MesaZona POV: An Artist With A Social Conscience

Your MesaZona watched in real time over the course of days unidentified figures using a hydraulic lift and scaffolding to scale the heights of a 35-foot high blank concrete wall at the Mesa Contemporary Arts Museum.
What appeared is titled "Desert Rose: New Generations".
It's a beautiful eye-catching work of public art in the Creative Place Making urban landscape here downtown.
Temporary banners were previously used to announce exhibitions @ MCAM. This one looks permanent.

It is a commissioned exterior work and part of one of the four inside gallery exhibition spaces that opened to the public on Friday, May 13, 2016.
It's one thing just looking at art and passing by, but when we have the opportunity to meet and interact with a world-renowned artist here in The New Urban DTMesa that certainly "makes my day" happy to live downtown one block away from the Mesa Arts Center. Admittedly, the close proximity to an urban airspace is one consideration to have made the decision to live here.

More than 30 years ago [gosh, is yours truly dating himself?], spray-paint graffiti was considered vandalism and cracked-down on in New York City - it appeared everywhere spontaneously all over - on the sides of drab gray underground subway cars and above ground on public buildings next to empty unused lots and in densely-populated neighborhoods, low-income and high-income. There were campaigns to remove "graffiti", cans of spray paint were locked up behind closed doors, graffiti artists who "made their mark" were hunted down and arrested, until artists who emerged in the public eye became very popular and famous - there was no stopping them from expressing themselves with vibrant colors, images boundless and unrestrained right in-your-face wherever you went in New York City.

Yours truly had the pleasure to know more than a few now-called "aerosol artists" way back when art took a quantum leap rocking what was the art establishment.

Here on the scene in Mesa thirty years later, the artist known as "El Mac" made a huge public impression for sure.
On a personal level, he is one of the most humble and sublime major art figures yours truly has ever met.
At the opening reception ten days ago a friend of his who's a photographer told me he's a hermit, disappearing for days to create works-in-progress. That may be the case for an artist to make his personal space his own in act of creating art, but in public he doesn't hesitate to engage people in soft-spoken conversations when they want to meet him. Likewise with the many children who wanted to know more.
Here's a link to a nice article

LA muralist El Mac brings graffiti style to Mesa

"El Mac: Aerosol Exalted" features portraits of everyday people painted with street-art flair.

Kerry Lengel, The Republic | azcentral.com 7:16 a.m. MST May 20, 2016

 

http://www.azcentral.com/story/entertainment/arts/2016/05/20/el-mac-aerosol-exalted-mesa-arts-center/84623330/

Reach the reporter at kerry.lengel@arizonarepublic.com or 602-444-4896.