Seattle guerrilla artist found dead

SEATTLE – A man found dead along railroad tracks in Mississippi has been identified as Jason Sprinkle, a guerrilla artist who left the field after one of his events paralyzed downtown Seattle with a bomb scare.

Sprinkle, 35, of Port Orchard, diagnosed from boyhood with attention deficit disorder, apparently was hit by a train as he was walking near a rail crossing May 16 near Long Beach, Miss., Harrison County Coroner Gary Hargrove said. His body was spotted by the engineer of another train.

Sprinkle was born in Fullerton, Calif., and reared in Seattle, left school at age 16 and joined the Job Corps, learning welding and earning a general equivalency degree.

Known in his early 20s as Subculture Joe, he had no artistic training but won widespread attention and some artistic praise for events he staged to bring attention to personal and social concerns.

He was a co-founder of Fabricators of the Attachment and chief instigator of the project that rocketed the group to attention, clamping a 700-pound ball and chain around the leg of “Hammering Man” outside the Seattle Art Museum in 1993.

The piece, padded to avoid damage to the massive Jonathan Borofsky sculpture, was intended as a Labor Day commentary on the state of workers.

For Valentine’s Day in 1994 the group surreptitiously installed a 14-foot black heart in Westlake Mall in the center of the downtown retail core.

In July 1996, emotionally distraught over the breakup of a relationship, Sprinkle went solo with what he planned to be his last art project, puncturing the tires on his battered truck and leaving it loaded down with a huge red, metal heart sculpture in Westlake Center outside the mall.

Graffiti on the vehicle included the words: “Timberlake Carpentry Rules (The Bomb!),” originally written by another youngster at a Job Corps camp in Timberlake, Idaho, but totally inexplicable to police who took no chances little more than a year after the Oklahoma City bombing.

A nine-block area around was evacuated for four hours and rush-hour traffic ground to a halt.

Surprised by the furor, Sprinkle called and went to the Associated Press office to acknowledge responsibility and surrender to police.

Jailed with bail set at $100,000, he accepted a plea agreement, served 33 days behind bars and never made art again except for a few small, intimate pieces, friends and relatives said.

Survivors include his mother, Lorraine Sprinkle, and stepfather, David Gaffney, both of Seattle; father Robert Muth and half-sister Shannon Sizilia both of Port Orchard.

A memorial service is planned for June 4 at Calvary Fellowship in Mountlake Terrace.