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ANN ARBOR - Mickey Mouse lost his ears. That was the initial reaction. Where had Mickey's ears gone? On a July morning about 10 years ago, dozens of Mickey faces quietly materialized on sidewalks across this college town. But what did it mean? Who painted them? And why so many? No one claimed the Mickeys and no one signed them. Each was identical. The artist (or vandal, if you prefer) had cut a stencil of Mickey without ears, placed the stencil on the sidewalk, spray-painted it, lifted it, then moved to the next location and repeated, probably in the middle of the night, working very fast, and with an occasional glance over the shoulder.

Vague though weirdly compelling, the Mickey faces could have meant anything. This is a town with a constant low-key tension between its celebrated activist past and gentrified, Starbucked, $2,000-a-month-apartment present. An earless Mickey could have been a protest against a corporate behemoth - the Emperor has no ears or something.

Or just hip marketing.

Later that night, the mystery of the Mickeys was solved. The street lights came on. The parking meters cast shadows on the sidewalks, and the curved meter tops filled in those missing ears.

Clever, though wholly illegal, the Mickey stencil passed into local legend - the artist, discovered to be an art student at the University of Michigan, died a few years later and while friends occasionally repainted the stencils in his honor, the remaining Mickeys have all but faded away and the curved meters replaced.

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• Christopher Borrelli talks about the Toledo Area Artists Exhibition of stencil graffiti artists

What remains, however - and what has since proliferated in Ann Arbor, rearing its head with increasing frequency in Toledo - is a tradition of stencil graffiti.

Which is also known as stencil art, a public art the public never requested and government never commissioned. It doesn't hang in a gallery (though stencils were included in the most recent Whitney Biennial in New York). And it often conceals its creator's anonymity as much as its meaning and purpose, for obvious reasons - like any graffiti, it's against the law, appearing on the walls of buildings and back alleys, sidewalks, the bases of street lamps, electrical boxes, railroad trestles, and overpasses.

And its fans are unlikely.

"I'd say that about 50 percent of our complaints about graffiti have become complaints about stencil graffiti," said Willie Perryman, manager of Toledo's Department of Neighborhoods which is responsible for graffiti removal. "We're seeing a lot more of it now. But I'd say it's not gang related. It's stencils of faces and names of things and famous people and quotations from books. The art work is very good at times - it's beautiful stuff. We paint over it, but it is well done."

Acme Mercantile, a novelty store on Liberty Street in Ann Arbor, is virtually surrounded by stencil art. The alley across the street is heavily stenciled. The sides of the building itself have stencils. "I love it," said Nina Juergens, the owner. "I don't like it splashed on a 130-year-old building - but I love it."

In the past six months, stencil artists in Ann Arbor and Toledo alone (and stencil graffiti itself is neither new nor locally contained) have stenciled not abstract or avant-garde images, gang signs or nine-foot-tall swear words. They've risked arrest to print iconic, populist pictures of Han Solo and George W. Bush (a favorite target of stencil makers), Kurt Cobain and Charlie Chaplin, children playing, trees, video game joysticks, toasters, washing machines, Thomas Jefferson, pigs flying, hundreds of protest messages, clouds, blimps, birds, Batman. A few years ago, when employees at the downtown Borders bookstore went on strike, someone stenciled dollar signs in front of the main entrance.

That's since faded, too.

"I call it ephemeral urban art, because it disappears," said Joy Shannon, an Ann Arbor artist who spent three years photographing the city's endlessly rich trove of stencil and renegade art. "They're just random, quickly done, and they will appear out in the open sometimes, but then gradually, they're painted over."

That definition, however, fits nearly any type of graffiti. What's unique about stencil art - what relegates it to a no-man's land in both legitimate and underground art circles - is that unlike hand-drawn graffiti, stencil graffiti is by nature symmetrical, at times (intentionally) indistinguishable from advertising, and therefore easy to overlook. Stencil graffiti blends in, whereas the scribble from a spray-paint can does not. Talk to stencil artists (a tough proposition, due to that anonymity) and they describe good stenciling as smart, tasteful, understated, and "discrete."

Relatively speaking.

"I'm not advocating it in any way but I do think it's a gorgeous form," said Adam Russell, a Toledo artist who handles public art for the Toledo Arts Commission and has himself stenciled around Columbus. "And that's the whole challenge. Some people see it as cool and go about it without tact, but anyone can cut a stencil. The more intelligently it's done, the more effective it is. What I like is you don't have to be an artist to understand it. It's accessible, and if done right, you can label a neighborhood with an idea, in a low-key fashion."

Gettye Lee agrees. He is 22. He's been doing stencil graffiti around Ann Arbor since he was 16. He won't give his real name; his moniker is a variation of Getty Lee, leader of the rock band Rush. He says he's never been noticed while stenciling, never been arrested for stenciling. "It's meant to be eye-catching. You definitely want people to see it and don't want it covered up, but they tend to be small." When asked if he feels for the people who have to clean his work off buildings and property, he says, "It matters to me. I tend to hit strategic targets, big corporations, non-local businesses. Places that can stand [the cost]."

Stencil artists tend to rationalize. They tend to know each other, and tend to be young (though stencilers in their early 30s are not unheard of). And they also tend to be political. But Lee adds "political stenciling is preaching to the choir around here. The best stencils are personal ones."

In other words, cryptic.

Arthur McViccar, facility director for the Michigan Theater in Ann Arbor, said he recently caught a stenciler in the act and chased the man for blocks, yelling into his cell phone at a police dispatcher the whole time. McViccar lost the man and walked back to the Michigan. He stood in front of the new stencil.

"Santa Claus faces. A number of them. In a row. Using three or four colors, too. They were actually done quite well. On the other hand, why he was doing Santas in July - I have no clue."

Around that same time last summer, at the corner of Laskey and Secor roads in Toledo, a driver pulled up alongside a reporter who was taking notes on a stencil. It was a face on the side of an electrical box but the black paint had run and it looked more like a face that had partially melted. "Betting that's not supposed to be there," the man shouted from his car and the reporter nodded.

"But who is it? Jack Kerouac?"

An employee from the corner 7-Eleven strolled over, taking a smoke break. He tilted his head and exhaled. "I think it's Elvis. If it were Jesus Christ on the side of that box, I'd make some money."

Stenciling is essentially print making, and print making dates back thousands of years. In the last 100 years, stencils played a part in the Russian Revolution and to mark troop locations during nearly every conflict of the past century. "It's been around since the Greeks and Romans," said Amy Gilman, associate curator of modern and contemporary art at the Toledo Museum of Art, "but as it is today, it became widely used in the '60s and '70s, then in the '80s by street artists like Keith Haring and Basquiat, who help drag it into galleries."

If there's an Andy Warhol influence to stencil art, to the way images are mass produced then set in rows, it's probably not intentional, Gilman said. "It is connected with Warhol, but his ideas are so appropriated into the culture, I doubt many [graffiti artists] recognize that link."

More specifically, the stencil art of today sprung up first around San Francisco and New York (and now touches virtually every decent-sized city and college town); outside the U.S., particularly in South America in the '70s, it was the art of choice of activists. That came later in this country, where stencils were first splashed on sidewalks and used as a cheap concert promotion.

"It's become an in-between art form," said Henry Ferreira, the chair of the print-making department at Rhode Island School of Design. "It's grown out of graffiti but also a punk tradition, and like punk, it's more widespread because it's relatively easy to do, and cheap - anyone can do it."

And so each year the city of Toledo spends roughly $5,000 on paint to touch up the spots where fledgling graffiti artists have been, said Perryman, of Toledo's Department of Neighborhoods. It's a small amount; the city doesn't budget specifically for graffiti removal. It has a lot of donated recycled paint in stock, he said, and a two-man crew who work eight months each year, until it's too cold out. (Incidentally, if caught spraying graffiti in Toledo, the charge is criminal damage or vandalism, depending on the severity; penalties can include fines up to $2,500 and possibly jail time.)

In Ann Arbor, the city has a volunteer clean-up crew which trawls streets and alleys once a year. Paint stores donate the paint, Starbucks volunteers the painters. They sweep through, leaving large, square cream-colored blocks over offending stencils, which receive, in turn, sometimes hours later, a new stencil - often an even better one, because the crew's pale blocks serve as a natural frame.

It's a losing battle Marsha Chamberlin would love to see settled. She isn't holding her breath. She is the president and CEO of the Ann Arbor Art Center, and commissioner of the city's Commission on Art in Public Places. Each year, corn husks are ground up and shot high speed into the side of the Art Center and other Art Center buildings around town - apparently an effective way to remove graffiti.

The Art Center alone spends about $5,000 annually on graffiti removal. "We get hit all the time," she added, then sighed loudly. "I admit some of these stencils are incredibly interesting, but I think when it occurs in a place that impacts the presentation of your property - it does cost us. It can get expensive. I'd like to see some middle ground used for this purpose. But at the same time, I know part of the thrill of this stuff is that it's spontaneous, not sanctioned. I'm sure that's the appeal to a certain extent."

That's exactly the appeal.

For instance, the last couple of years during the annual Ann Arbor Art Fair, a stencil of an old monster movie poster with the words "Art Fear" has popped up on a highly visible wall near the fair. It's a reminder of how controversial the massive art fair has become among local artists.

As with many of these stencils, context is everything. "I believe there's a great amount of respect that goes into stencils," said Adam Russell of the Toledo Arts Council. "Especially when you consider why a stencil is there and why the message is specific to that location." It's hard to believe, for example, whoever stenciled a George W. Bush face with the word "Killer" above it, to a utility pole on Monroe Street in front of Bob Evans, wasn't thinking of the traffic in that location.

An even better example of context is the mural at the corner of State and Liberty streets in Ann Arbor. It's of five artists, including Woody Allen and Franz Kafka - five white artists. And so someone has stenciled, at the very end of that mural, an addendum: John Coltrane, blowing his saxophone.

"To me that's public art," said Carol Lopez, owner of the Peaceable Kingdom gift shop down the street. "Someone might not want it there, but it is there. And not because of committee, and not because of a grant, but because, one day, in the middle of the night - it just happened."

Contact Christopher Borrelli at: cborrelli@theblade.com
or 419-724-6117.

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