When the call came asking him if he’d consider a change of scenery, trading the street art of San Francisco for the brick side of a former warehouse a block from the Jasper County Courthouse, Cameron Moberg had to crank up Google.
“My first thought was, ‘That is spelled so weird,’” Moberg said about Rensselaer, a place where he’d eventually spend more than a week on a scissor lift, spray-paint cans in hand. “Then I Googled, and I saw 5,700 people. … So this is rural Indiana. This could be interesting.”
What did the town with the name tough to spell — home of St. Joseph’s College, 45 minutes up Interstate 65 from Lafayette — know about the guy who won Oxygen channel’s “Street Art Throwdown” in 2015 and tags his art “Camer1”?
“Before this? Not a lot,” Rensselaer Mayor Steve Wood said, shrugging. “Nothing, I guess you could say.”
After a 10-day residency, part of an “Art in Rural Places” project financed in part by a National Endowment for the Arts grant, the two — artist and small-town Indiana — were much better acquainted.
Rensselaer showed Moberg the joys of Chicago hot dogs at Doggers restaurant, hanging in line with his family for ice cream behind youth baseball players celebrating on a humid night and spotting the rise of fireflies in the grass at dusk. (“Can you believe it?” Moberg mused. “Our first fireflies.”)
For his part, Moberg — with black, quarter-sized gauge jewelry in each ear, a black ring in his lip and a depiction of a spray-paint can among the array of tattoos on his forearms — gave Rensselaer a towering taste of street art at the entrance to the downtown, a block from the brick streets of courthouse square.
On Monday, as the last clouds from a torrential downpour faded toward the southeast, Moberg put the final touches on “Wingin’ It,” a mural of a bird that takes the entire brick canvas available on the side of the Embers Venue, a warehouse converted into an events hall. With him that afternoon were dozens of the nearly 100 kids and adults who chipped in during 10 days of work.