters for bigger projects, who hang around nearby bus stops and communicate with him via walkie talkie, but even many long-time friends don’t know he’s responsible for the hornhead cut-outs.

“I really want to tell them but I can’t. I want the recognition, but I can’t have it.”

In Milwaukee, the Anti-Graffiti Program was developed in the early ’90s to combat a swell of tagging in the city, with firm message that “graffiti is wrong… and has the potential to destroy neighborhoods.”

I ask Sedgwick what he would tell people who argue that what he is doing is simply a criminal act — and a public nuisance to boot.

“I would tell them to look at the advertisements that are being force-fed to them every day when they walk down the street.” He mentions a list of things he feels are unavoidably thrust upon him- literature from political campaigns, TV ads that enter into small talk conversations, obnoxious billboards and unending Internet pop-up ads on the rare occasions he goes online.

“I’m sick of s**t being shoved down my throat all the time” he says. One has to wonder if he might, in his own way, be fighting back.

Tomorrow: Tea enters Sedgwick’s inner sanctum, learning a few tricks of the trade and taking a nocturnal tour of Sedgwick’s world.