One year after their mural was erased, graffiti students take on new challenge

Courtney Crowder | The Des Moines Register

Show Caption Hide Caption "People don't create art just to make something look pretty" Kenny "Sol" Tran, sophomore at Hoover High School, talks about his connection with art.

Chloe Pham smelled the spray paint first.

Then she heard the cans’ distinct sharp, somewhat stifled hisses. Following her senses, she happened on a scene she could barely believe: Kids her age spray-painting a wall, in public, in daylight, with an adult.

She lingered. “You want to try?” Asphate, the graffiti workshop teacher, asked, inviting her to feel the weight of a can in her hand.

That’s the moment Pham, 17, says her life turned around. Before graffiti, she wasn’t doing well in school, she said. Before graffiti, she wasn’t deterred by threats of juvenile detention.

Before graffiti, she just didn’t care.

But Pham found her passion — and herself — in a mix of colors and cans and murals and a group of kids she’s close enough with to call a crew. That crew, including fellow students Kenny “Sol” Tran, 15, and JJ “Zero” Emanuh, 16, who both have similar stories of self-discovery in graffiti, will get to prove their talent on an international stage when they compete in the 90-minute Secret Walls competition during the Des Moines Arts Festival, which takes over Western Gateway Park from June 23 to 25.

Self-described as “the ‘Fight Club’ of the art world,” Secret Walls marks a new high point in Des Moines’ ever-growing street art and graffiti writer movement. The internationally recognized event pits well-known street artists or graffiti writers against local “bedroom artists” as they battle to create the most artistic canvas using only black and white paint and their creativity.

The event, which takes place Friday night, comes on the heels of the one-year anniversary of the buffing out — a term graffiti writers use when their work is covered with a neutral color — of a student-painted mural behind Central Campus that featured images of labor leader Cesar Chavez, author Maya Angelou and civil rights activist Yuri Kochiyama.

City erases student 'empowerment' mural The city of Des Moines erased a 200-foot-long student mural project near Central Campus downtown.

A result of miscommunications and clerical errors, the buffing was devastating at the time, said students and leaders at RunDSM, the organization that hosts Movement 515 Color Codes, the graffiti workshop. But they were amazed at the community’s supportive response and have mended fences with the city. For its part, the city, which is happy to give students a safe place to be artistic, has even enjoyed some unforeseen budgetary savings due to the partnership, said Public Works Director Jonathan Gano.

“If you look to the right of the new phase of the mural, you’ll see all these beige patches,” Gano said. “Those are all the times we had to pay a contractor to remove illegally applied, often crude or vulgar graffiti. Since the new mural went up and the kids took over that space, we have spent exactly zero dollars abating graffiti there. It’s basically graffiti-proof, so I am seeing that savings reflected in my bottom line, which should make every taxpayer happy.”

Even though redoing the mural seemed unimaginable at time, Pham and her crew have come to realize that one piece doesn’t make or break them, they said. Because, when push comes to shove, what they do is so much more than colors and cans and murals.

“With our painting, we want to change the world,” Tran said. “We always lead with love and strive to get rid of the hate and inequality in the world. So on our new wall down at Central Campus we have a quote by James Baldwin:

"'Those who say it can’t be done are usually interrupted by people doing it.'"

More than paint

About a week before Secret Walls, Tran and Emunah met at the Des Moines Social Club to sketch out ideas. Tran definitely wants to make sure to incorporate his tag name, Sol, in the piece. He’s been working on adding stitches to his letters, a symbol that no matter what, you can always put yourself back together.

Des Moines Public Schools has a “majority minority” population and many students face hardships before they even enter the classroom, according to the district’s website. The district has been proactive about meeting some of those physical needs — Scavo High School, for example, has a health care clinic, on-site child care, dental services and a food pantry — but RunDSM seeks to meet kids’ emotional needs in service of re-engaging them with education.

“We’re trying to infuse elements of hip-hop culture and artistry in public schools because we know young people are engaged by hip-hop, whether that be graffiti, deejaying, emceeing or rapping, or break dancing,” said Kristopher Rollins, a teacher and one of the RunDSM founders. “When young people have access to those art forms and we validate them along the same lines as fine arts, we strongly believe they will invest in education or be more engaged than they traditionally have been.”

MORE: Huge student mural erased outside Central Campus

On some level, Pham is living proof that their theory works, said her mentor Asphate, whose legal name is Brandon Warner. Since starting the workshop, she’s managed to stay out of trouble and is planning to graduate in December. The key, she and her crewmates said, was being given the space to express themselves.

“Graffiti isn’t just paint or colors,” Emunah said. “It’s more about your life, your story. Every time you paint something, it is what you feel and what you see and what you think. Nobody chooses what you put down with your pencil; it’s just you.”

Arbiters of Art

Traditionally, graffiti has been thought of as an illicit affair, and practitioners had to vandalize, breaking the law — however innocuously — for their art. The currency of the culture is both how good an artist you are and where you are able to leave a mark, Asphate said.

Despite some still perceiving graffiti as criminal, as hip-hop culture grew into mainstream culture, graffiti broke into the established art world.

“Graffiti is absolutely art,” said Stephen King, executive director of the Des Moines Arts Festival. “Why wouldn’t it be? What makes a graffiti artist expressing himself on a wall any different than Monet expressing himself on a canvas?

“Everybody considers Banksy an artist and yet his work is also done in the middle of the night,” King continued. “If we call him an artist, I think we must call graffiti writers artists, and, locally, we must call those kids whose work was covered up artists as well.”

MORE: Where's the best street art in Des Moines?

Even though the mural painted at Central Campus wasn’t permitted at the time the city covered it, some with Movement 515 felt like it was hard to mistake their mural for anything but artwork. The wall had nothing obscene and there were obviously no gang ties, Asphate said.

While the police department wasn’t involved in the incident with the Central Campus mural, their officers can be on the front lines of graffiti response, said Des Moines Police spokesman Sgt. Paul Parizek. And when they respond to a complaint, they are not the arbiters of what is or isn't art, he said.

“Whether the work is beautiful or not, graffiti is a criminal act,” he said. “If they are putting it on a canvas and don’t have permission to put it on that canvas, it’s really as simple as that to us. I have seen some very talented artists. You can sit near the train tracks and see artwork by people who obviously have lots and lots of talent, but they are just not directing at the right place.”

'A phoenix rising'

With a year between the buffing out and now, the kids are the first to admit that they couldn’t have redone their mural without the community rallying around them. A GoFundMe page reached its $4,000 goal less than 48 hours after being posted and the Arts Fest funded plane tickets to bring in another graffiti artist to work alongside the kids and Asphate, who said he was simply blown away by the public’s response.

“We said we wanted to be like a phoenix rising from the ashes,” Pham said. “We put way more effort in the second mural. We felt like it had to be 10 times harder and 10 times badder because of what happened.”

As Tran and Emunah trade ideas for the mural at the social club, they both worry whether they’ll be good enough to take on the Secret Walls artist. They plan to practice and prepare as much as possible before Friday in hopes that can impress the audience enough to secure more opportunities to show their work and to make their mentors proud.

“Honestly, I didn’t have life goals before I met 'Phate,” Pham said. “But he said you have to get good grades to keep painting and you have to be a good person and be productive to keep painting.

“Now that he’s set me on this path, I won’t go back,” she said. “I am the happiest I’ve ever been, I think, and I am the person I’ve always wanted to be.”

Pham’s not sure what she’ll do next, but she hopes to keep painting, eventually traveling the work with her chosen art. It could happen, she offered, you never know.

After all, she never expected the smell of spray paint to lead her on this path: the road to herself.

Des Moines Arts Festival

The Des Moines Arts Festival runs from June 23-25. Hours are 11 a.m. to 10 p.m. Friday and Saturday and 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Sunday. The free festival surrounds the John & Mary Pappajohn Sculpture Park in Western Gateway Park.

The Secret Walls competition runs from 5-6:30 p.m. Friday on the Hy-Vee Main Stage.

To learn more about the Arts Festival, visit DesMoinesArtsFestival.org.