Artist Mickael Broth's work from the 2013 RVA Street Art Festival (Photo by Justin Vaughan)
I first saw the mural work of Mickael Broth (aka The Night Owl) in 2013 at the second RVA Street Art Festival. You couldn’t miss it. Everyone was photographing his bearded, green-skinned wizard who rose nearly three stories.
I got to meet and talk with Broth for the first time at an intimate Valentine Community Conversation held on the Canal Walk one evening in February 2014. I ran into him again early on a Saturday morning in September 2017 as he was organizing artists from all over the world to paint the outside of the Diamond.
Broth’s work (which includes more than 200 public murals in the U.S. and Europe), his love of Richmond, and his way of connecting students and neighbors through art has left its mark in the past five years. As an example, he and his wife, Brionna Nomi, were co-leaders of Art 180’s first Performing Statistics project, which was about curtailing the school-to-prison pipeline.
It’s a long way from highway overpass graffiti tagging and the jail time Broth served for it back in 2004. Today his work along Richmond’s highways is part of a new mission.
Mickael Broth (Photo by Ash Daniel)
In an interview for this magazine in 2014, Broth said, “There’s so much great public art within the city, so many great murals, so many great artistic institutions, but if you’re driving along the highway into Richmond, it basically looks like a … decrepit, old Southern town. There’s no indication of the beauty and the creativity and the culture that we have here.”
To send another message to those approaching Richmond, Broth founded Welcoming Walls, “dedicated to bringing large-scale public art by Richmond-based artists to the highways and gateways of Richmond with the goals of boosting civic pride, increasing tourism and signaling that Richmond is a capital of culture and creativity.” One of these walls, on the Sports Center of Richmond as you near downtown from I-95, sticks with you — its colors, its faces — long after you whizz by.
In 2017, Broth was awarded a commission by the city of Richmond for the creation of an 18-foot-tall welded-aluminum sculpture that was installed in front of the Hull Street Library. That sculpture, “Perfect Bound,” is on our cover. And Broth’s newest work between two covers, “Murals of Richmond,” came out in late fall, published by Carytown-based Chop Suey Books.
Thank you to Mickael and all the other Richmond-based artists who, through their talents, are signaling to visitors and, more importantly, to ourselves that Richmond has most assuredly turned the page on what and whom we want to be known for. There’s more work to be done, as expressed in a recent billboard by artist Sable Elyse Smith at Chamberlayne and West Jackson in historic Jackson Ward, and a list is there for all to see — “We want land, bread, housing, education, justice and peace.”
The colors used by these artists inspired this month's issue, the 2019 Complete Sourcebook. And I thank our creative team — Justin, Lauren, Rachel, Heather and Ross — for following through on their vision for our pages, not only this month, but every month.