The Back
of the Sign
For more than twenty years a friendly water buffalo trespassed across Philadelphia. We went looking for the man who drew him.
of the Sign
For more than twenty years a friendly water buffalo trespassed across Philadelphia. We went looking for the man who drew him.
here is a particular genre of Philadelphia signage devoted to telling you no. No turn here, one way only, no parking, three hundred dollars to get your car back. For more than twenty years a small horned water buffalo lived on the other side of those instructions, on the blank aluminum the city never imagined anyone would look at, smiling at whoever happened to glance up. He surfaced in the back room at Tattooed Mom, on a newsstand at Fifteenth and Walnut, on lamp posts and cement barricades and brick walls in neighborhoods that had nothing else in common. His name was El Toro, and the man drawing him preferred, for a long time, that you not know his.
That man was Justin Nagtalon, who died on March 7 at the age of forty-three. The cause, confirmed by his family, was a heart attack. He had been drawing the same friendly animal, by hand, over and over, for most of his adult life.
Nagtalon was born in the Philippines and lived there until he was ten, long enough for the place to settle permanently into his imagination. He grew up on the cartoons and toys that defined a certain 1980s childhood, the ThunderCats and the Ninja Turtles, and on the carabao, the working water buffalo that stands as something close to a national symbol back home. When the family resettled in New Jersey, those early loves came with him. Years later he would describe El Toro, with characteristic self-deprecation, as a kind of male Hello Kitty, cute in the kawaii sense but carrying a streak of mischief he had no interest in apologizing for.
He arrived at the work through design. In 2001 he enrolled at the former Art Institute of Philadelphia to study graphic design, and he began writing graffiti while he was there. The graffiti did not last. After a run-in with the law in 2007 and a stretch of community service, he moved the whole project onto stickers and canvases, where the same restless hand could keep working without the same consequences. It suited him. He had found the European sticker scene and recognized something in it, a way of making art that asked for no gallery, no permission, and no audience beyond whoever was paying attention on the walk home.
This is the part worth sitting with. Nagtalon was, by training and by paying trade, a graphic designer, the sort of professional whose work turns up on brand campaigns for clients like Adobe, the Philadelphia Eagles, Roots Picnic, and URBN. The same precision went into the thousands of small drawings he gave away for free on the street. He did not treat the commissioned work and the trespassing as separate careers. They were one hand, and the street was the half he could not stop doing.
What he built out there was less a body of work than a community. Alongside Bob Will Reign and the loose collective known as the 33 crew (Ticky 33, Underwater Pirates, Noségo, and others who drifted through its orbit), Nagtalon helped turn a fringe and faintly criminal habit into something the city now takes seriously. By the accounts of nearly everyone who came up around him, he was more teacher than star, the one who organized the group shows, started the collaborative walls, and tended to drag everyone he knew along with him rather than leave them behind. Conrad Benner, who founded the blog Streets Dept and spent years documenting the scene, has pointed to the quiet strangeness of the method, an artist alone in a studio hand-drawing hundreds of pieces and then installing them in the empty corners of a city that never asked for them.
That man was Justin Nagtalon, who died on March 7 at the age of forty-three. The cause, confirmed by his family, was a heart attack. He had been drawing the same friendly animal, by hand, over and over, for most of his adult life.
Nagtalon was born in the Philippines and lived there until he was ten, long enough for the place to settle permanently into his imagination. He grew up on the cartoons and toys that defined a certain 1980s childhood, the ThunderCats and the Ninja Turtles, and on the carabao, the working water buffalo that stands as something close to a national symbol back home. When the family resettled in New Jersey, those early loves came with him. Years later he would describe El Toro, with characteristic self-deprecation, as a kind of male Hello Kitty, cute in the kawaii sense but carrying a streak of mischief he had no interest in apologizing for.
He arrived at the work through design. In 2001 he enrolled at the former Art Institute of Philadelphia to study graphic design, and he began writing graffiti while he was there. The graffiti did not last. After a run-in with the law in 2007 and a stretch of community service, he moved the whole project onto stickers and canvases, where the same restless hand could keep working without the same consequences. It suited him. He had found the European sticker scene and recognized something in it, a way of making art that asked for no gallery, no permission, and no audience beyond whoever was paying attention on the walk home.
This is the part worth sitting with. Nagtalon was, by training and by paying trade, a graphic designer, the sort of professional whose work turns up on brand campaigns for clients like Adobe, the Philadelphia Eagles, Roots Picnic, and URBN. The same precision went into the thousands of small drawings he gave away for free on the street. He did not treat the commissioned work and the trespassing as separate careers. They were one hand, and the street was the half he could not stop doing.
What he built out there was less a body of work than a community. Alongside Bob Will Reign and the loose collective known as the 33 crew (Ticky 33, Underwater Pirates, Noségo, and others who drifted through its orbit), Nagtalon helped turn a fringe and faintly criminal habit into something the city now takes seriously. By the accounts of nearly everyone who came up around him, he was more teacher than star, the one who organized the group shows, started the collaborative walls, and tended to drag everyone he knew along with him rather than leave them behind. Conrad Benner, who founded the blog Streets Dept and spent years documenting the scene, has pointed to the quiet strangeness of the method, an artist alone in a studio hand-drawing hundreds of pieces and then installing them in the empty corners of a city that never asked for them.
He is Philly's street mascot
Sean 9 Lugo, fellow street artist
For most of those years almost nobody knew his name, and then, in the last stretch of his life, Nagtalon stepped out of his own anonymity on purpose. He began to claim the work publicly, and with it his heritage and his community. The decision carried a weight that is easy to underrate, given that he was an immigrant and a person of color whose signature medium remained, strictly speaking, against the law. The reward was a body of work that finally got to be local in the fullest sense. His buffalo appeared on the walls of Filipino restaurants around the city, at Manong, Baby's Kusina, and Tabachoy, and his mural work spread from collaborative walls in Kensington to a commission with Mural Arts and cover art for WHYY's Art Outside. One of his earliest paintings had already told the joke he kept returning to, a caped, boxing El Toro hoisting a cracked Liberty Bell, a transplant claiming the city by carrying its most famous broken thing.
It would be easy now to oversell the individual stickers, and we will not. Any one of them is a small, funny, well-made thing. The achievement was never the single image. It lived in the volume and the generosity of it, in deciding that a medium most people read as litter was worth a designer's full attention, and then proving it thousands of times over until the city came around. Nagtalon got up before dawn to make things because he believed he still had a great deal left to give, and he was in the middle of giving it when he died. The work is still out there, on the backs of all those signs that exist to tell us no, still quietly saying something closer to yes.