Artists Share Opinions on Art that Speaks

Crush Walls artists aim to uplift and empower.

Story and Photos by Elsa Russell

The walls of RiNo are bursting with fresh color, and the pungent aroma of spray paint has begun to subside in the late summer breeze. This transformation of concrete and brick is thanks to Crush Walls, the street art festival that gives RiNo its annual makeover. 

The festival is “committed to reflecting and diversifying the urban landscape and the unique voice of a community, bringing art out of the galleries and into the streets,” according to the Crush Walls website. And truly, if you take a closer look, the walls have a lot to say.

Artists painted from Sept. 14-20 to create new visuals for people to experience and learn from.

Congolese artist Lio Bumba grew up in Matonge, Ixelles in Brussels. He was surrounded by graffiti growing up, and watched artists around him make the transition from graffiti to street art. For this year’s Crush, Bumba created a piece about joy. The wall is part of a series called Black Love Bodies. 

“It’s about capturing the black essence,” Bumba said. “It's about recontextualizing how black bodies are viewed within visual arts and also within the urban landscape … recontextualizing it and reappropriating it, because I feel like the narrative has been written by people from outside the culture.” 

Artist Ally Grimm paints under the name A.L. Grime. She initially went to school to study politics, but found her calling creating art that inspires hope, spreads positivity, and speaks out on issues that the media tends to ignore. 

For Crush, Grimm painted Sa-Roc, a “conscious rapper who speaks on issues like female empowerment, uplifting the black community, and uplifting poor communities.” The portrait is accompanied by an augmented reality feature, animating the wall and playing a Sa-Roc song titled “I Am Her”.  “It’s about women stepping into their power and using their strengths creatively in order to reclaim the power that's been taken from us, and to inspire the next generation to do the same,” Grimm explained. 

In a different style, Gregg Deal uses art to reclaim old comic book images. He substitutes the original dialogue with lyrics from punk rock songs in order to represent native people. For this year’s Crush, Deal explained that he chose “lyrics from a song called ‘Merican. It's a Bush era punk song … from a band called Descendents who have been around since the 80s.”

Deal’s piece depicts a colonialist saying “We flipped our finger to the King of England, stole our country from the Indians, with God on our side and guns in our hands, we took it for our own, a nation dedicated to liberty, justice and equality.” The Native American responds with “Does it look that way to you? It doesn't look that way to me. The sickest joke I know.”

Deal grew up in Utah, but studied art and made his bones in Washington D.C. In addition to painting, he is also a performance artist.

“Everything I do is coming from my perspective; things that affect my community, things that affect my family, things that affect me,” Deal explained. The art is “unapologetically indigenous and unapologetically just my voice, my work, my opinion, all of which points at a narrative of the experience of a contemporary artist who happens to be indigenous.”

“If the voice wasn't true to me, I wouldn't say it,” Deal added. “The integrity of the work and the integrity of the voice is paramount. That never changes. If you were to look at the work I did 10 years ago and the work I'm doing now, it's the same. In terms of voice and the level of voice, it's the same.”

In fact, each of these three artists use their work to elevate the voices of populations that have gone unheard. The messages these walls send are personal and powerful. 

The inspiration for Grimm’s recent work was born out of a need to speak up. “I’m from Venezuela, and I’ve watched a president become a dictator and destroy the place that I’m from, and now I’m watching it happen again. When I finally started to see that this was happening in front of me again, I was like ‘this has to stop. I have to say something,’” she said.

Grimm explained that “in the overview of my work, I seek to empower women, but also to inspire young people to really follow their dreams and actually pursue careers that make them happy.”

Bumba seeks to “add a different narrative than what has been the case for representation of people of color and marginalized communities” through his art.

He is not only “adding beauty to the world, adding to the conversation, and reflecting it, but also trying to help change the narrative for future generations, so that it's a different world tomorrow than it is today.” 

The beauty of using art to send these messages is that it gives the artists “the power to pretty much create giant advertisements,” Grimm elaborated. “Now we can decide what is talked about.”

Grimm characterized her wall as “...a way to fight hate with love, but in a way that’s not passive aggressive.”

“I feel aggressive,” she said, “and I feel that we have to be active and be assertive, but we don't have to be hateful. Art is a really beautiful way to do that because it's not hurting anyone. We’re honestly just inspiring people and calling a new message to action in a peaceful way that adds beauty and also enriches people's lives.”

As an adolescent, Bumba said he was “drawn to the streets because the streets are not classist. A lot of art institutions are classist and not many voices are represented within traditional art institutions. The streets provide a blank canvas that the whole world can interact with and participate in.” 

Bumba explained that creating provides “an opportunity for us as artists, especially as artists of color, to be able to express ourselves and help change the narrative.” 

He further described the visual arts as having the power to speak their own nonverbal language in a way that “helps foster human compassion and human empathy in ways that conversation and normal logic often fails to.” Art “adds a human touch to the conversation.” 

Bumba’s wall can be viewed at Lustre Pearl. Grimm’s is located in the alley to the left of Denver Central Market. Deal’s can be found at Crema Coffee. In between and around them are the works of the 57 other contributing Crush Walls artists. When you next walk the streets of RiNo, pause and take in the stories these walls have to tell.