Hotel HIJINKS – Naples Florida Weekly

It began as a joke.

Now it’s turned into a mission.

Santa Fe artist Terrell Powell, also known as T Bang, was spending a lot of time in hotel rooms as he traveled from art fair to art fair around the country, selling his paintings.

But the hotel pictures he saw hanging on the walls at night were nowhere near as creative as what he saw during the day, nor as creative as the images in his head.

The hotel art was uninspired, insipid mass-produced work, a visual snooze.

So he decided to do something about it.

T Bang is working to change the ugliness of budget hotel room art, one room at a time.

When he sees an ugly painting in his hotel room, he takes it off the wall, removes the glass and frame, and paints on the image, embellishing, or, as he puts it, “enhancing” the painting. Then he replaces the glass and frame and hangs it back on the wall.

They’re never original works or valuable, such as Picassos or Warhols, he says, pointing out that the glass and the frames cost more than the actual image itself.

“I know that these prints cost 38 cents, maybe a dollar,” he says. “Most of them are cheap, offset prints, and they’d turn blue in the sun after a year. The paint I put on them lasts longer. I just increased the value of it!”

While some may see it as defacing artwork, T Bang sees it as a public service. He’s helping to beautify America by enhancing mundane prints.

He signs them on the back with his hotel artist name, T Bang.

“T Bang is like the dark side of Terrell,” he jokes.

Though the term has sexual connotations, he claims his name doesn’t.

He jokes that he has no first name and two last names, as Terrell was his mother’s maiden name.

“Everybody calls me T, T Man, T Bone,” he says. “Then, if I was at an art show and had a big sale, (my friends) would say, ‘Cha-ching,’ like a cash register. They’d call me T Bang after a big sale happened. The name came about like that.”

The first time he painted on a hotel painting was at Americas Best Value in Giddings, Texas.

He was staying there, selling his paintings and antiques at an art fair in town. He had his paints with him, and in the evenings he’d work on small paintings and sculptures. But the hotel’s two black velvet paintings over the beds kept bothering him.

“They were as cheesy as you can imagine,” he says. “Probably picked up at a garage sale. I thought, what kind of artist am I if I don’t put a little touch on them and doctor them up? This was before I had security hardware tools (to take the paintings off the wall.) So I stood up on the bed and painted them.”

He painted a sea monster in the water and transformed a wolf into the John Holmes of the wildlife world.

He showed pictures of the modified artwork to his artist friends, and they all laughed about it.

“The whole thing started as a joke,” he says. “It was just a funny thing to do at the time. There was no goal or motivation to take it further.”

As he stayed in other hotel rooms, he continued adding to the art on the wall. Throughout Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Colorado and New Mexico, he visited different hotels in different chains, mostly budget motels and hotels.

He kept enhancing the paintings.

He’s painted a fleet of UFOs in the sky in a scene with windmills, as well as beavers, birds, butterflies. In a Holiday Inn Express in Wichita, Kansas, he painted a tornado on a prairie landscape, complete with flying house, truck and cow.

Though the same housekeepers go into the rooms every day, he says, they typically don’t notice the paintings. “What they’re looking for is: is the big screen TV still there? Is there a crime scene in the bed? Did someone smoke in the room and leave a (burn mark) on the sink?

“It was so weird: I did a few more, then a few more, and I never got a phone call. I kept thinking: what do I have to do to get noticed? How do you push the boundaries of the thing without getting in trouble?”

An image as seen before T Bang got to it, left, and after he offered enhancements, right. COURTESY PHOTO

It wasn’t until 30 or 40 hotels later that he was finally caught at the Sleep Inn in Des Moines, Iowa.

He had a friend make a video of him taking down eight black and white photographs from the wall and painting on seven of them, doctoring them up with an octopus and a butterfly and “birds in crazy colors.” Their mistake was in posting it live on Facebook before he checked out. e

Th hotel discovered the modified photographs as soon as they walked into the room, and billed T Bang’s credit card before he’d even made it to Kansas City, he says.

Although they charged him $200 for the “defacing the artwork,” the hotel sent him the modified paintings, which T Bang turned around and sold.

“I did more and more outrageous things,” he says. And although he signs his name on the back, “I’ll sign probably 50 of my best friends’ names all over it,” he says. “As many people as I can think of, so they don’t know who to go for.”

T Bang with one of his works of art.

But he’s becoming known among hotel managers around the country and also has a following on Facebook, where he posts his latest feats, showing before and after pictures.

Some hotels hang up his work in their offices. One manager liked it so much she took it home. The Americas Best Value Inn in Butte, Montana, was so pleased he’d enhanced one of its paintings that the hotel manager paid $600 to have it professionally framed. The picture now hangs in a stairway, along with a plaque with T Bang’s name, the date he stayed there (August 25), and the room he was in. (Room 206) The manager calls T Bang every year on August 25th to wish him a happy T Bang anniversary; the two have become friends.

The hotel posted this online: “Our hotel was lucky enough to have the amazing T Bang ‘beautifully vandalize’ a piece of art in one of our guest rooms. We can’t thank you enough for the joy this has brought to our staff. It is currently being re-framed to be hung in the stairway for all the guests to enjoy. Hope you come back and stay with us again and see your artwork on display soon.”

Enhancements to hotel art is a thing T Bang does.

But a Holiday Inn in Missouri wasn’t amused; they charged him $500 for defacing artwork and banned him.

But most hotels are open to his work; they get the joke, and realize he’s enhanced not only the artwork but the hotel’s reputation.

He’s been called a Hotel Banksy, but T Bang says he’s never called himself that.

He’s beginning to become more well known.

A few years ago, Joe Henry Delgado made a short film about his hotel hijinks, called “Your Hotel Has Been T-Banged!”

And the Wall Street Journal ran a story about him on their front page on Oct. 15

Gadi Schwarz and NBC Nightly News came out and did a story about him in early December; it was supposed to air on Dec. 20 but was bumped by another story. T Bang isn’t sure when it will be rescheduled.

He’s also going to be interviewed by WGN-TV.

What was initially a joke has now transformed into a mission to paint on hotel paintings in all 50 states. He estimates he’s more than two-thirds of the way there, and plans to visit New England in the spring or summer, as well as Florida and Mississippi.

He usually looks at the artwork and lets it tell him what it needs.

“But I tell you right now,” he says, “Florida is going to get a funky alligator picture, or a big fish. It’s going to get some wildlife for sure.”

He’s working on a book about all his hotel artwork; he’s taken photos and documented it all.

Some of his original hotel artwork has been sold for as much as $3,000. His “regular” artwork, done in a colorful folk art style, which sells at the Calliope Gallery in Madrid, New Mexico, can go for as much as $25,000.

He began his career as a professional illustrator, creating illustrations of jets for Southwest Airlines. But in his spare time he always worked on his own paintings. He also taught illustration, basic drawing and airbrush technique at a community college, but gave it up after he showed his work at an art fair and made more money in one day than he did in an entire semester of teaching.

“The rest was history,” he says.

“You have to have a goal, then work hard to do it, to get to where you want to be.

“I would travel around, but I didn’t have a goal. But after Des Moines, I thought: there has to be a more noble approach to making this thing happen. Aim higher.

People think it’s hilarious, (what I do.) My artist friends say they wish they’d thought of it, but they’d be scared.

“But I’m totally fearless about doing it, it’s so second nature now.

“You gotta live life on the edge.” ¦

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