Like many states, North Carolina is full of state-sponsored historical markers commemorating the locations of important people, places, and events in the state's history. They range from the significant to the minor, and they are ubiquitous enough and unobtrusive enough (despite being four feet wide) that most people just ignore them. Still, they're the government's way of embracing the past, ranging from patriotic celebrations of the Mecklenberg Declaration (the first declaration of independence from Britain by any colonists, on May 20, 1775) to an apologetic acknowledgement of the state eugenics board of the 20th century to people you've never heard of even if you live here like John Garzia (ca. 1690-1744).

Sadly, though, there is one place with a disappointing absence of information about its place in the cultural history of the city of Raleigh - an otherwise-unremarkable spot on Hillsborough Street, in front of NC State University's Winston Hall, which played host to a noteworthy art installation.

Hillsborough Street is currently under construction. It has been since 2007, and shows no clear sign of stopping. One of the part-time construction workers is (or was) Joe Carnevale, a student at NCSU and an avid urban explorer and sometime street artist who goes by the name "U Live and You Burn." After getting an idea which apparently just wouldn't leave his head, ULYB stole three of the construction barrels which line Hillsborough, took them back to his apartment, and spent the next three hours with a box cutter and a paintbrush. Later that night, he returned to the area under construction and installed his masterpiece - a towering monster holding out its thumb as if to ask for a lift.

It didn't last long, of course, before Raleigh police removed the sculpture. They also tracked down the artist and arrested him on charges of larceny (for stealing his raw materials for the project.) It sparked a controversy that was the talk of the Triangle, with the sculpture's fans arguing that art should not be a crime, while the city maintained that he had illicitly stolen the barrels from the construction company they belonged to. They were right, of course, but that didn't make it a popular decision - even the CEO of Hamlett Associates (the construction company) was among the sculpture's aficionados, and declined to press charges. Not only did he like the sculpture, he said, but the $360 dollars in property damage (apparently those barrels cost more than you might think) was far less than the value of the publicity the sculpture had given his company.

Nonetheless, Carnevale was sentenced to 50 hours of community service as punishment for his art. He apparently spent them working on other art projects for various nonprofits, including a Raleigh street fair which displayed a seventeen-foot-tall dinosaur which he made out of barrels donated by Hamlett Associates.

It may not seem like much, but the traffic barrel sculpture has become something of a trendy cultural touchstone in the Triangle. While the artist is back to focusing on the buildering and the guerrilla photography, the piece that put his name in the papers has endured in the popular memory.

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In an effort to remember and commemorate the short-lived existence of the iconic figure, we decided to install a North Carolina Highway Historical Marker sign to educate and inform the public of the historical signifigance of this site. Dimensions of existing signs were taken and fonts were matched for accuracy. We wrote up a blurb matching the style of the other markers, then Teucer designed the sign with technical assistance from Levatating Potato, while I painted the text.






Finished product:



We packed up the sign in the car

and drove to Raleigh

We put the finishing touches on the sign


and mounted the sign right next to the site of the original statue.







The next day, Teucer checked and the sign was still in place



and attracting attention


including some attention on the internet; a photo of it spawned quite a bit of chatter on Twitter:



and a local website has made mention of it. Apparently it even made it onto the local evening news.

All in all, if the mission of this praxis was to insert information regarding the work of Joseph Carnevale, it was a raging success.