Wynwood Walls
TRAFFIC ALERT: Miami traffic is VERY HEAVY! Please allow yourself or your driver time to navigate traffic and find parking.
I can’t take this warning from the silly tour I’ve booked seriously, especially after it ultimately takes only 21 minutes to go the 7.4 miles from my place to Wynwood. Writing this, on this the most frigid of nights in recent Boston memory, it would take almost exactly as long to travel 7.4 miles into Brookline. Miami traffic my ass.
It is thus that I end up disgustingly 10 minutes early for my tour. I peruse the various items in the gift shop while waiting for it to begin, before jotting down some notes on my phone.
‘Mi amor,’ my guide directs me, ‘We begin.’
Sara does not like being caught in my camera, even after I explain that I like pictures better with people in them. Who wants to read a blog post full of pictures of murals that you could almost certainly find better ones of online—or better yet, experience yourself? Still, she steps aside if I’m not quick enough on the draw.
‘When you paint in Wynwood,’ she explains, ‘You don’t know how long it’s going to last. Sometimes you ask the store owner; sometimes…’ she pauses, pulling her neck gaiter up over her nose and mouth, ‘Cover and come at night.’
Sara is a muralist; distinct from a graffiti artist. Her husband is a muralist as well, and also a graffiti artist. His signature is these dots that ring his paintings, like pointillism, but deployed economically. Hers is a woman with her right breast exposed. But we’ll get to that.
We tour Wynwood in a golf cart: Sara driving, me riding shotgun, Jesus in the middle, Carla and her mother Angela in the back. Carla and Angela are from Spain, Santander, not far from where Ryan and I were in Basque Country; Jesus is from here, but has never toured Wynwood.
Graffiti is always illegal, but because Wynwood has become known for its street art, and is gentrifying, now muralists might get a commission to paint. Still, it’s hard to make a living. The shop that the tour group, Wynwood Art Walk, operates out of is a little bit outside the main drag. Sara points out shops that go for $10K a month in rent. Wynwood is the next high end Miami neighbourhood, following the Design District that gentrified before it. I ask what’s next, what’s still authentic but at risk.
‘Little Havana,’ she considers, then adds, ‘Calle 8,’ in Spanish, Calle Ocho. She gives our tour in a mix of English and Spanish, translating in turn for either me or Angela. I explain in my simple Spanish that I can understand more than I can speak back in return.
We stop at a mural with a Medusa tag. This one celebrates women; one on the left representing a beautiful Miami Latina living her best life, the other on the right representing la pura vida and Dominican culture. There is a women’s artist collective that painted this. It used to be just one or two women here or there painting; now this collective is cincuenta chicas strong.
As we go along we pause briefly at the largest mural in Wynwood. It took 5 months to complete. It was commissioned. Uncomissioned, there’s an unwritten rule that you have 7 days—at most 10—to paint. If you take too long, others will come and tag your art. Better hurry up.
If they like your art, they won’t cover it up. Some walls that are particularly well loved become what’s called landmark walls—walls you can navigate by, because they’re so unlikely to change. Sara points our a few of these. The most famous, an 80’s boom box taking up the entirety of a a side of the building that faces the highway, is repainted in different colours every now and again. A particular technique that the artists have used to paint it means that it looks more metallic—almost dripping with wet paint—in a camera than it does to the naked eye. I show everyone in our golf cart the back of my camera; they try to capture the same on their phones.
Another wall with a similar technique is around the corner. This one an artist Vila from Portugal has created by chipping away at the cement with a hammer and chisel. When you look at the wall through a lens, it looks back.
Another wall commemorates René Favaloro, the pioneering Argentinian surgeon who invented bypass surgery. Next to it is one celebrating Costa Rica. Continuing on, one by an artist from Chicago. I always like how Chicago is pronounced in Spanish, CHEE-ka-go.
Sara’s aunt raised her. After her aunt died of breast cancer, in her grief, Sara created a character to celebrate her, whom she paints and creates in other forms now, forever ensuring that her aunt lives on. Here she is on a wall with a hare for good luck, a hummingbird for rebirth, and a leopard for strength. This mural would have had metallic beading all down her robe, but Sara ran out of time. 7 days and all that. She is proud because this has been up for 6 months now. ‘It means they like it.’
This wall depicts a young Cuban activist. I am surprised that I can’t find her name via various searches; I didn’t think I’d have to write this one down. In her hair are butterflies and constellations. At her left hand is the fort and lighthouse in Old Havana; at her right hand is the Freedom Tower in Miami. Behind her hair is a halo of gold leaf. The artist broke the rules, and was putting up gold leave for the better part of 4 months. Thus, other artists have come by to tag this wall, which are sloppily painted over in blue at the bottom left.
There’s another one by a muralist who’s 65-years-old or something like it now. It would have been controversial for the Pepé Le Pew-esque character in the middle of it smoking cannabis, but that’s legalised now. (Or at least decriminalised, given that petitioners in the Grove keep approaching me, and I have to explain that I vote in Massachusetts.) Another unwritten rule is that you don’t depict illegal substances, pornography, politics. Kids could see this; this is a family-friendly neighbourhood. No democrats vs. republicans. This mural here is Guernica, but Looney Tunes style. The Spaniards particularly like it. The things we consider taboo are curious to me; a self-immolating My Little Pony character is acceptable, but politics is not.
Jesus gestures towards an orange on the wall, something I thought was the King Mango in the Grove. ‘No, Atomik,’ Sara explains. It’s a characterisation of the old Orange Bowl logo; it’s also everywhere. Jesus cannot get over just how everywhere this orange is. We see it many more times along our tour, and its appearance on a wall in the Grove is a testament to this. ‘Everywhere!’ he emphasises. Atomik is everywhere, it seems.
He is also part of a larger collective, MSG, currently 28 guys or so. Sometimes the pieces they paint are collaborative, one cohesive piece with their various signature touches; sometimes the pieces are more individualist, each taking a section of the same wall to make their own. We pass several of their walls. When you look carefully, you can always find the creative ways they’ve incorporated MSG into the wall.
Our tour takes us by Church, an area of buildings where artists used to practice at night, with no lights. They had to have lookouts; cops would come and taser them if they didn’t get away fast enough. Now, however, because Wynwood walls have become famous and a tourist attraction, ‘The police just say hello, hola, hola.’
We pass the Miamigator, their animal. This one is painted by an artist from Barcelona. The Spaniards perk up. It represents the high fashion of Miamians, Chanel and all that. The artist painted it solito, in under the 7 days allotted. Someone liked it so much they commissioned him to paint another Miamigator along the exterior of the convention centre.
Wynwood Walls—a museum in Wynwood honouring all of this street art—began in 2009 when developer Tony Goldman saw an opportunity to transform the exterior walls of the abandoned warehouses of Wynwood by brining street artists together. Goldman was instrumental in revitalising not only other areas of Miami like South Beach, but also SoHo and parts of New York City. He seems pretty all right for an Emersonian.
We stop at the outskirts of the neighbourhood, by a giant monkey-man made of barrels and spray-painted peace signs. ‘Our protector,’ Sara explains, ‘Looking out at the convention centre across the way, where the offices of some of the developers are. Developing buildings like that,’ she says, pointing to a large glass-and-steel edifice that rises in the not-too-distance background.
‘We cannot paint on glass,’ she remarks, and that statement struck me the most.
We cannot paint on glass.
– Sara Molano
‘Excuse me!’ a woman calls out to Sara, interrupting her thought, ‘Where can we find the Star Wars wall?’
‘It isn’t there anymore,’ she answers, ‘Painted over. It’s been gone for years,’ she answers.
Turning to us, she adds, ‘People are always asking about things that aren’t there anymore.’
So many of the wayward warehouses and back alleys of Wynwood are simple concrete, blank canvasses. It took an urban developer from the northeast to spark the creativity that has become a signature of this neighbourhood, attracting the sort of hip urbanites that expect higher standards of living than converted warehouses can bring. They in turn are responsible for the boom of development in this area, the mural commissions that attract Art Basel exhibits and muralists from all over the world to paint here with an opportunity to make a decent living on commissions, while also pricing out the artists who would otherwise call Wynwood home.
Wynwood Walls started only 15 years ago. Based upon how locals talk about South Beach, Brickell—even the Grove—and other areas rapidly gentrifying and building up, it seems doubtful to me that there will be any concrete walls left in the wild here in another 15 years. Maybe in Little Havana, Calle 8 or other points farther west. As for Wynwood, however, you cannot paint on glass.