Photo and Commentary ©2025 by Maylan Schurch
Friday, September 12, 2025
Driving about the metropolis in recent years, I’ve noticed something interesting, mostly as I’m waiting for the light to change at an intersection. I’ll see huge metal boxes like the ones in the photo above. I’m not exactly sure what they contain, but it’s most likely electrical switches or maybe phone or internet equipment. Normally these boxes are gray in color, or a muted green, presumably to not draw too much attention to themselves.
The problem, of course, is that once an anarchistic spray-painter catches sight of such a box, he or she sees it as a virgin canvas, and in the dead of night will create an eye-catching but largely indecipherable string of letters, or maybe a gang hieroglyphic.
But one day, somebody got a great idea: put real art, beautiful art, on these boxes. And it seems to be working. Because in my purely non-research-based personal opinion, there seem to be at least two basic kinds of freelance public artist. The first is the gang-graffiti sprayer, and no doubt no piece of art would deter such a person from leaving their signal. But the second kind seems to be the people who want to do real art. These people love beauty, and will produce it if provided with enough spray paint, and time, and side-of-the-building canvases.
What’s interesting to me is that I have never once seen gang graffiti sprayed on one of these art-covered boxes. The spray-paint artist, observing it, probably shrinks back from defacing something somebody put a lot of careful work into it. And even the gang-tagger keeps the spray can in the backpack and moves along. This is a kind of “art war,” where the beautiful (in most cases) drives the ugly away.
The Bible has quite a bit to say, both through words and through demonstration, how the light of God’s presence, and the power of His love, keep the opposite at bay. Check out the two links below.