Berkeley Resident Petitions Authorities to Punish Park Vandal

A Berkeley resident filed a petition on Whitehouse.gov Wednesday requesting that authorities pursue charges and the maximum punishment allowed for a New York artist who vandalized at least 10 national parks.

The petition, which has garnered over 2,300 signatures as of 3 p.m. Thursday, states that a graffiti artist named Casey Nocket has traveled to several national parks and defaced them with her own acrylic paintings.

“Please don’t allow her to receive a slap. Please pursue the most serious of charges for these offenses,” reads the petition.

The news of Nocket’s activities — and they are crimes, according to the National Parks Service — was broken by two hiking blogs, Modern Hiker and Calipidder.com, after Nocket’s Instagram feed was posted on Reddit.

Before she made her Instagram account “creepytings” private, Nocket had posted several photos of her “works” at notable national parks such as Yosemite, Joshua Tree and Death Valley. On one of her Instagram posts, she admitted that she was using acrylic paint (and not chalk), later stating in the same thread, “I know I’m a bad person.”

After the news of her vandalism spread across the Internet, Nocket shut down her Facebook and Tumblr pages, which she used to share her Instagram photos of her graffiti. Her Tumblr account has since been reactivated and after first posting “i dun fucked uuuuuuup,” the feed has since been populated with snarky responses to her critics, including one post that reads, “IT’S ART NOT VANDALISM. I AM AN ARTIST”

Is what Nocket doing to these beautiful landscapes art? Under the headline, “Street Art Comes to National Parks—Is It Vandalism?” art market newswire artnet News has described Nocket’s actions as having “left her unwanted graffiti art in at least 10 national parks” and stating that “Graffiti isn’t just for the urban landscape anymore.” But unlike notable artists such as Andres Amador and Andy Goldsworthy, both of whom use nature as their canvas, Nocket’s work is permanent and, well, not good.

Our question to our readers: Would you be on Nocket’s side if the work was actually good?

Thank you SFist for use of the images in this story. Read their post from Wednesday here.