i am staying in tacoma in the north west pacific region in the usa. it’s close to seattle. the airport in seattle is called seattle/tacoma airport. what is interesting however is that if you go into a gift shop everything is about seattle. it tells you something about tacoma – it’s more invisible, cheaper, our of sight maybe. it’s actually really lovely, on the pugent sound. but these sort of narratives about place run deep. this insight caught the attention of artist, lance kagey. together with friend and co-conspirator tom llewellyn they decided to shift perceptions through a guerilla arts poster project beautiful angle.

beginning in 2002 they have designed a letterpress poster printed 120 and posted them round the city. actually they post around two thirds i think and the remainder are sold to fund the project. a letter press is a hand cranked press using movable type characters – see the photo. lance is on the left and tom on the right. i lucked out in that they were at a meeting i was invited to join and we ended up visiting the studio where they make the posters. it’s a labour of love and you need a whole room to store the amount of letters and so on. but the posters are gorgeous. read more about it here. it’s a long commitment (20 years and more) and in many ways as well as it’s quality i think the longevity is what is magical about it. they have become collectible, are on peoples walls, in the city’s imagination and are reframing tacoma with a beautiful angle. all the posters are on the web site and it’s worth taking some time to scroll through the pages. this was a recent one which lance showed us which is why i chose it. it was one of the most popular perhaps given the wider context in the usa right now. just an astounding project.

for those of you who follow the blog out of interest in pioneering, one of the things we talk about is noticing where god is at work and joining in. we use an approach called asset based community development – at it’s heart that is about looking for assets rather than deficits to make connections with and help communities find their strengths rather than perpetaute stories of problems.

you’ll notice if you scroll through the posters that some draw subtly on ideas from the christian tradition and scriptures – and are brilliantly done to simply be good news for the city, are evocative and don’t shout in any way – a new tacoma, a creed for tacoma, a holy city and so forth. (this reminded me of doug gay’s new glasgow back in the alternative worship collection we put together years back!).