It’s two or three in the morning, and the quiet of the night has a 13-year-old kid by the name of Mario Enrique Figueroa Jr. on high alert. He’s positioned himself in an alley behind a convenience store in Houston’s East End and he’s prepared to outrun anyone in uniform if it comes to that.

Years later, he will describe the nightly missions of his adolescence as “military-esque,” complete with reconnaissance plans and escape strategies. In a way, what he and other youth were doing in the early ’80s was a kind of urban warfare. The fight, at least Figueroa’s personal one, was one of aesthetics, even if authorities didn’t see it that way.

“You want to leave your mark, leave something beautiful,” he says. “But you know in a heartbeat something could go wrong. You’re out there with a giant risk hanging over your head, but you’re fighting to leave your art.”

Such is the work life of a graffiti artist. But Figueroa, now better known as GONZO247, is no longer painting (or writing, as the act is referred to in the street-art community) his name behind convenience stores. He’s a commissioned artist, the man behind the sunburst of color that is the Houston Is Inspired mural downtown.

GONZO247 now works in broad daylight without the threat of arrest or detainment. Not that he’s ever experienced such reprimands. “Let’s just say when I was younger, I ran really fast,” he says jokingly. And he doesn’t have to worry about his work being painted over or destroyed. In the case of Houston Is Inspired, it will stay however long the Greater Houston Convention and Visitors Bureau, the organization that commissioned the piece, wants it up.

That means a lot for an artist who has always understood his work to be ephemeral. “It’s instilled in every graffiti artist that their work is temporary and nothing is permanent,” he says. “You knew that you created a piece, that it once existed, and hoped for the best, because you also know that one day, the city or the property owner or another artist would paint over it.”

The founder of the now legendary video magazine Aerosol Warfare and its accompanying gallery on Jefferson, GONZO247 has spent much of his career in Houston advocating for street art as much as he has creating it.

And he’s the man behind the first graffiti museum in the country: The Graffiti and Street Art Museum of Texas. He’s at work organizing and developing the new 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization, which in many ways is the culmination of two and half decades devoted to validating a form of expression often associated with gangs and illegal activities.

Currently housed at Aerosol Warfare before it opens at its new, as yet undisclosed location in January, the GASAM isn’t just another art institution. It’s the first of its kind, the only museum in the nation dedicated to graffiti and street art. “We’re not the East Coast or West Coast. We’re the Third Coast, right in the middle of the country,” GONZO247 explains. “We’re positioned in a unique spot, where we can’t be biased to either coast [where the art form took hold in the ’70s]. Major entities from all over the world have contacted us to ask what they can do to support us.”

The GASAM will be a fully curated institution with major programming to go along with it. “The idea for a graffiti museum isn’t a new one,” GONZO247 says. “The streets themselves have always been the natural museums for graffiti.”

GONZO247 cites the artwork of cavemen and the Romans as graffiti that has endured for centuries, but a person doesn’t need to cross the ocean to find examples that have weathered the years and sparked the imagination of its contemporaries. Crossing the tracks is good enough.

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Mario Enrique Figueroa Jr. spent much of his youth traveling up and down Lockwood and Canal visiting extended family who lived in the neighborhood. His parents immigrated from Mexico along with his aunts, uncles and grandparents, who had a plethora of brothers and sisters of their own.

“It was this tribe, and we all lived here in the East End. “I spent my time visiting family, because that’s what you did, and at least two or three times a week, I was passing The Rebirth of Our Nationality on Canal Street,” he explains, referring to the iconic mural by Leo Tanguma that was created during the height of the Chicano movement in 1973. “I didn’t understand it completely. If anything, it was somewhat scary, and when you’re that age, you really don’t understand the imagery and take things too literally. What really affected me was the sheer scale of the wall. I thought, man, it would be awesome to do something that big.”

Growing up, Figueroa was a creative kid. He would draw and sketch everything from hot rods to monsters to dinosaurs, but never really had a focus to channel his artistic energy. And then sometime in the early ’80s, he found hip-hop. Graffiti art is one of the four keystone elements of hip-hop culture along with the crafts of the emcee, the DJ and the b-boy. But it wasn’t the visual component that caught the imagination of the future GONZO247.

“I got into the music first, because that was the most accessible to me. By listening to the music, I started to understand the emcee turntables. Little by little, the information came trickling through. It’s like going to church and getting your sacraments. The final stage was graffiti.”