Mexico’s mural art is getting a modern makeover. Former graffiti taggers and graphic designers have joined forces in a cooperative called Street Art Chilango, who paint walls with Star Wars characters and hype their work on social media.
Founded in March 2013 by Jenaro de Rosenzweig and Alejandro Revilla, the group’s name uses the slang word for things from Mexico City.
Their murals aren’t only appearing on brick-and-mortar walls. Rosenzweig – who goes by his artist name, Jenaro – vigorously promotes the team’s artwork on social networks and the group’s website, streetartchilango.com. The group has more than 165,000 “likes” on Facebook, 72,000 followers on Instagram, and 9,000 followers on Twitter.
“We have the muscle of the social network and the brains to put the artists to work,” says Jenaro.
In April 2013, he launched the hashtag “#streetartchilango” so that anyone using Instagram could plot street-art locations on the site’s interactive Google map.
“People embraced it and started using it,” he says. Suddenly, “I started meeting every artist there is”.
As the virtual map attracted attention, Jenaro also designed a Mexico City walking tour that visits many of the online locations. The group still organises tours most weekends.
Though many of them started as graffiti taggers, group members can now earn a living from splashing walls with their paint.
In recent weeks, Street Art Chilango artist Andrik Figueroa Barreto, who signs his work as Andrik Noble, has produced several Star Wars-themed murals, including a 60-foot-long Stormtrooper mural at the Mercado Michoacan.
“I don’t have any studio. Everything is in the street,” says the artist, whose hands, T-shirt, and shorts were covered in paint smudges of a dozen colours.
Business owner Pascual Medina Ortiz smiles as he pointed out a spray-painted image of Princess Leia on the front of his shop in the Condesa neighbourhood. “Now a lot of people are coming just to see the art.”
Two miles away, fellow Chilango artist Beatriz Avila Haro sits on scaffolding 10 feet in the air as she applied strokes of black paint to a white wall.
Ricardo del Razo, the architect who commissioned that project, says the 12-foot-tall mural will show a woman pressing a pencil to the drawing board, “devising how to solve problems”.
Murals and street art have a long history in Mexico. Beginning in the 1920s, Diego Rivera, David Siqueiros and Jose Orozco painted public buildings with social and political messages, establishing murals as a pre-eminent Mexican art form.
“So painting walls was already cool in Mexico,” says Jenaro.
The group’s next step will come in November at the Art Basel festival in Miami, where Jenaro and Avila intend to display a mural to an international audience. “We are going to create new stuff that will blow the whole world’s minds open,” Jenaro says.