Richmond Virginia, welcome to the big show. The Richmond Mural Project is in full effect, and it, along with The RVA Street Art Festival happening in September, has put us in rare company. Few cities in the country can say that they have a internationally renowned group of artists represented on it city's walls, and to have the work be of such high quality is just icing on the cake.
So now that I have hyped it for you, what does it really mean? How do a few paintings on walls really make a difference in a city? As one of the Mural Project’s organizers, I am getting asked that question on the regular, and I feel the need to address it.
Tracking the raw data--counting the dollars spent in a particular area during a set amount of time, as well as the tweets, instagram pics, and facebook likes--can tell us some things. Some people will count the number of blog posts and articles written about The Richmond Mural Project and the RVA Street Art Festival. But street art has the potential to make a much more fundamental and important impact on this city. Let me gaze into my crystal ball and tell you a story about the power of street art.
There once was a rundown warehouse district in a city full of crime, homelessness, and low expectations. The business community and city government had left it in despair for decades, but at a point in the recent past, changes had started to take place under the surface. Artists moved into the neighborhood and made it their own, creating a visual language on the warehouse walls expressing their situation and transmitting their calls for revolution; asking for hope or begging for destruction. This authentic artistic dialogue attracted other artists that understood the stories being told, and a vibrant community grew in the shadows.
When a successful international art fair was established in the city, everything accelerated. Artists from all over the world converged on this warehouse district and wanted to add to the conversation. The art got bigger and the message more expansive, until it spoke on a worldwide level. Once the word spread through the web, it got everyone's attention, and the business community saw an opportunity. Realizing that this dilapidated area of town had become a hotbed, they started buying up closed businesses, gutting condemned houses to build upscale apartments, opening galleries to sell the art being produced in and around the neighborhood, and building bars and restaurants to serve the masses coming to see all of the incredible artwork appearing on every wall in the district.
This might sound like an urban legend, but it really did happen. The place is called Wynwood, a warehouse district in Miami. The international art fair is Art Basel. While visiting Wynwood a few weeks ago, I had a chance to talk with longtime Miami Times art critic Carlos Suarez De Jesus about the process of transformation that he’d watched take place over the past decade.
"When Art Basel first came [to Miami] in 2002, that was all [taking place] on the beach,” De Jesus explained. “[But soon], they started having satellite fairs here in Wynwood. In four years, we went from having one, two, three fairs a year to 25 fairs. All those smaller art fairs--I say ‘smaller’ as in [they involved] 150, [as] opposed to 250 galleries--were all located in this area for several years. You have all these collectors starting to grab up the work. Some of it was organic, and some people organized. Look up Primary Flight. Those are the guys that started organizing. Started bringing people."
When I looked up Primary Flight, I found this explanation on their website: “Historically, Primary Flight is the first organization to take an entire art district, roughly 30 blocks by 5 blocks worth of previously occupied industrial factories, and envision the available concrete landscape as an open air museum. In 2007, Primary Flight invited 35 artists to paint on strategically located walls throughout the Wynwood Arts District and Miami Design District, maps were circulated, inviting patrons to experience an art form, known for its secrecy, live in the streets of Miami over a five day period. The opportunity to ask questions, press palms, and experience these works in motion solidified the success of Primary Flight, allowing it to expand to 80 artists in 2008, 150 artists in 2009, and become a cultural phenomenon by 2010. This spawned a full time exhibition space, Primary Projects, located in the Miami in the Miami World Center / Downtown Miami, and the success that year powered the project to continued expansion, gracing Miami with some of her largest and most powerful murals to date.” This fit right in with what De Jesus was talking about.
I asked him how this artistic growth affected the economics of the area. "Let me tell you something,” he said. “[From] 2006 to 2008 I lived right where the galleries are now. You could shoot off a cannon at 5am and nobody would hear it. A lot of these empty lots had empty school buses [parked in them], and the weeds would be up to the windows. When I moved away, the crime was so bad I couldn't put out my trash unless I set my clock, because within a few hours the homeless people would dump it and take the cans. Cigarette butts everywhere. People living in tents. Crackheads living under the buses. And the city wasn't doing anything about it.
“Now, this is the tenth year of the [Wynwood] art fair, and in the last three years, the art scene has exploded. Now the artists can't afford to live here. It’s expensive. When I lived here, my rent was $650 a month. That same apartment is now renting for $3500 bucks."
In this explanation, we can see both the positive and negative sides of the process. Mr. De Jesus feels that the evolution of the area has already chased out the artists, displacing them in favor of corporate and political interests. This is the down side. But the upside is that artists have a platform to express themselves, distribute their work, and gain a much wider audience for their message--not to mention the opportunity to improve their economic position. De Jesus stated that several of the artists that started in Wynwood have gone on to international fame, doing commissions around the world.
Wynwood is now the mecca of street art in the United States attracting top notch talent and revitalized an neighborhood that was forgotten. Will the same thing happen here in Richmond, VA? No one can know for sure at this point, but it is not hard to imagine our city as a center for creativity and inclusive diversity. After all, this has been part of Venture Richmond’s goal with its campaign to rebrand the city as an artistic destination over the past few years. The Richmond Mural Project and RVA Street Art Festival help to take things in this direction by bringing in artists from around the country and the world. This year we have EVER and Sonni from Argentina, Etam Cru and Natalia Rak from Poland, Stormiemills from Australia and a select group from the good ol USA like Angry Woebots (Hawaii), Kelly Towles and Aniekan (DC), Gaia (New York), Greg Mike (Georgia) and Andrew Hem (DC). Art Whino and RVA Mag are teaming up to create at least 20 new murals around the city during this year’s Richmond Mural Project. Between these murals and the 23 created last year as part of the G40 Art Summit, that puts us at over 40 murals in the two years Shane Pomajambo from Art Whino and I have been working on it--not to mention those created as part of the 2012 RVA Street Art Festival, and those that will be created later this year when Ed Trask and company stage the 2013 edition of that event. By this fall, there will be over 100 public murals on display around RVA. There aren’t many cities in the world that can make that claim.
The power of art has been documented since the dawn of time. You might not love every mural, but hopefully you can see why its important that it is even allowed to happen here. It reflects a community that welcomes creativity and diverse voices. We have come a long way since when the start of RVA Magazine in 2005 when the general population and government frowned on and actively cracked down on public artistic expression. Now people are seeing the positive side of it, encouraging the development of an artistic culture here in Richmond. And as we can see from the story of Wynwood, there are many positive aspects to this sort of growth.
So enjoy what is happening here. We have just started, and The Richmond Mural Project is just one part of an overall community movement that includes many worthwhile ideas. Let’s all work together and continue to change Richmond for the better.