His name is Yo Dawg. Or Blink-Dawg. Or Hot Dog Man, Graffiti Weenie, Highway Hot Dog, or Welcome Weiner. Whatever you call him, you’ve likely seen the smiling, dancing, waving banger in a bun throughout the Puget Sound region. He pops up on trains, behind abandoned buildings, and in the shadows of freeway overpasses.
Everyone loves Bill Hinker’s friendly hot dog graffiti, and I know this because when I started mentioning to friends that I was dedicating my summer to seeking out as many hot dogs as I could, they all enthusiastically exclaimed, “I love that guy!” before offering up their favorite spots.
Hinker painted his first hot dog in 2004. “Back before 2017ish, the hawtdawg was pretty plain and didn’t come out much,” he says. “But in the last five years or so, he has evolved. [He’s] sprouted appendages, sometimes wears clothes, and even speaks!”
Sometimes the hot dog is sporting jeans and a hat. Other times he’s naked, save for a scribble of ketchup or mustard. On one especially fruitful hot dog hunt, I stumbled across a pair of golf club-wielding wieners framing a Happy Gilmore-inspired mural near an abandoned mini golf course. “The price is wrong, bitch.” While I almost always see the character with either pink or red dog, legend has it that a purple weenie on the side of a train car can occasionally be seen passing through town.
Hinker estimates he’s painted somewhere around 5,000 hot dogs over the years. Many have been covered by other artists or demolished or scrubbed away by Mayor Harrell’s multimillion-dollar graffiti clean-up efforts over the years—Harrell the Hot Dog Killer—but Hinker doubled down on his dog this year, when he launched a line of limited-edition enamel pins through Makeshift. His hot dog originals are also hanging at Broadcast Coffee at 20th and Yesler through October, and he’ll be selling paintings, pins, and more at Punk Rock Flea Market, September 20–22 in the old QFC space on 15th Avenue East.
As you flip through the pages of our new Art + Performance Fall 2024 issue, keep an eye out. You never know when the Welcome Wiener will wave hello.
Today I learned Makeshift exists. Thanks!
I clicked on this comment thread with some trepidation, fully expecting to encounter some tiresome scolding from the current incarnation of that one commenter we have all come to know and love, raindrop. And much to my surprise, there was no comment. And then I went back and searched a bit, and whaddaya know, all the comments from this latest incarnation of that individual had vanished. raindrop redux was mercifully short-lived.
Now, this is not to say that I am here to endorse Bill Hinker’s artistic endeavors. I hate seeing the usual thoughtless tagging one normally encounters, which this is clearly not. I’ll admit I’m ambivalent about graffiti like this which aspires to some sort of humor or humanity or happiness. But more to the point, it’s just not something I am worked up enough about to form a well-formed opinion on and to feel the need to share that opinion in a public forum. I don’t feel the compulsion to be going around scolding and passing judgment on all I survey.
Unfortunately, the commenter formally known as raindrop offered no real humor or humanity or happiness to go along with their relentless need to mark their moral territory, whether one might or might not agree. Really, it was the virtual equivalent of the most mindless markings that normally come to mind when we do think of tagging.
Correction: “the commenter formally known as raindrop” -> “the commenter formerly known as raindrop.”
And to express what I was saying @2 in a nutshell, the artist formerly known as raindrop was the real tagger. (But unlike the work of IRL taggers, we can see that raindrop’s artwork can be readily removed. No chemical agents required.)