A&E

Take the stairs at the Cosmopolitan to discover Stephen Powers’ striking murals

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Stephen Powers’ works can be found in the stairwell adjacent to Marquee Nightclub at the Cosmopolitan.
Photo: Wade Vandervort

When I interviewed New York-based artist Stephen Powers—a.k.a. ESPO—for a corporate branding campaign about 10 years back, I asked if he’d rather see his work in alleyways or on museum walls. “They’re great either way,” he said. “I’ll take the worst neighborhood ever, or I’ll take the best museum you’ve got.” Or, in an unusual case for the prolific muralist, hidden away inside the stairwell of a Las Vegas hotel, leading up to its pool deck.

Powers’ freehand murals at the Cosmopolitan—located in the stairwell adjacent to Marquee—are very much in ESPO’s signature style; Powers presents his truths, messages of affirmation and twisty bits of wordplay (“She had a face built to take the stares,” goes one) in the style of old-school painted signs and advertisements, like those that covered many of Las Vegas’ neighborhood bars and restaurants in the 1950s and early 1960s. “The entire visual landscape was made by hand [back then],” Powers said. “I didn’t mean to be cool and pick the coolest period of American visual noise. I was just picking up where we left off.”

ESPO’s Cosmopolitan works are a cool change of direction for an artist who generally works on pieces that are several stories tall or poster-sized. (See more at firstandfifteenth.net.) They interact with their environment in fun ways—soaring upward above the handrails, offering promises of good times to come. They’re what Stephen Powers believes in his heart graffiti can be, at its best: “a way of actively making love to a city.”

“I never saw graffiti as a negative thing,” he said. “I saw it as kids trying to make themselves known in a place where nobody cared about them anyway. It was a way of humanizing, a way of making things interesting.”

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