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An Ounce of Creative Prevention is Worth a Pound in Police Enforcement
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Celebrating the summer labor of local and traveling muralists making great works in the city, and that street-level beauty can act as a front line of defense against crime.
Here’s a bit of my backstory and enthusiasm for the great outdoor public artform.
The first mural I can recall was the bubbly graffiti letters on the trains in the movie Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo. My mom saw how much I loved the “Sugar Hill Gang” record she bought me for my eighth birthday, so she rented the VHS highlight reel of breakdancers and funky beats for movie night. She was cool like that.
It has been a true pleasure of life to witness the ascension of the graffiti-writer artform into a prestigious and evolving public artform. Cities always have the best murals as they do artists, and Roanoke is certainly a big part of the decade-long mural boom in the US, and Richmond with a regularly awe-inspiring, expansive and ever-evolving urban gallery.
Today nearly all smaller towns and cities in the state and nation are producing more murals, and we can all hope they can be a deterrent to looking down at our devices.
Banksy is certainly my champ of the living muralists, with Diego Rivera and Keith Haring’s gargantuan-sized works standing as two of my favorites of times passed.
As the publisher of the 16 Blocks Arts and Culture Magazine in Blacksburg (40 print editions 2007-2012), I also co-produced many of the murals in downtown Blacksburg (with town liaison Kim Kirk) by selecting the artists, choosing spots with amenable owners, and helping to raise money and materials.
From Chris Pritchett’s massive Farmers Market mural to the collective works in Mural Alley (by Hokie Hair, which includes a commissioned work by Roanoke master-artist Toobz, producing big murals was a big part of what we did. This was also the time murals were being noticed as a possible tool for crime prevention, and the work of many artists once labeled as vandals began entering the mainstream artworld.
I continued that tradition with the reLaunch of 16 Blocks two summers ago, producing The Local Jam with artist Rita Brame on the pedestrian Draper Block in Blacksburg. Downtown artist Iameye used some of the leftover paint to make three small works behind Bollo’s.
It was during that 2024 project that I first met Jon Murrill as he was simultaneously completing Neon Owl right across the street. He is amazingly prolific throughout this entire region, and his reach as the regional mural master keeps growing.
Brian Counihan of Art Rat Studio was also a vital part of that history, serving on the jury that judged a gargantuan-sized mural competition we held in the massive warehouse behind Nino Cerintano’s Restaurant. Today the murals at Riverdale are some of the biggest recent works in the city.
From Forbes Magazine 2024: There are no official statistics, but the total number of murals in North American cities has undoubtedly skyrocketed in recent years. From New York to San Francisco and numerous cities in between, street art has fully emerged from its controversial beginnings as graffiti to a brilliant art form that delights tourists and locals.”
The murals in Roanoke were one of many art-related elements that originally drew me to live here, with Emily Herr finishing her amazing and massive “Where, Here”
Bringing this focus back to the present day, Adam Lyon has been capturing incredible aerials of our city, beginning a fantastic new visual series focused entirely on these public works.
“We make ugly places pretty,” is how Joey Paleukas beautifully described the work to me twenty years ago after finishing an epic Boombox mural both in the warehouse competition and in mural alley, and that base truth remains unchanged.
Discouraging criminal behavior and spreading focused awareness of one’s surroundings through artists painting city walls is the most ancient and modern of all the artforms. And murals more often than not are seen and appreciated, by more people than most gallery or museum exhibitions.
Murals are a paramount form of the still image, often envisioned in gargantuan size on outdoor walls in an effort to move or calm you, and made solely for the benefit of you being aware and affected by your immediate surroundings, the only cost being your time, paid back manifold with artful memories photographs.
Hart Fowler
Publisher 16 Blocks
Independent Journalist
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