Next on Gallery America, we find out what murals mean for communities across the country.

Beginning with Oklahoma's Miami Mural Fest 66.

"We're starting to take some pride in things that we're doing again, and it makes me happy."

Then we go to Harlem, where an ongoing mural project looks out for our feathered friends.

"Let's do all 314 threatened birds."

Last we go to Miami to see how a renowned muralist is captivating a community through Giant Works.

"it focuses on creating something that has some sense of timelessness."

Hello, Oklahoma.

I'm Robert Reid.

Welcome to Gallery America.

And we're kicking off our 23rd year at OETA with a show Dedicated Arts by talking about murals, murals in Oklahoma, New York City, Miami, what communities are doing with the power of mural arts.

Now, Oklahoma is having a big mural moment right now centered here at Oklahoma City's Plaza Walls.

Now, these murals have influenced communities across the state to get involved in mural fever.

Like our first stop today, Miami.

In 2017, they started their own mural festival and quickly discovered wasn't just murals for mural sake, but something bigger.

Check it out.

Hello, everyone.

Local broadcaster Michael Woodruff.

Here's your forecast for today.

Sunny with a high near 75.

Perfect weather for Mural fest coming up at 10:00 in the beautiful downtown Miami.

It's a free event for the entire family, so come on down.

They're going to be here till about 5:00 tonight while you're doing that- continue to listen to some great music here on KGLC 100.9 radio on the Route We're in our fourth year trying this.

2017 was our first try.

This year we will have 11 new murals put up by ten artists from around the state and myself, and then one mural painted by local artists.

So 12 new paintings.

That's quite, quite a big thing, really, for small town, for three local artists.

Jeanette How long have you lived here?

Since I was 15.

Oh, 'bout 45 years now.

I've lived here for about 45 years as well.

Jessica got a hold of us and said, Hey, we have a wall.

Would you be interested?

And we said, Yeah.

The Oklahoma Mural Syndicate is a nonprofit that advocates and creates public art throughout the state of Oklahoma.

They were one of the first communities that reached out to us after seeing what we've done with plaza walls in Oklahoma City.

And they were like, Hey, will you come to our community and paint it all up as well?

And we said, Yeah, of course.

You know, in 2017, when we first started this, we had people from the community walk up and say, Wow, this is so cool what you guys are doing.

And we've never seen anything like this.

Our first year we tried Mural Fest out here.

This building was vacant at the time and since then it got renovated, was sold, and now it's a daycare center.

The praying mantis.

That was mine.

Bugs are cool.

It's really great to introduce modern art to, you know, a community that might be used to some more traditional murals.

But I like to describe my style as colorful, abstract work.

Um, I do a lot of work that references typography and calligraphy.

I think it's like a nice little moment of joy, you know?

Like not even just just today, but like, just seeing the murals every day is like, just a little moment of happiness or joy or, you know, excitement of having a little bit of art right in your life.

That's called a doodle grid.

And it's just another form to put up a big image on a wall.

In this instance, yeah.

I mean, you just fill up the whole wall with a bunch of different reference points just to in order to get the image up on the wall.

And then once I have that, then I can kind of just play jazz and improvise a little bit with the color and.

I have painted my whole life.

Six years ago, I finally, after years of wanting to try, it, started spray painting.

It takes a lot of practice to really kind of get it down.

really It comes down to they say it's called can control that's the term it's your ability to control the can.

There are options with you can trade out the caps.

You've got skinny caps, you've got fat caps for fills, you've got there's stencil caps, which I have never used.

But you can get super fine lines with those.

*music * All right,here we go.

I love the idea of coming to a smaller town.

The lady and her family, they just bought stickers from me.

Her son said that he liked the robots the best and that it inspired him to do some art.

So I think that's awesome, right?

That's kind of the goal.

But I don't I don't know exactly where the robots came from.

I don't have like some bigpurpose about why I started painting them, but I think they're cool.

You know, I have always been kind of attracted to, like, painting things that I would have thought were awesome as a kid, you know.

You're listening to KGLC 100.9FM Radio on the route- local broadcaster Michael Woodrow hanging out with you this afternoon.

Hey, come on down.

to Mural Fest here in Beautiful downtown Miami.

They got some great stuff.

And while you're at it, stop by the Coleman Theater to get tickets for tonight's music performance.

It's air conditioned.

It's fun.

It's KGLC 100.9 FM radio on the route.

Welcome to the beautiful, historic "Coleman Theater Beautiful".

This is on the stage where the Marx Brothers performed, where, of course, Will Rogers was here, where where Tom Mix wrote his horse on the stage and what you see behind me, flown halfway down from the flier space, is Miami's very first mural.

This is the backdrop that was here on opening night in 1929.

And this is a mural that I painted about the history of commerce and life in Miami, Oklahoma.

Miami is an interesting little town.

The economy of it was really based on local lead and zinc mine.

It was the biggest supplier Lead and Zinc for the world really during World War One and World War Two.

And that built the town and it also ruined the environment.

It's kind of that eternal story of the good and the bad mixed together.

When we moved here, there were a lot of buildings on Main Street that were boarded up, the windows were boarded up, and yet it survives and it's building up now.

Downtown's looking good keeps getting improved.

We have events like Mural Fest great.

It's a small town just trying to make their downtown prettier.

But it's very encouraging.

It's a great sign to see, you know, a relatively small town that's embracing the arts in such a way.

I wish the more small towns and Oklahoma would do the same, because I do think that it revitalizes the community a little bit and and it gives people something to look at every day, you know, and.

When we first moved here, we had Bfgoodrich and it was a really happening little place on the go.

And then Goodrich shut down.

It was like Miami just lost its will to live almost.

Oh, people talk about it.

They see the murals, and they just talk about how happy it makes them feel.

Oh, we're starting to take some pride in things that we're doing again, and it makes me happy to drive down Main and see life.

Oh, well, the mural fest is finally coming to an end if you get to come down here, it's going to be open 24/7.

They did such a wonderful job.

We want to thank them again for another wonderful year.

To get more information about the best Oklahoman murals in the state and the artists we met today, visit our mural hub at OETA dot TV slash Oklahoma murals next.

Before we go any further, let's talk a little bit about mural history.

The term mural has been kicking around the English language for about 170 years, but the history of murals goes back a lot farther.

In Indonesia, they found a rock art in caves of bulls and pigs and hands that date over 40,000 years old.

And in the Americas, in the south of Mexico, the Mayans depicted traditional ceremonies at places like Bonanpack.

That's 1200 years old.

But the modern mural movement, as we kind of know it today, really originates in Mexico.

In the 1920s, when painters like Diego Rivera and Jose Clemente Orozco were painting huge murals on public buildings intended as a source of history and pride for people.

The U.S. artist.

Because a decade later, WPA artists in the United States were painting thousands of murals all over the country, like Stephen Mopope's paintings in the Anadarko Post Office here in Oklahoma.

Sometimes we see murals these days kind of focusing on a theme in this next segment from Harlem, New York, you have painters painting murals, an unexpected places around New York to remind New Yorkers about the beauty of endangered birds.

Check it out.

I had open the gallery and want to bring some attention to the gallery.

So ask the one fine artist I knew who also did, quote unquote Street art to paint a mural on the adjacent gates to this art gallery.

And he's from Florida.

And he said to me, I'm going to paint a flamingo for you because I'm from Florida, bring some Florida flavor.

And I made the connection John James Audubon Birds.

And that's how the project really got started.

I said, Wow, this is a great idea.

Get get the word out about, you know, the threatened birds.

You'll beautify the neighborhood.

But let's let's be a little more ambitious and let's not do just a dozen birds.

Let's do all 314, you know, threaten birds, you murals of all of them, on gates and walls all over this neighborhood.

And Abbie crazily said, sure, let's do it.

And we've been, you know, chasing our 314 number ever since.

So it's really nice to sort of publicize one of the great Americans and really one of the most interesting Americans to people who are familiar with the name but unfamiliar with the actual person.

John James Audubon was possibly America's greatest bird and natural world artist and an extraordinary pioneering pathologist.

He spent the last ten years of his life here in Washington Heights.

The center of the project really has has shifted to what was once the Audubon Estate, between 155th and 156th Street and Broadway.

And it's appropriate because John James Audubon final resting place is in Trinity Cemetery on 1/55.

We made the decision to paint from approximately 135th Street west to 193rd Street, which is the end of Audubon Avenue.

And there's no great logic to it.

But we sort of thought it would be nice to keep the project uptown.

Picking the locations is a bit of a challenge, but one of the things we decided from the beginning was we weren't just going to paint anywhere.

We're looking to beautify, so we're seeking out spaces that are in need of some sort of fix, some sort of improvement.

So, you know, the big walls that we've painted all had crumbling paint and really were in a state of disrepair.

We've worked with landlords to secure spaces like empty alcoves that are boarded up, and we can work with studio artists who are painting panels that we then install into the building.

We're mostly working with artists who are from the neighborhood or from the greater New York area.

We work with them to choose a bird.

We try not to paint the same birds twice.

We really ask them to do what they want within reason.

Some of the murals contain more than one bird, so we've painted about 70 birds so far.

There are challenges to painting outside, but there are also benefits to painting outside.

So there are people who come while an artist paints and they're engaging the artist and it's a little bit distracting.

But the positive is that they're engaging the artist and they're learning about the project, and they're learning not just about global warming, they're learning about art.

I'm from the neighborhood originally, and I wanted people uptown to be able to see the sort of art that you would normally have to go to Chelsea or the Lower East Side or maybe parts of Brooklyn for.

One of the things I love about coming up here to look at and for the murals is that you can't be sure on any given visit which ones you're going to see or if you're going to see them all in that way.

It's sort of like going out for a birding expedition.

You can't know which birds you're going to see when you're talking about half of all North American birds being threatened.

You're going to see some birds there that you wouldn't expect to see.

They will shift.

They will move.

The Baltimore Orioles is predicted to no longer be able to be seen in Baltimore.

The common loon, which is the state bird of Minnesota, is projected not to be able to be found in Minnesota.

I think that the that sort of seeing these murals of birds in this urban environments in a particularly urban sort of art form, is something that gets people's attention.

And I hope they will sort of investigate and see like, what is this?

Why are these murals all here?

And really learn about this threat to the birds that we are used to seeing around us, even in an urban environment.

I hope that it inspires people to think about that and to and to kind of be inspired to do something about it.

On 163rd Wave, one of my favorite murals, it's by the artist.

Cruz is a New York based artist, and it's a painting of three tri colored herons in the mural.

The polar ice caps have melted and sea levels are rising, and the three herons are fighting for the last food.

In this case, a snake.

There's so many things I'd love for people to take away from the murals.

An understanding of the threat to the environment faces more neighborhood pride for Uptown Manhattan, a sense that art is accessible.

I strongly encourage people to get up here because it's really an extraordinary experience.

We started it today in Miami.

Next, we're going to Miami, where a legendary graffiti artist is attributing locals with seriously monumental murals.

Meet EL Mac.

With this piece.

As with most of my pieces, my focus is on creating something that has some sense of timelessness.

My name is Miles McGregor, also known as El Mac.

I'm an artist and mirrorless.

That's something that I take very seriously as a public art is painting these big, large public murals.

You know, there's something very powerful in that because of that power.

You know, there's there's also kind of a responsibility that comes with it and hopefully something that the community can connect with, you know, something that's relevant to the history and the culture of wherever that the mural is.

These figures are monumental formally.

When we look at monuments, they're, you know, a famous figure.

I don't know if it's like groundbreaking conceptually or anything, but I think it's important work to make these kinds of monuments to normal people.

The figures are based on reference photos that I saw of some local young people, the young woman, her name is Magdalena, and she helps manage a nearby community garden.

The figure next to her, his name is Jamye, and he's a ballet dancer.

The third figure, he's Seminole and he's the youngest figure that I'm painting.

I work all night.

And then in the mornings, the technique is very difficult.

It's ridiculously time consuming.

And the way that I paint, you know, it's all lines and circles, lines and circles and patterns.

And the hope is that that kind of consistency is it does something for the viewer or it can.

The same way when we hear some music that we like, you know, there's something about the pattern that's appealing to the brain from a distance.

These images hopefully look representational and and realistic and accurate.

And at the same time, I hope that when people actually are in front of them in person and can see the details, that that can work on another level.

And it's almost abstract.

When I paint, I'm putting my paint in, I use, you know, to cool the cans and lower the pressure.

I'm using certain kinds of carbs and, you know, and if it's hot out, you know, it'll change the pressure of the can.

And so there's a lot going on there.

But at the same time, I'm also kind of using the paint in a way that comes out of what you would call a traditional graffiti esthetic.

You know, like I'm using these caps that are known as New York fat cats and they're kind of like iconic paint valves in graffiti, you know, historically, you know, and the way that they make the the paint spray out in this kind of hollow circle or ring of paint, but I'm kind of stretching it to its limit.

This technique has been kind of evolving over time.

And if you could look at the one surviving piece that I painted here in Wynwood from 2009 and, you know, just over the years, I think I've, I, I keep trying to find ways to make it more difficult and time consuming for myself now.

But I have been actually, because I keep trying to push it and stretch it as far as I can.

And I think the challenge of of painting these pieces, you know, and constantly trying to figure out new ways to make them more beautiful is just kind of a never ending task for me.

It's also, you know, this is an important project for me because I haven't painted in Miami in over a decade.

You know, the first time that I painted out here was in 2007.

There was already graffiti art in this area, no question.

But I think as far as I know, 2007 was maybe the first year that there was really kind of a larger scale organized mural project.

We always hear about street art, and I think Wynwood is kind of world famous now, is kind of the epicenter of street art.

And, you know, I always point out that the first time I actually heard the term street art here in Miami in 2008, we were all just like, What is that?

Because we were all coming out of a background in graffiti and and, you know, fine art.

But, you know, we were we call it graffiti.

You know, I think from my own experience, that was a turning point in this whole movement.

I never really liked the term street art.

I never really embraced it.

But, you know, it is what it is and so much goes into it.

You know, I really see it as I'm putting love into the art, which sounds very fuzzy and cliche, but it's really sincere.

It's almost spiritual, it's almost religious.

You know, it's it's it's my life's purpose.

That's all the time we have for Gallery America.

Thank you so much for joining us.

Remember, as always, you can see past episodes on our archives, head to OETA Dot TV, slash Gallery America and get Oklahoma art news every day from Gallery America Online.

You can get it Facebook and on Instagram at OETAGallery.

And don't forget about our Mural Hub OETA dot TV slash Oklahoma murals for information on the artists we met today and great Oklahoma murals to see we'll see you next time till then- stay arty Oklahoma