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The Magnet Mafia Sticks to Street Art

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Their latest and most geographically ambitious project is a magnet exchange with artists in Austria. The scheme came to them through Alicia Bailey, who has a studio on Santa Fe Drive where she specializes in crafting highly conceptual handmade books. Alicia is a member of Spondere, a small art collective of like-minded women, and several members traveled to Vienna in December to hang magnets painted by Denver locals. While three middle-aged women dressed in scarves and berets and creeping through European alleyways may not seem like stereotypical American street artists, their campaign earned newspaper headlines about the "Bilder-Anschläge der Magnet-Mafia," which translates roughly to "a Magnet Mafia art attack."

To return the favor, Matt and Harrison plan to decorate Denver with magnets crafted by their German-speaking counterparts. Right now, the tile-sized Austrian strips are still in a stack on Matt's countertop, where Harrison sits carefully snipping the edges off some hand-painted magnets sent by OhNo, a street artist in West Virginia. Matt then places small stickers on the back with their logo and website, www.magnetmafia.com, so that people who find the magnets can share their discoveries online, preferably with photos.

But first, the Magnet Mafia coordinates with individual artists and collectives around the country to make the original magnet art. "This is amazing to me," Matt says. "We've got artists who will sit down and actually put in the time to do stuff like this. They send us packs of their own little stickers and artwork; we put anything that people send us straight on the magnet and get them up in Colorado."

Eventually, they'd like the Magnet Mafia to be organized enough that artists from around the globe can engineer trades without having to go directly through them. As Matt explains it, "They talk through our Internet platform and say, 'Okay, I'll send out twenty of my pieces and you send twenty to me, and we'll put each other's stuff up in different cities.'"

In this city, Matt lives in Highland, in an old two-story house that's been in a stalled remodel since he purchased it four years ago. The kitchen is all high-end granite and stainless steel, but the rest of the place is more or less gutted, giving it a warehouse-like feel that's perfect for an art studio. Tags and other scribblings adorn the bare rafters and wall studs; someone has written the words "stairway," "to" and "heaven" on the vertical risers of a set of steps that read from the top as "heaven to stairway."

The Magnet Mafia name was inspired by a discovery in the basement. When Matt was tearing some shelves out down there, he discovered a secret vault. The concrete door to the chamber was a foot thick and set on hefty hinges from the turn of the last century. "We found all of these documents and newspapers from the 1920s," Matt says. "Then I looked up some records and figured out that this was the house where the Smaldone family lived."

The Smaldones got their start bootlegging during Prohibition, then moved on to gambling and loan-sharking, a criminal enterprise they ran out of the original Gaetano's, just six blocks away from Matt's new house. By the time he made his discovery, the Smaldone family had long been out of the crime business and Gaetano's had moved into the hands of the Wynkoop Restaurant Group. Matt had his own business, a small mortgage company (this was before the subprime loan crisis gutted the market), and Harrison was helping out in his home office. It was basically a two-man operation, and they spent much of their downtime talking about graffiti and street art and cooking up the idea of a magnet crew. The house's backstory was so cool that they decided to co-opt it for the name of their new art enterprise.

The two had known each other since middle school in Littleton. At Dakota Ridge, they'd discovered a shared interest in art and design and often teamed up on extra-curricular projects, like tricking out Matt's car or creating comics making fun of each other and hanging them around the school for the amusement of friends.

"Matt was a Goody Two-shoes when I first met him," Harrison says. "He wouldn't even cuss!"

"I wouldn't even cuss," Matt concurs. But getting emancipated at seventeen from his parents, who'd gone through a divorce, and then spending a few years working at a skateboard shop cured him of that. The friends drifted apart in their early twenties — Harrison trying a few years of college, Matt working for a marketing firm in California. Then Matt moved back and became Mr. Broker, all the while daydreaming about graffiti. "But it wouldn't have been that fun getting arrested and having to explain to my real-estate clients why I'm out spray-painting other properties," he points out. Harrison had been working for fabrication and signage companies and had knowledge of other materials that could work on the street, such as industrial magnet sheeting often used for advertisements placed on the sides of vehicles.

"And we put the two together," Matt remembers. "You could do the artwork right on the magnets. So we were able to incorporate not only our own style, but all the other mixed mediums and put it on top of another medium covered with vinyl that can adhere to acrylics, screen prints or posters, then put it out on the streets in a new way."

In his house are boxes filled with fresh rolls of industrial-grade magnetic sheeting. Fifty feet goes for about $150 online, and the sheets are easily cut into ready-made canvases to adorn at concerts, fundraisers, even poetry slams. In less than two years, they estimate, over 5,000 Magnet Mafia pieces have gone up on the streets of Denver, ranging from the size of a quarter to a six-foot-long ray gun they slapped on a bridge awning. At an event called AfroBlu, they did a picture of Malcolm X to mark his assassination; another work — spread over several pieces — depicted Matt and Harrison riding spray-paint cans like rodeo cowboys. They borrowed a thirty-foot ladder to put it on the wall above a LoDo parking lot.

Most of their art is rough, chaotic. "We don't really take it too serious," Matt says. "It's hard for me to paint without people around. I like distractions; I like people to talk to, wondering what you're doing. If I'm by myself, I think about it too much. It's cool because we get to meet people, types of people we would never have met."

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