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Jesse (left) and Corey Knapper created the Slang Gang — and then took them to the streets.
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Have you seen those YouTubes of twin babies talking to each other, and it doesn't make any sense but they're communicating?" Corey Knapper asks. He and his brother, Jesse, are like that. At 24, they still have a secret language of gasps and glances, as well as a secret gang of cartoon friends.
They're inseparable. They make art together, work together and live together in southwest Denver. In their downtime, they play disc golf together, and they're thinking of signing up for a tournament: They think they'd make a killer doubles team.
The Knapper twins are identical. Most people can't tell them apart by looks, personality or speech. Rooms are "raging," and folks at Phish shows are "faded"; "It's all good" is one of their favorite phrases. Both dress in baggy graphic tees and loose-fitting jeans. But the Lakewood Police Department was able to find distinguishing characteristics: According to investigators, Corey has a "casual" appearance, while Jesse has a "sloppy" one. Their hair and facial hair are always changing, too. That's Corey with the heavy mustache in the Wheat Ridge mug shots.
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Being teenagers in Phoenix was so boring that the Knappers made their own fun by skateboarding off rooftops and videotaping the antics. Then they decided to collect some cash by designing T-shirts that they'd sell at parties. "You'd wake up in the morning with your pockets stuffed with cash and say, 'I hope I didn't fuck up last night, because I don't have any shirts left!'" Corey remembers.
Their parents told them they needed to get serious. While this admonition would put many nineteen-year-olds on the nine-to-five treadmill, the elder Knappers were okay with their sons going to art school. So after a couple of years at an Arizona community college, Corey and Jesse packed up their 1994 Infiniti and headed to Colorado, where they enrolled at the Rocky Mountain College of Art and Design in 2008. While Jesse studied communications and design, which he shorthands to "graphic design," Corey majored in fine arts; both maintained near-4.0 GPAs.
During winter break in Arizona last year, the twins decided to create a gang of cartoon characters. Playing off "It's all good," they wondered what kind of character Saul Gud might be. For a while, a drug-addicted but chipper homeless man Corey had met on East Colfax was the top contender. But when the pair decided that Saul sounded biblical, it clicked instantly. Jesse Google-imaged "religious Jewish man," then vectorized one of the images that came up. Saul Gud, a Hasidic Jewish man with a strong nose, a snazzy hat and an impressive beard, was the first member of the Slang Gang.
Slide show: Meet the "Slang Gang"
Other characters soon followed: Pho Reel, a smiling, bearded Asian man; Ray Jin, a gym-rat juicehead with bleached tips and a snarl; Fay Did, a girl who's enjoying the effects of MMJ to the fullest; Buzz Kill, a domineering cop who does not look amused; Saight, a seeing-eye dog; Kay Pasha, a seductive Latina girl; Das Kuhl, a beefy German man; and Klee Che, a spoof of the iconic Che Guevara image that the twins were so tired of after three years in art school.
Accompanied by the Slang Gang, they returned to school with new energy. Corey had signed up for a street-art class taught by associate professor Sandra Ceas, the former interim chair of art education at RMCAD. Ceas saw that street art had turned away from gang-related messages to become a free and public medium for the purposes of beautification, awareness and humor. So in November 2010, she proposed a street-art class to RMCAD administrators. They approved it right away, she remembers, "which was kind of surprising, since it was quite cutting-edge."
By then, the school had received a lot of student requests for such a class. "Street art is an important part of the art world, and increasingly so," notes Karen Wachtel, RMCAD's director of communications.
Still, there's plenty of confusion over the role of street art.
"A lot of students did take the class thinking it'd be a graffiti class, and right away I said, 'It's not about graffiti. It's not about vandalism. It's about having a public voice,'" Ceas recalls. "And right away, the students responded in tune with that."
The legality of street art — or lack thereof — was often a point of discussion in class. Laws pertaining to graffiti, vandalism and other related activities in Jefferson County and the city of Denver were posted on the class's Digication portal, a website that students could access that included a syllabus, homework assignments, readings and other course-related materials. Although Ceas never required students to break laws for the sake of the class, she didn't discourage it, either. "Even though if you were to technically say, 'You are making art on something you do not own, you are vandalizing,' the students who are artists and want to work in this genre are saying that we should have equal rights to a voice in public," Ceas says. And so she asked her students questions like: What's the responsibility that goes with doing this sort of work? And, even, am I willing to get arrested for it?
