Host Lisa Kiefer interviews Desi Mundo, aerosol artist and founder of the Oakland-based non-profit Community Rejuvenation Project (CRP). CRP has emerged as one of the most prolific mural arts organizations in the East Bay, transforming the role of the "aerosol writing" culture from neighborhood scourge to community benefactors through public projects like the ALICE STREET mural, the Funktown Arts District at the Parkway Theatre, and the San Pablo Cultural Arts corridor in Oakland.
TRANSCRIPT
Speaker 1:Method to the madness is next. You're listening to method to the madness. A biweekly public affairs show on k a l s Berkeley Celebrating Bay area innovators. I'm Lisa Kiefer and today I'm interviewing Desi. Muno does, he's the founder of the Community Rejuvenation Project and Oakland nonprofit that cultivates healthy communities through public art, [00:00:30] beautification, education and celebration does. He has produced over 150 murals and is a leading policy advocate for public arts. Welcome to the program. Desi, you're cofounded or were you the founder of community?
Speaker 2:I'm the founder of the community Juvenalian project in Oakland, CRP Bay area.org. Um, we're primarily based in Oakland, but we do murals throughout the bay. And [00:01:00] even throughout the nation we've done about probably closer to 200 murals in the past five years, primarily in, um, visible spaces, you know, and some murals in like schools and some murals that are not as visible to the public in general, but the majority community rejuvenation project. So I think in the beginning we were trying to find ways as aerosol riders to connect to the community and make our work be sort of respected [00:01:30] by the community for graffiti artists. Uh, yeah, the, I mean, graffiti is a derogatory term. Graffiti was a term given to us by the media in the 70s, uh, by people I, Norma mailer who wrote the original, well one of the first books called the faith of graffiti and I think that that's where they started applying that name to us.
Speaker 2:But writers never said that. Writers called themselves writers because they were writing [inaudible], you know, I choose not to use that term. Um, because I've been taught by some of the older guys in New York that that's a derogatory [00:02:00] term to them. I grew up calling myself, you know, graffiti writer, where did you grow up in Chicago? And I always felt like we didn't want to kind of soften our identity and we wanted to hold down the, the rebellious side of our work, um, by calling ourselves graffiti and not calling ourselves aerosol artists or things like that. In fact, we were, we would say that I still somewhat believed that we were there first. You know what I mean? The writing was there before art was we, we're the descendants people [00:02:30] putting the artwork on the walls came way before it was put in a frame and kind of limited to the bourgeois.
Speaker 2:And so we've always been artists for the people and we've been, you know, we connect back to the caves, we connect back to the Egyptians and the Aztecs and the, and the Celts. And they're always a message in your art. There's always a purpose. I think the, I mean writing is a culture. We definitely write different things in relationship to different time periods in lives. You know, people [00:03:00] pass away, people are born, we may do pieces that are dedicated to those people, but a lot of it is also personal identification and expression, personal definition of who we are. So I feel like sometimes there's like a, a demand from the outside that we create something that is, can be connected to by the larger public. And that's not always the purpose from the inside. The more political, yes. You know, they're trying to get something that they can understand.
Speaker 2:And My, my brother and my [00:03:30] teacher Raven would always talk about, you know, this is like jazz. You don't have to understand it to know that it's beautiful. We actually do a lot of work to in our lettering to, to hide the true meaning for people that don't understand or are not willing to take those steps to decipher it. For us, the continued elaboration of the letter, sort of like the illuminated manuscripts, the infinite possibility of what the letter can be to continue to push the style to continue, continue to develop [00:04:00] who we are. We continue to elaborate and make it more and more complex, more and more advanced versus you know, Helvetica nation that we live in where everything is kind of homogenized and everything is very readable and everything is very palatable and everything does not have any, you know, cultural context within it.
Speaker 2:You know, everybody's supposed to, you know, merge into this one culture instead of celebrate the diversity of all the cultures. You've been involved in projects that pose significant questions about the role of public art. Right. [00:04:30] Can you talk about your art in context of that? Say in Oakland? Right. The community rejuvenation project is a pavement to policy organization. So what that means is that we've been on the ground painting murals throughout the bay area for a long time. We've been, you know, involved in this art form for the past 20 plus years. We've been looking at it from kind of a holistic standpoint, from a public art policy standpoint, and we've been advocating to get more public art [00:05:00] onto the streets and into our communities and we've been creating best practices. We've been helping to advocate for specific legislation battling against the prejudice against the aerosol aesthetic, which is that literally stuff that's done with spray paint is treated differently than any other medium in Philadelphia.
Speaker 2:It's illegal to do murals with spray paint in Chicago. It's illegal to sell spray paint within the city limits. So can you imagine [00:05:30] what it would be like if they banned the brush? They paint in acrylics or they said that you couldn't use your tool? That which is what we use to to survive, to sustain ourselves as professional artists. It doesn't matter. Again, in Philadelphia if the mural is commissioned, if it's permission or or if it's illegal, it doesn't matter. Anything though with spray paint is automatically illegal. We saw that even closer to home in Richmond, California where there was a group of artists that painted a [00:06:00] commissioned work on Paul's paint, decide the fact that they were paid to do this project. A local neighbor labeled it graffiti and because it was under that label, they were required to paint it out. Paul himself was actually threatened with a fine despite the fact that he had paid these guys to do this work on his business, which was probably his private business. Yeah. Which is probably, you know, helping to deter illegal vandalism on his property. We have a lot of these backwards laws that CRP has been calling out and challenging [00:06:30] and putting out alternative best practices that you know, city governments can look at and can consider when developing their approach to working with artists.
Speaker 1:What is the proof? Is there any proof that it has actually stopped crime in areas or lessened crime? How are you proving that?
Speaker 2:The the what we're, what we are looking very directly at is the role of murals in abatement. And what we realize is that murals actually do a deter ongoing [00:07:00] vandalism. So how do you know this will? Because when you paint the murals don't get vandalized as much. So you've been watching this for, so we use, we have, we have tons of case studies, but also the Department of Justice has actually come out with a report which recommended murals as part of an intelligent strategy for so-called graffiti abatement. From our perspective as aerosol riders, the top quality work is intended to go over lower quality work where we're supposed [00:07:30] to continue to push the envelope of our development with better and better work. So if you have less developed work, higher quality work is allowed to go over that. That's part of the unwritten culture, so it makes sense from both the aerosol standpoint and from the public art standpoint and we believe that murals are more cost effective than the ongoing abatement.
Speaker 1:If you're just tuning in, you're listening to method to the madness. A biweekly [00:08:00] public affairs show on k a l x Berkeley Celebrating Bay area innovators. Today I'm interviewing artist Desi Mondo. He's the founder of the Oakland nonprofit community rejuvenation project, and there are some facts that we can point to. Worst. We do know a couple of things.
Speaker 2:In 2000 the national abatement industry was $4 billion a year. That's across all the cities in America in 2015 it's a $17 billion industry. [00:08:30] So we have to consider how is it possible that you're actually deterring an activity, but the cost of you doing it is steadily on the rise. If the activity was being deterred, the cost would either stay the same or go down over time. But the abatement industry, despite being in effect since the 1980s has never conducted a study to determine whether or not it's actually [00:09:00] deterring people writing on the wall over the longterm. And what instead you have is a lot of these private consultants coming along and kind of acting as rainmakers. They, they tell you that they have the solution and we're gonna organize all these volunteers and we're going to have these big paint outs and vandalism will go down.
Speaker 2:And it does for the short term that the people are organized, but you're not paying anybody it. The only way that this is cost effective at all is to, is to rely [00:09:30] on volunteer work. And then on top of that, as soon as the volunteers disperse it, things come right back up. So it's not actually cost effective over time. And basically what you're doing is pouring money into this black hole of lift paint off the wall that's painted again. Let's paint it again. And these laws are based on this prejudice against the aerosol aesthetic, which is a prejudice against people of color because it's assumed that the people that are doing [00:10:00] the writing, our young adults, our young people of color, there's a natural prejudice that assumes that those folks are involved in gangs rather than just being top quality.
Speaker 3:And so your experience has shown otherwise.
Speaker 2:Absolutely. There's some, obviously some aerosol riders that are gang members, but it's not a requirement, you know, and it's is not even the majority of the people that are doing it. Everyone's going to be an individual so you can't speak for an entire group and put a blanket statement. Basically what the current laws are saying is that if there [00:10:30] is some writing on your property that is illegal, but there's no requirement beyond that. So if you paint out a little orange square on a red wall, that's legal, you can even kind of paint everything out in the shape of what was written there before it. That's legal. The colors don't have to match. It can look completely ugly. It's obviously that there's been that there's been vandalism there in the past, but as long as the aerosol name is not on that wall, it is considered legal and [00:11:00] acceptable by the city government. So it's not a question of like quality of the aesthetic is long as the name is gone. Again, we see those extreme cases of Philadelphia and Ri and Richmond where you know, you literally are, even if it was permission and commissioned, it's still illegal. It's still not allowed.
Speaker 3:Well, let's talk about some of your projects. Okay. I've seen your Alice Street project in Oakland. It's gorgeous. Can you talk about how you go about doing something like that? How do you produce a project like [inaudible]?
Speaker 2:It's a very, [00:11:30] it's a very long and extended process. Alice street connecting back to our conversation started as an abatement strategy. So we talked to district three. Lynette McElhaney is office and they pointed us at some of the most problematic walls in their district, which were these walls at 14th and Alice Street. You know, I'm not from Oakland, but I've lived here for a long time. I looked around when I went over there and I was like, man, this is, there's [00:12:00] some really powerful organizations or some really deep history around here. I want to be very careful in terms of how we approached this project because there's not necessarily a requirement to engage the community in these mural projects, but there's so much important history in that area that to not engage the community is doing a disservice to the community. So we went back and we got some funds to film some interviews.
Speaker 2:We take your money [00:12:30] primarily from the city at the beginning. Um, but then we went out to some private foundations, East Bay community foundation, and then later to Zellerbach Foundation and the ochin naughty foundation and East Bay community foundation has a, a one to one match requirement and it cannot be matched by another organization. It has to be matched by individual donors. So we reached out, we created a Indiegogo campaign, which is a crowdfunding platform and [00:13:00] we matched $8,000 from over a hundred contributors who are excited to see us both create this evolving documentary. Did you start to meet our project? Always knowing that you were going to do a documentary film about it. We knew that we wanted to talk to the community members and get, get their history and get their perspective and really make sure that this, this piece reflected the history with the cultures of the people in that area.
Speaker 2:Because we knew that it was a powerful place. So [00:13:30] when you went to get your funding, your request was that you were going to film this as well? We were going to film interviews and it was very small. It was not like we did not see the scope of the project at that point. It was not fully fleshed out. Once we started talking to people in the community, you know, we knew it was big. We didn't know how big it was. So what are those communities? So there's two primary locations that we were, you know, kind of working with, and that's the hotel Oakland, which [00:14:00] has had many different kind of identities throughout the years. It's one of the oldest hotels in Oakland that had just had his hundredth anniversary in 2013 so it was built in 1913 it's housed presidents. It's, you know, it was a hospital during World War Two, uh, and now it's home to low income Chinese seniors.
Speaker 2:It's a senior home and it's really a unique model because it's, they've created all these village groups to keep the seniors connected together and builds the [00:14:30] community and it makes people have those connections and have a happy kind of violate of their, their days, autumn of their days. And it's also at the edge of Chinatown. 14th street was always kind of the border for Chinatown, although we found out that Chinatown had moved three times and I think Chinatown was burned down once and people were just forced out the second time. It ended up, you know, below Broadway and towards the estuary at 14th all [00:15:00] the way to Jacqueline and square. Then the Chinese exclusion act happened in 1882 folks were not allowed to move out of that area all the way until actually the 50s or the 60s. It was in the African American community also experienced something like this with red lining.
Speaker 2:So folks were actually forced to live in West Oakland and banks would not give them mortgages to buy their own property. So it was, it was really difficult for people to actually accumulate property and that type of wealth that that property brings with it [00:15:30] until those laws were also found to be illegal around the, around the same time. And we in that connects back because the other building that we were really looking at was the former Alice arts center, which is now the Malonga Casquelourd center for the arts. And that's kind of kitty corner to Hotel Oakland. And that's home to a lot of drumming groups. And yes, African jamming. It's, yeah, a lot of, I mean a lot of different artistic groups, primarily African and African American from contemporary to [00:16:00] traditional. Um, but it's also Ho home to access dance and Leeka, which is a Filipino dance group and it's just so many other amazing groups.
Speaker 2:It started out as a women's building, I believe around 1927 and it's also had a lot of different lifetimes. And it was actually the eighties before it was converted to the Alis Art Center and it started to how's all these different artistic groups? And so we talked to a lot of different community members. We got a little bit of the story [00:16:30] of the pre Alice arts days with everybody's dance center and history of how uh, these master drummers and dancers came to America. How they were brought here by Catherine Dunham, how they kind of created the center for African culture in the United States. The stories are just really those two major stories to Chinese and the African American cultures right next to each other and not necessarily always connecting because there's these language [00:17:00] barriers because it's just two completely different cultures. They have connected in in many ways. Um, but not, uh, not a huge overlap.
Speaker 2:We wanted to do something that reflected both of those communities. So you got the stories, we, and then we do actually that did the art or that was primarily myself and my painting partner, Poncho Pescador. But the story we tried to, we had to look for where's the common thread. And so the common thread was [00:17:30] displacement and cultural resiliency against that displacement. How do you maintain your culture? How do you keep things active in the face of constantly either being forced into a location and not allowed to move out of it, or once you're allowed to move out of it being forced out of it. As we saw in west, as we saw in Chinatown with the building of the eight 80 freeway, the uh, Lake Merritt Bart Station, Laney College, and now there's all this new development. Exactly. So w w you know, we're, [00:18:00] we're seeing another displacement happening through gentrification and that's kind of the unifying theme.
Speaker 2:And, and that's what connects it to what's happening right now. Oh, of course. We had to go back to the original people. The first people to be displaced were Aloni people. So we also incorporated some more Loney images into the mural, but we haven't actually gotten a chance to interview Tony Serta who's on the wall, but he's actually the chief of the Aloni tribe that actually came from Oakland and was displaced all [00:18:30] the way down to Pomona. We did get to speak to his grandchildren who came by the wall through one of our friends, a Luther kind of Lariya and they all did interviews at the mural in front of the picture of Tony that we had painted. So there's this kind of ongoing displacement of peoples in this kind of cycle of displacement and then connecting to the gentrification that's happening in Oakland now, and that was kind of the theme that we saw connecting folks is the attacks, but also the resistance to those attacks and what, [00:19:00] what's that meant to the community and of course we wanted to focus more on the celebration of the resiliency versus the destruction of you've completed this film.
Speaker 2:We're at the end of production, but we're not done producing, so we're still shooting some interviews. We're still collecting some footage and then we're going to go into full on post production.
Speaker 1:It sounds like your goal is to get this out to a wider audience where this same thing is happening in other cities. Right,
Speaker 2:because gentrification is definitely not limited to Oakland. [00:19:30] We see this in Brooklyn, we see this in the Bronx. We see it in Detroit, Chicago, just so many communities are being uprooted and pushed out by various forces in Chicago is the University of Chicago buying up all the land and renting it out to students and, and developing it for kind of a more affluent community in Oakland. We're seeing the tech industry moving in here in Brooklyn. We're seeing, you know, the traditional African and you know like Chicano communities, but Puerto Rican, Dominican, all [00:20:00] of these different people descended from indigenous communities throughout the Americas being pushed out in favor of more affluent people. Um, more white people in general. And so this theme of gentrification and the stories of, of displacement are happening throughout the United States and happening throughout the world. That is really what connects the story of this location to everything.
Speaker 1:How much wider problem you're listening to method to the madness on k a l x, Berkeley. How does a mural really [00:20:30] change anything?
Speaker 2:One of the things that we experienced at the wall was that people were buying up properties route us, including one of the walls that we were painting on and kind of thinking that they were going to move into an empty space, not recognizing that there were established cultures and established communities already there. Folks are showing up like we're going to do this great benefit for the community by creating artists lofts and a gallery and it's like you're right next to one of the largest artists communities and the Malonga Casket Loris [00:21:00] that includes artists housing. So you're not, you know, you're not doing anything new. You're sort of attempting to reinvent the wheel because you don't know that the wheel already exists. By having a mural there, we were able to tell these folks, listen, there is a community here and you need to come in respectfully and make relations with the existing community rather than showing up and kind of pushing an agenda that, you know, sounds really great, but at the same time [00:21:30] doesn't acknowledge that there's already things going on.
Speaker 2:I mean, you know, it's great to create artists housing and places for arts to create their work. That's, you know, that's a noble idea, but you need to recognize that there's all that's already happening. Trying to educate people about diversity of culture. I think we're trying to put people in contact with the people who are creating that art and acknowledge that there's a history there. I think that the people that should be doing that education are the people who [00:22:00] are there themselves, that we're hoping to create a bridge between that so that when people, we understand that there's these waves of people that are going to come in, but it's how you step into a community. That is the big issue right here that we want to see people show up respectfully, show up, humbly show up and want to connect with what's existing versus displace what's existing.
Speaker 2:And a lot of that displacement starts with a lack of acknowledgement that it's even there. In the act of gentrification, [00:22:30] there's this obliviousness, oh, I see an abandoned lot where this, these walls that are kind of, you know, not well taken care of. I could do whatever I want here because it looks like it's run down and that's so that's kind of this connection to, again, the perception of blight, the perception of things not being maintained as an excuse to come in and and put whatever you want. The film is just asking the questions, but overall I think as an organization we want to ask the question around can [00:23:00] we have development without displacement? How do we build up communities from within rather than pushing folks out? I mean I've had conversations with folks where they really feel like the only way to reduce crime is to kick people out, is just to move people away.
Speaker 2:The only way to to beautify neighborhoods is to move the people I know. I just, I can't believe that. I don't agree with that. We need to create infrastructures and we need to create support systems for the people that lived there in relation to the Malonga center [00:23:30] and all these incredible organizations that exist within their, all these incredible communities that that reside there is that is not fully acknowledged by our city. The city has taken some steps to support and keep those folks there on some level. But this is the first mural that I've seen in Oakland that's acknowledging a lot of the people that are on that wall. And those people are internationally [00:24:00] recognized. Um, they've had made a huge contribution both of their culture but also to the culture of the city of Oakland. And they don't get that recognition here. I really feel like the men, that, the stories and the, the, the work that's been done in Oakland needs to be celebrated on such a larger level.
Speaker 2:And the people who've already done that work, the, the, the Dia Monte Chorus, the access dance, the dimensions, dance theater, people like destiny Mohamed, [00:24:30] the, the whole Somba community, the Sama funk community, the, the full gonna Rope Oz. All of these people that, when you think about the bay area, you kinda like, you remember these images of carnival, of drumming and all that stuff. But those folks really need to be kind of put out there, remembered, acknowledged and, and yeah, remembered but remembered in the presence still here. They're still doing, I mean dimensions, dance, theater had like four generations of people that have been passing through it that you're seeing great-grandmothers dropping off their great [00:25:00] grandchildren to keep doing what they've been doing. And it's, it's incredible.
Speaker 3:You sound so passionate about all of this and I wonder, did something happen in your life around gentrification or displacement where you grew up in, you grew up in Chicago, I mean, where, where did you get this passion to do something to such a difficult thing?
Speaker 2:We are going through gentrification in my neighborhood and my neighborhood was already somewhat middle-class, but because um, Obama kind of built up his, [00:25:30] you know, legacy out of my neighborhood in Chicago, you're seeing a displacement of any of the working class aesthetics in favor of university aesthetics. Um, in Hyde Park work, which is where I'm from, they're talking about building the Obama presidential library there and there's literally not even the, there's like a private police officer on every corner for anything suspicious and it's really kind of a, a sterilization of my neighborhood and it's really sad. I don't think that that really drove me [00:26:00] as an artist though. I mean it's, it's sad to go home and, and see the landmarks that you grew up with changing and being taken away, especially in favor of what they're putting in there, which is a lot more corporate, a lot more cookie cutter and a lot less personal.
Speaker 2:It doesn't have that history to erasing that history is always difficult to witness in the places that you grow up and they're just building over your memories. And all of my murals that I didn't growing up in Chicago have been destroyed. Some of them destroyed [00:26:30] illegally and that's difficult to, to deal with those early works that I worked on and developed and trained on because when I was a kid I would, you know, get together with older artists that and very intentionally ask them to train me. Those works lasted for a long time. Um, but they're gone now. Coming from a movement that began on the subways and every single subway has been painted out, you know, we would lose works that we did the same night that we did them. So we have always had a sense [00:27:00] in the aerosol community that nothing is permanent. At the same time, you still kind of hope to see some of those works.
Speaker 2:Particularly like the more elaborate pieces, the more monumental pieces you wish that they would stay. I think part of that expectation that you're gonna be erased, no one comes from the rebellious nature of doing it without permission. But at the same time it comes from the fact that that folks are constantly being attacked and expected to be [inaudible] in the battle against extermination. [00:27:30] And that's particularly true for the communities of color that pioneered this artwork. You know, as you know, a white person, I have a lot more privilege around that. But nonetheless, being involved in this particular art form, you know, like there's that mentality that things are gonna be erased. So on some level I think that's kind of where the fight to, to maintain ourselves. And I think also that we really want to sustain ourselves. The bigger picture is that we want to continue to be able to create new works [00:28:00] and we want to actually have the capacity to to Redo old works instead of just having them erased and removed from the collective memory.
Speaker 2:If something's fading or something's damaged or even if someone happens to vandalize a mural, which does happen, we want to be able to come back and create new works on top of that and we believe, and I think that we can prove that it's actually more affordable to do it that way. It might be cheaper to paint out those walls again and again and again on some level, but you're not getting [00:28:30] anything for it. Imagine the person whose job is to paint out these walls. What do they show their children at the end of the day? A bunch of blank walls. And so investing in the culture, investing in telling the stories of our community has value by itself. And we've seen, one of the interviews we conducted with Roy Chan is that it's actually these, these projects have actually been used to protect the existing communities, not just the work that we're doing, but he was telling us about how the Oakland Chinatown oral history project used its, its stories [00:29:00] to connect the Tai Chi community at Madison Park, which is right across the street from the Bart Station.
Speaker 2:And those folks, once they connected, they rallied and helped stop the development of a new Bart headquarters right there, which would have displaced that incredible Tai Chi community that so many people you know, think about when they go by Lake Merritt Bart station. So I think that there's a capacity within our work to really support and maintain communities in the face of the ever present threat of displacement. Does he help with people [00:29:30] get a hold of you? Do you have a website where the organization is community rejuvenation project? And we're at CRP bay area.org facebook.com/crp bay area or Twitter. We also see our p Bay area, Instagram, CRP, Bay area. We kind of keep it, you know, the same. Um,
Speaker 1:well, thank you for being on the program. We're looking forward to seeing your film about Alice. All right, awesome. You've been listening to method to the madness. You can find [00:30:00] links to this and previous podcasts on the Calex website. Tune in again in two weeks at the same time. Have a great weekend.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
