Tursi Soccer is a soccer store in Portland that has been selling Timbers, Thorns and other community soccer team-themed merchandise since 1986.

Cam Murry works at Tursi. Murry said that to advertise their products and brands in the store, Adidas and Nike would wrap the store in marketing material. 

Murry said that although this idea was good in theory, it was not successful in downtown Portland because of the frequent graffiti and tagging. 

“Obviously most taggers are looking to throw up their name and they see that advertising as fair game so [the advertisements] would get covered the same night they got put up,” said Murry.  

Another employee at Tursi Soccer, Jen Hrynco said that the graffiti made the building look run-down and hurt their reputation.

“I feel like a lot of people didn’t think that there was any business here,” said Hrynco. 

Instead of continuing to cover the building in advertisements and clean up the graffiti, Murry and Hrynco reached out to Cada Casa. 

Cada Casa is a non-profit organization based in Portland that, according to their website, advances equity by providing accessible, impassioned educational experiences, athletic programs and civic engagement opportunities for students, with a focus on Latine, BIPOC, and disadvantaged communities. 

Cada Casa created “Cultural Analysis of New Age Spray” (CANS), an after-school program where students analyze the cultural significance of spray-paint-based art while learning fundamentals in street art. 

The executive director for Cada Casa, Tymon Emch, is also a chemistry teacher at Beaverton High School. Emch said that this project was inspired by Chicano activists in Central Valley California as well as Gothic style typography.

“[There is a rule] in the world of graffiti…there’s a big hierarchy,” said Emch. “It is really interesting because you can see this hierarchy in action along [Interstate 5]  kind of on the way to Delta Park. And what you’d see is someone do something that’s called a throw-up, just a real quick piece. It’s not the pretty stuff. And then you’re allowed to go over that if your piece is a bit more complicated.”

In a commissioned project for Turisi, CANS and several high school students in the Portland metropolitan area created a mural at Tursi’s downtown location.

The mural uses Gothic typography and lettering inspired by the Latino community and the Portland Timbers. 

Murry and Hrynco have seen success in the implementation of this mural. 

“It has multiple layers of that spray paint deterrent paint which means that it is really easy to wash off spray paint if it gets tagged, but so far we haven’t had to wash anything off yet so it actually works,” said Hrynco. 

This story was originally published on The Cardinal Times on October 16, 2024.