Why does a shocked boy’s face keep appearing in Tacoma? We asked man responsible
Hidden on the side of utility boxes, affixed to alleys and spray-painted on sidewalks around Tacoma is the image of a boy with a shocked look on his face. The face varies in color and size, but the graffiti image of a boy with a wide-eyed expression has become a calling card of sorts in Tacoma’s guerrilla-art scene.
The person behind the image asked to remain anonymous in this story and video to protect his identity and focus the attention on the tag itself. On Wednesday the 42-year-old went for a walk with The News Tribune around the Stadium District to show off some of his favorite pieces.
The spray-painted stencils depict the exact moment a deaf boy named Harold Whittles heard sound for the first time. Photographer Jack Bradley captured the boy’s shock and astonishment in black and white, and the image was published in the February 1974 edition of “Reader’s Digest.”
The man behind the Tacoma tag, who recently started an Instagram account documenting his work at @deafboytacoma, has been spray painting images of Whittles around Tacoma since 2011. Although he’s tagged hundreds of the faces, many of them have been painted over or removed. The man estimates there are 40 to 50 stencils in Tacoma up right now from Point Defiance to Ruston Way, downtown, the Tacoma Dome District and 6th Avenue. You can find a small set of Aubrey Hepburn’s eyes (which has been there for more than 10 years) on an apartment building at the intersection of North Tacoma Avenue and North 2nd Street.
“I started off doing all kinds of random stencils, mostly faces with expressions on them. And then I came across this boy’s face, and it looked like me as a kid. I love the expression on his face,” the man said. “When you see another face looking back at you, you can’t help but feel what that face is feeling. It kind of strikes you more than just words, seeing a face staring back at you. It’s more noticeable and kind of makes you wonder.”
The man said he related to Whittles’ face “because I didn’t consider myself an artist until I was like 28 … but it completely changed my whole life. You know, just the way I look at the world, the way I communicate with the world.”
About once a month before the sun rises, the man sneaks out with his backpack to add another face to a flat surface somewhere in Tacoma. He readies the stencils at home and scouts locations in advance so he can tag in the image in about two minutes.
“The rain and the wind are my enemies. Sometimes you just have to do it because it’s always raining. I try to find the dry spots that are under a canopy or something,” he said. “I try to find the spots that are safe for me to do, but visible … Anywhere I can get to on a skateboard.”
Speculators on Tacoma’s Reddit thread have for years questioned the man’s motives and inspiration, even going so far as to compare him to Banksy. Although he’s been doing this for more than 10 years now, he says he gets nervous tagging and is humbled that so many people enjoy and inquire about the man behind the face.
A special “Tacoma Aroma” poster (depicting Whittles wearing a gas mask) was made in 2013 in a collaboration with Tacoma’s letterpress poster project Beautiful Angle. Some Whittles graffiti depicts his skull, tears or Whittles wearing a hoodie. The man is now selling T-shirts and stickers with Whittles’ face in several shades of blue.
“People say they make games out of finding them. People steal them off the street. People ask me for shirts,” he said. “I didn’t expect people to love it as much as they have. Started off doing it for fun and now I’m making shirts and getting interviewed by the paper.”
Donning a blue beanie, sunglasses and blue medical gloves (to hide any identifying hand tattoos), the tagger said Wednesday he finally agreed to talk with The News Tribune because, “I feel like it’s been long enough to where, you know, I can let people in on the secret.”
“I’m born and raised here. I love Tacoma. Tacoma has been so supportive as an artist, so I love that it’s become a Tacoma thing. I didn’t intend it to be that,” he said with a laugh.
“Not everyone knows it. If you’re outside of Tacoma, you don’t really know [about] it,” added Jason Gordon, a neighbor and friend of the tagger. “We live around here, we see them all the time. It’s just like a rallying cry for neighbors. It’s so Tacoma.”
Street art or vandalism?
When asked if the public has ever complained about the tags, the city of Tacoma said “our traffic box wrap artworks have been tagged in this manner and the city removes them as needed.”
City spokesperson Maria Lee said Tacoma tracks vandalism complaints based on address location alone, not monikers or certain individuals. So far this year the city has received 127 combined public property and private property graffiti complaints, 24 of which appeared to be on public property, she said. One 311 complaint in May, which was reviewed by The News Tribune, asked the city to put public art on a utility box in the Stadium District that has been repeatedly hit with the shocked-boy tag.
As reported by The News Tribune’s Craig Sailor last year, the Washington State Department of Transportation spent over $815,000 on graffiti removal statewide in 2023.
Lee said city arts administrator Rebecca Solverson also shared that “she has received at least one direct complaint from an artist about this tag on their work.” In that case, a traffic-wrap box about the Puyallup Tribe’s creation story was tagged, which was “very disrespectful both to the artist and the story being told,” Lee said.
When asked about this case, the shocked-boy tagger said, “I respect all art and artists, especially local ones like me, and this was a misunderstanding. I didn’t realize I was painting over his art. This artist has since reached out to me, through an intermediary, and I have apologized and said I would be more diligent in my placement.”
