Tag, you’re it

Pete Bettencourt is a member of the C.U.F., a local hip-hop fivesome whose acronym stands for California Underground Funk. But he’s also a ’zine publisher (What Do You Think You’re Doing? is a 36-page, text-free exploration of street art) and a visual artist who came up through practicing that graphic analogue to hip-hop, tagging. Bettencourt’s repeated insistence that one person’s blank public space is another one’s canvas once landed him a seven-month vacation at “the Branch,” as the county’s Bruceville Road detention facility is known. But that was then. This Friday, March 22, Bettencourt makes his debut at the Toyroom Gallery, which is located in the alley between Sloat Way and 2nd Avenue just east of 24th Street. At the show, which also will run Saturday, March 23 (both events start at 6:30 p.m. and run till “late”), Bettencourt will display over 100 of his pieces, many of which display a cartoonish sensibility somewhere between graffiti and early, acid-era Robert Crumb. The C.U.F. recorded a limited-edition CD for the occasion; 25 or so will be available at the show.