Nilé Livingston

Executive Producers: Tom Grahsler
Producers: Michael Olcott, Michaela Winberg
Engineers: Charlie Kaier, Al Banks, Tina Kalikay, Adam Staniszewski
Mixing: Charlie Kaier
Tile Art: Justin Nagtalon
Theme Song: SNACKMFTIME by SNACKTIME

Special thanks to Louisa Boyle, Naomi Brito, Aubrie Costello, Grant Hill, Mike Mehalick, Alejandro Miyashiro, Sarah Moses, Maiken Scott, Jason Andrew Turner, and Kayla Watkins.

Art Outside is a production of WHYY.

[STREET SOUNDS]

NILÉ LIVINGSTON: It’s a mural about pride, and I feel a strong sense of pride. I feel really good. I like that it’s bright and vibrant. I went through a couple different styles, and essentially, we landed on a style that’s really native to my hand.

CONRAD BENNER, HOST: From WHYY, this is Art Outside, a podcast about the art in our public spaces — and the people who create it. I’m your host, Conrad Benner.

Right now, we’re standing outside of a five-story mural in Philadelphia’s Gayborhood, talking with the artist who designed it, Nilé Livingston.

NL: So I feel great. I also am proud that it’s a mural that’s predominantly about Black people and queer people and folks on the margins, and that it offers more representation.

CB: Nilé is a lifelong Philadelphian with creativity in their family history, and a commitment to supporting and uplifting community. In this episode, Nilé is going to show us what it takes to create the murals that Philadelphia is known for.

[MUSIC]

You are kind of like a Philly legend, you and your family. So your grandfather, Walter R. Livingston, Jr. is a notable architect from Philadelphia. And actually, the 4600 block of Locust Street was actually renamed Livingston way off of your grandfather and your grandmother. So what did it feel like to grow up with this sort of legacy, if you even knew the weight of it at all?

NL: Yeah, my grandfather was very loving, so I mostly just knew him as pop pop. He would make this sound that I can’t make, but it was like a clicking sound. A lot of my cousins lived on the same block as me, and we could hear that sound to know, like, he’s walking up the street or nearby, and we would, like, go over and say hi to him.

CB: Is he known for, like, certain buildings around the city?

NL: Yeah, he designed the Clef Club on Broad Street, which is a place where jazz musicians play. He also designed Zion Baptist Church, where Reverend Leon Sullivan preached. And it’s like a triangle, pyramid-shaped building. And he designed OIC, the national office, which is also on Broad Street in North Philadelphia. So he did a lot.

I think it’s what, in a way, subconsciously, probably got me interested in public art, because it’s about going into the community, learning what will resonate with the folks that live there, and designing something that will be impactful for that particular space.

Although he’s amazing and inspirational to me, I try not to follow after him in a way. Like I still want to build a name for myself.

CB: Nilé’s love of art helped break them out of their shell.

NL: If you look at photos of me as a kid, you’ll see a group of people, and then you’ll see me off to the side, ‘cause I was oftentimes in my own world. I was always sitting there doodling whenever I had a break from doing anything else. And I think also, as an adult now, my practice forces me to just pay attention to things happening around me, and to not be in my own head and in my own world.

I think I really fell in love with visual arts from the Philadelphia Mural Arts program.

[MUSIC]

I remember going to CAPA High School, and this girl came out of school covered from head to toe in paint. And I was asking her, you know, ‘What do you do that you have so much paint all over your clothes?’ And she was like, ‘I’m in the Mural Arts program.’

CB: Mural Arts is the largest public arts program in the nation. They’ve created thousands of projects across the city — with about 100 new ones in the pipeline each year.

NL: I always admired the public art. I thought it was really accessible. When my dad would take my sister and I to the Art Museum, instead of going inside, my sister and I liked climbing the statues on the outside. We liked looking at things that were just public and easy to see, and weren’t behind closed walls where you had to, like, be quiet. I went with her to the Mural Arts program, and I loveD the class that I took. And at that time they only had a program for kids that needed community service hours.

CB: OK.

NL: And so they told me I couldn’t join. And so I came back the next day with my mother, and I brought a portfolio with me, and she talked to them behind closed doors and really advocated for me being in this program. And they let me in.

CB: They stuck with Mural Arts through high school. Then Nilé went off to college. After they graduated, they had trouble getting a full-time job in the creative space. But they still wanted to make art. So they decided to paint a mural at a city rec center.

NL: So I started exploring mural painting more, and picked that up from my high school years. And me and a childhood friend went around to Lowe’s and Home Depot, and we asked for donations of supplies and paint. We went around to barbershops and corner stores and churches and community centers, and we got volunteers to come out and help. And we worked on a volunteer mural project in North Philly at the Cecil B. Moore Playground.

[MUSIC]

CB: You and your friend are going around getting all these materials to build murals. I’m just trying to think, like, you’re out of college. You could be doing anything. Why take on such a big effort?

NL: Oh, I loved it. It was, for me, a passion project. It didn’t feel like work. I worked at Urban Outfitters during the day, and then in the evening time, I would go off to the mural site to do this. And it was fun for me.

CB: It was fun, but it wasn’t easy.

NL: There were definitely many challenges. I think one challenge was, before we started to get the people in the playground involved, we would start painting directly on the wall and then at night graffiti artists would come and paint over what we just did.

CB: This can happen! Sometimes, if you put up public art without engaging the community first, people will get upset — and take back the wall in their own way.

But Nilé wasn’t discouraged. Instead, they leaned in.

NL: We realized, like, we have to invite people in to help us paint. Another challenge was, just, the wall just needed repair and work. So while the wall was being smoothed out, we were able to paint indoors on parachute cloth. Because it’s the playground, it’s mostly younger people and kids that wanted to come out and help us. So making sure we mixed paint in advance, and we were able to project the design onto parachute cloth and trace the outline.

CB: Nilé and their team were resourceful.

NL: It looked like a coloring book. So we just handed a kid, like, a container of paint and then told them, like, what spot to paint in with that solid shape or color. And they would fill that in. And then we brought it all together and you stand back, it starts to form different faces and something that you can recognize. We also didn’t have access to scaffolding, so we used just ladders.

CB: You mentioned parachute cloth. For the novice, what is that?

NL: Parachute cloth, it’s almost like canvas, but it’s really durable and resilient to weather, and it’s something that’s nice to paint on and then glue to a wall with nova gel.

CB: It’s basically like painting a mural with wallpaper.

NL: Yeah, exactly.

CB: You paint it somewhere else, and then you can put it up.

Nilé made sure everyone had a place in the mural.

Visually, walk us through what some of these volunteer murals ended up looking like.

[MUSIC]

NL: My style naturally is bright and colorful and eye-catching. I talked to the folks in the playground, and they really wanted to see themselves reflected on the wall. So the first mural was, it showed kids playing. Because Jill Scott’s from that neighborhood, they want to see Jill Scott on the wall. They also wanted to make sure that the mural was inclusive of different body types. So we also showed what someone with a disability would look like playing basketball. So that mural, it really just was a reflection of that particular community.

CB: So through this volunteer mural, I’m guessing you got the attention of Mural Arts, and you’re back there doing this work with them?

NL: Yes, exactly.

CB: Wow.

CB: This community project propelled their career forward.

Since then, Nilé has created murals at concert venues and restaurants. They’ve done huge portraits of famous Black, queer people like James Baldwin and Grace Jones. They’ve made public art to encourage voting.

And now, they have their own creative business — a successful graphic design agency.

Can you talk about some of the work you’ve made through Creative Repute? Give us, like, some examples.

NL: So we worked with the William Way Community Center. They’re working on a capital campaign to raise a couple million dollars to renovate their building, so that they can provide more services to the folks.

CB: It’s, for those who don’t know, the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender community center here in Philadelphia, and they do so much work.

NL: Yes. We’ve designed the branding for that campaign, and it’s called Build the Way. So that involved logo, style guide, light marketing recommendations.

CB: You know, you have this successful business, it’s growing, you have incredible clients, you’re doing really interesting, dynamic work with a crew of two dozen-plus people. Maybe this is silly, but why even continue to pursue this practice of mural making? Why is that important?

[MUSIC]

NL: Oh, I would do this no matter what, if I was getting paid or not. It doesn’t, like, it would be volunteer work if I had to. I absolutely love doing it. It’s life-affirming for me, and it doesn’t always feel like work. It feels meditative. The actual task of creating the art and understanding what people are saying to me, and making sure that that translates into the art, is something that I enjoy a lot.

CB: This is why I wish everyone had a creative side, because what you just said, the meditative thing, I’ve heard that described as, like, flow state too. Can you describe that state you get into?

NL: Yeah, so it’s like when you don’t know how much time has gone by, like you’re just in the flow of just doing something, and sometimes like you don’t even have words to put to it. Like your body and mind are just moving. And when you take a step back and come back to it, then you can assess like, how was that?

CB: How do you feel after?

NL: For me, I oftentimes feel like it was a relief. I think it’s like something working through me, and it feels really good after I’m done. I don’t know how to explain it, honestly.

CB: Coming up, we’ll talk about their most recent project — a landmark new mural for Philly’s Gayborhood. That’s next, on Art Outside.

[MIDROLL BREAK]

CB: Welcome back to Art Outside. I’m Conrad Benner.

Today, Nilé’s taking us out to their most recent mural, a giant, colorful tribute to Philly’s famous ballroom scene.

[STREET SOUNDS]

NL: We’re at 13th Street, in between Spruce and Pine. So we’re in the Gayborhood in Philly.

CB: This is Philadelphia’s historic LGBTQ+ neighborhood, right in the heart of Center City. And it’s the perfect spot for this mural.

This idea came directly from people in the community, who submitted a suggestion form through Mural Arts asking them to celebrate Philly’s 30+ years of Ballroom culture.

[MUSIC]

NL: So, it’s a collage of various faces and figures that are in the ballroom community. It’s really bright and colorful. Instead of using skin tones, each person is a hue from the rainbow. So for example, we have a blue person, green person, yellow person, red person. The background is also just really bright and colorful. There are swirls and drips and splatters throughout the mural. And when you’re taking a step back, I think it’s extremely eye-catching in this particular area of the city. And then you come closer, I think you could spend a lot of time with it because there’s a lot to see.

CB: At its core, Ballroom is a Black and brown, LGBTQ+ art form. It’s an underground competition that tests participants in different “categories,” like their fashion, “face,” aka their make-up, and dance moves. People compete under different “houses,” which are basically chosen families of queer and trans people.

In the early days, the Ballroom scene could be the only family many people had. The culture has become more mainstream recently with shows like Pose and Beyonce’s Renaissance album.

[SOUND FROM BEYONCE’S “ALIEN SUPERSTAR”]

There are a lot of murals in the Gayborhood that honor queer history or queer life. None of them specifically highlight and celebrate, like, a particular part of, like, Black and brown queer culture. So that’s one thing that’s really important about this mural.

NL: Yeah, we wanted the mural to be extremely authentic, and definitely show real people from the community, people that have unfortunately passed away due to various causes, as well as people that are still living, and the legendary originators of the Philadelphia ballroom scene. These are honestly everyday people that made a path for themselves despite any lack of support from external fanfare.

[MUSIC]

CB: The real people in the mural are painted from archival photos taken in Philly’s ballroom spaces.

NL: I went through past ballroom invites, photos that people pulled out of their shoe boxes, and photo albums in their homes. I was looking for things that could be, for one, easily recognizable, because although this is a really authentic mural, it’s still about ballroom. So the more dancing and expression that I could find the better. I was looking for clarity, because these photos were taken in the early ‘80s, a lot of them were, so they were really blurry. And on top of that, people took pictures with their cell phones, so, just, warped as well.

CB: Oh, like early 2000s cell phone photos?

NL: Yeah.

CB: Oh, wow.

It took a lot for this mural to come to fruition. There were two years of community meetings to get approvals from Mural Arts, the wall owner, and to make sure Philly’s ballroom community felt represented in the design.

Then there was the actual painting. Murals this size are never done alone.

NL: Yeah, the wall is just so massive that it’s better to do this in a collaborative way. So I got to work with five artists that had their hand in actually translating the design onto the wall. The assistant artists placed a projector as high as they could, and projected the design onto the wall, made sure the aspect ratio was correct, and that it didn’t warp. Then they traced the design onto the wall. And similar to a coloring book, you had a black and white image in front of you. And then using, kind of, like, a paint-by-numbers system, they were able to fill in some blanks with colors. They also printed out reference photos, so that when they were on the scaffolding, they could get closer and look at the details, and they could reference what was in front of them to get more of the details in.

CB: For Nilé, making a mural is so much more than just putting paint on a wall.

NL: Any chance to offer more representation is great for me, because I think it’s important just to show Black people in a way that shows them uplifted. It shows Black people with a sense of pride and joy. So, for me, I feel like it was an easy yes to take on this project. It’s also fun, honestly, it’s what I love doing. So that’s why I’m here.

[MUSIC]

CB: Next time, on the season finale of Art Outside…

[SPRAY PAINT SOUNDS]

JOSE BUSTAMANTE: The essence of graffiti is illegality. It’s doing it for you by you in places that you’re not supposed to.

CB: We talk to the graffiti artist Busta, about how he started his practice in a small city in Colombia.

JB: You see graffiti in the littlest town of the towns in Colombia.

CB: We learn the logistics of being a graffiti artist.

[SPRAY PAINT SOUNDS]

JB: It’s crazy because it looks messy. But every stroke that I throw has a purpose.

CB: And find out why non-commissioned art, like his, is healthy for cities.

JB: There are places that are city owned, that are pretty much abandoned or, you know, just big gray spaces that, you know, they should be intervened.

CB: That’s next time, on Art Outside.

[THEME MUSIC]

This is Art Outside. I’m your host, Conrad Benner.

Our producers are Michael Olcott and Michaela Winberg. Our engineer is Charlie Kaier, with engineering help from Al Banks, Tina Kalakay, and Adam Staniszewski. Our executive producer is Tom Grahsler.

Our theme song is SNACKMFTIME by SNACKTIME. Our tile art was created by El Toro, aka Justin Nagtalon.

Special thanks to Louisa Boyle, Naomi Brito, Aubrie Costello, Grant Hill, Mike Mehalick, Alejandro Miyashiro, Sarah Moses, Maiken Scott, Jason Andrew Turner, and Kayla Watkins.

Art Outside is a production of WHYY. Find us wherever you get your podcasts.