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The prolific tagger boldly transformed the city’s street infrastructure for decades.
Eric Alan Hirt (“ESON”) (all photos courtesy MSG)
Miami graffiti legend Eric Alan Hirt (“Eson”), a prolific urban tagger and member of the Miami Style Gods (MSG) crew, has died. The 47-year-old was struck and killed by a train in the early hours of May 13, Miami-Dade Sheriff’s Office detective Joseph R. Peguero Rivera confirmed to Hyperallergic in an email.
Hirt, known for traversing treacherous urban landscapes to tag street infrastructure, was reportedly walking along tracks near his home in North Miami when a Brightline passenger train struck him.
Hirt is survived by his wife of 26 years, his two daughters, his brother, and his mother, according to a GoFundMe created for the family.
The artist’s wife, Shawn Hirt, told the Miami Herald that her husband’s death was an accident. According to Hirt, her husband was partially deaf, and the area he was struck in was a “quiet zone,” where trains are prohibited from using their horns.
“Eric was a devoted husband and father who meant the world to his daughters,” reads a text on the family’s GoFundMe. Donations will be directed to his daughters, the fundraiser states.
Hirt used the moniker “Eson” in his graffiti tags throughout Miami.
The artist appeared in the 2018 VICE documentary, Miami’s Graffiti Style Gods, in dramatic shots that showed him dangling over a highway and standing feet away from oncoming traffic with his painting materials. In the film, members of MSG, which emerged in the 1990s, boldly rejected that their street art was art at all, and defiantly embraced the term “vandalism” instead.
To date, over 6 million viewers have watched the VICE feature, in which Hirt describes his passion for street tagging despite a stint in jail at the age of 18.
“I can’t drive down the street without wanting to hit every curb, pole, sign, wall,” Hirt, concealing his face with a skull mask, said in the documentary.
“It’s addictive,” he continued. “The more you see yourself up, the more you just want to keep going.”
Hirt also acknowledged the dangers of his craft. “A majority of my ‘bombing’ has been alone,” he told the interviewer, “because at any time, anything can happen.”
According to the Miami Herald, Hirt’s death was at least the 206th documented fatal Brightline strike since the high-speed passenger line began test runs in 2017. Earlier this year, an investigation by the Herald and WLRN, South Florida’s NPR affiliate, found that Brightline “failed to urgently address the train’s dangers.” In 2019, the Associated Press had already named the train the country’s most fatal rail line.
Shawn Hirt told the Herald that the family was “devastated,” and questioned why there weren’t “more safety features” on the train to prevent the accident.
When asked to comment on Hirt’s death and broader concerns about the train’s history of fatal strikes, a spokesperson for Brightline told Hyperallergic that “none of the incidents along the railroad have been the result of improper train handling by Brightline personnel or failure of our equipment or infrastructure.”
Many members of the graffiti community have shared tributes to Hirt on social media in recent days.
“Today we mourn the loss of our brother ESON, a true king of the highways, but also a friend and a father,” MSG wrote on Instagram last week. “We will forever keep his name alive. Paint the heavens, man, see you when we get there.”
