Last week, a provocative new piece of street art popped up around the corner from Monk’s Cafe in Center City: a black-and-white image of a boy in a backpack and bulletproof vest, lifting his arms up in a plea not to shoot. But by Monday afternoon it was just a faded outline, mostly scrubbed off the side of a boarded-up building at 16th and Spruce streets.
The erasure is nothing new for Bad Luck, the Philadelphia street artist who created it.
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“I tend to try to put pieces in populated places, which in turn means they get buffed rather quickly usually,” he said via Instagram message. “And especially a piece like that. Might not sit with some people well.”
Bad Luck uses stencils and spray paint to create striking images of unhoused people pleading for empathy, a bride calmly watching her bouquet burn and distressed children reacting to unseen horrors. The boy at 16th and Spruce streets was one of those kids, his frightened facial expression offering a commentary on school shootings in America.
“It was just a way to bring attention and to remind people about the ever-growing violence in our school systems,” Bad Luck explained. “How to a degree it’s almost normalized in my opinion.”
The artist said his piece was not in response to any specific event, but all mass shootings in U.S. schools. As Bad Luck noted, there already have been at least 18 school shootings in the country in 2024, and 14 of those were at K-12 campuses. Though no mass shootings have occurred on Philadelphia school grounds this year, eight Northeast High students were shot while waiting at a bus stop in Burholme in March.
“(It’s) hard to keep up,” he said. “I felt I had to try anything to get people curious about the subject.”
Bad Luck is often compared to — or confused with — the international graffiti artist Banksy, whose work has appeared in London, New Orleans and the West Bank of Palestine. Bad Luck previously told the Inquirer that he bristles at the comparison, lamenting “if you try to do stencil work, then somehow you’re automatically biting off of Banksy.”
As seen in videos posted to Bad Luck’s social media, the artist typically tapes a cut posterboard to his chosen spot along the side of a building and then spray paints the stencil, filling in shadows and shading where necessary. Though he usually creates black-and-white images, he occasionally incorporates colored paints, often to emphasize a flame, flower or streak of lipstick.
By the looks of his Instagram account, where Bad Luck catalogs his nighttime excursions into the city, he’s had a prolific April. His other recent works include a young ballerina, a couple in matching sneakers and winter hats, and a piece at Third Street and Elbow Lane in Old City that depicts a man in sweats sitting on a bench, a bird at his feet.
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