The Pow! Wow! factor Artists from around the world bringing street-art cred to LB

Cory Bilicko
Managing Editor

Long Beach joined a colorful global art scene this week as a score of volunteer street artists from around the world took over the exterior walls of historic buildings to create large-scale murals.
For the week-long event, Pow! Wow!, a Hawaii-based arts organization, has dispersed muralists and installation artists throughout Long Beach to give facelifts to structures like the Expo Arts Center in Bixby Knolls and the Dolly Varden Hotel downtown.
Founded by visual artists Jasper Wong and Kamea Hadar, Pow! Wow! was originally centered around an event in Hawaii around Valentine’s Day, but it has evolved into a global network of artists that organize gallery shows, lecture series, schools for art and music, mural projects, concerts and live-art projects spanning the globe. Its organizers say the network now boasts over a hundred artists and is expanding to include projects in Taiwan, Israel, Singapore, Jamaica, Washington D.C., Guam, New Zealand, Germany and other locales.
The City of Long Beach hosted a preview event Tuesday outside the Dolly Varden Hotel, where the sketch of that particular mural had been completed and painting was about to begin. Wong and Hadar were in attendance, as were: Long Beach Mayor Robert Garcia; Julia Huang, Pow! Wow! director for Long Beach; Ron Nelson, executive director of the Long Beach Museum of Art; Steve Goodling, president and CEO for the Long Beach Convention & Visitors Bureau; and several of the artists affiliated with the event.

Video by: Denny Cristales
In an interview with the Signal Tribune, Hadar said Pow! Wow! originated with a small gallery exhibit that Wong had organized.
“He owned a small gallery in Hong Kong, and it was a show that was open to the public while the artists collaborated,” Hadar said. “So, it was about two things: collaboration between artists and opening that process to the public. So, he did that, and he wanted to do one in Hawaii, so he called me— I went to high school with Jasper— and he said, ‘Hey, I want to do this thing— I don’t know what to name it,’ so we had a lot of different names, and he ended up naming it Pow! Wow!, from one of the comic-book inspired pieces in the original show.”

Hadar said the duo began working on Pow! Wow! in 2010 and had their first event in 2011.
“Back then, it was just a small warehouse show in a gallery,” Hadar said. “We weren’t even doing any murals then. It just kind of exploded into this monster.”
Hadar said he is “ecstatic” about how the event has taken off.
“We’re not just creating murals, we’re creating culture,” he said. “All these artists we bring together, a lot of them become lifelong friends. So many times we hear, ‘I knew so-and-so by email, but I never got to meet him, and now we’re best friends.’ So, that’s what we’re all about— this big family that we’re building, this big network, spreading it around the world.”
Fafi, an artist from Paris, France, was also among those creative individuals at Tuesday’s preview, and, when asked her last name, declared, “Nobody cares about that!”
When asked how the Pow! Wow! folks found out about her work, her answer was simple— “I’m famous!”
Fafi, who will be creating an art piece outside Lyon’s Art Supply downtown, had worked on the Hawaii edition of Pow! Wow! a few months ago and was invited to participate in this week’s festivities, as well as the upcoming version in Tokyo. Although, during the preview event Tuesday, she didn’t yet know for certain exactly which ones she would be bringing to life in her work, she did know her creation would involve the characters that comprise her trademark.
“I’m going to do an installation with flowers and the cut-out pieces of my characters,” she said, adding that, in Hawaii, she had created a similar piece, from which spectators would steal objects. “They steal the characters, and I don’t care,” she said. “It’s part of the game.”
Meanwhile, uptown in Bixby Knolls, the Expo Arts Center on Atlantic Avenue is getting the street-art treatment from a more local artist— Push, a Los Angeles native.
This week, he is creating an abstract mural on the north side of the building, and Blair Cohn, executive director of the Bixby Knolls Business Improvement Association, which is located just inside, is pleased with that approach.

“It’s an abstract design, so it’s all criss-crosses and stuff, so he’s just putting all his lines in right now,” Cohn said Tuesday afternoon, adding that Push is painting the mural alone. “He’s got a guy here taking pictures of him— documenting it, like a time-lapse kind of thing— but he’s a one-man show.”
Cohn said he first heard about Pow! Wow! coming to Long Beach a few months ago and was very excited about it. Originally, the north-side wall of the Expo was going to feature large-scale photos, but, upon getting news of the mural, Cohn decided to starch those images inside the building’s lobby instead.
“Then we got more bang for the buck, because we were able to save that exhibit and reserve the wall for [the mural],” he said. “By having the mural there, it’s all part of the big plan of transforming this building into the iconic building of the neighborhood— obviously, the art center for the neighborhood and community space. With the artist doing that side and then the Boy Scouts helping on the façade, and us going to repaint soon, the building will start to transform into the way we want it to. Really, that’s our goal— to make it the iconic building in Bixby Knolls.”
Around 7:00 Wednesday night, the sun was still glaring against the stark-white wall of the Expo, where Push was filling in his geometric shapes with red paint. He had an extra piece of clothing wrapped around his neck to block the harsh, early-summer sunlight as he worked.
In marked contrast to the other artists involved in Long Beach’s version of Pow! Wow!, Push is, by nature, reserved and even reluctant to be interviewed, even for a print story. However, with a bit of journalistic nudging, he was willing to open up a bit about his mural. Considering the expansive wall space, which is 35 feet by 100 feet, and the fact that he is working solo, it’s hard to fathom how he might be finished by the Friday deadline. And there’s one more thing.
“I started yesterday,” he said. “I got here a day late.”
Perhaps the fact that his design is indeed abstract will work in his favor, since there is often a freedom to such work.
“I just kind of made a grid and picked shapes that I wanted to do,” he said. “I couldn’t just do these shapes out of nowhere, just so random, [so] they’re all in somewhat of a pattern.”
Push, a self-taught artist, said he’ll be including about 12 different colors in the mural, using spray paint and rolling paint. That evening, he had about one half of the mural sketched out, while the other side was still blank.
“It’s not going to be a continuation [on that side], but it will be similar,” he explained. “It’ll probably be bigger chunks.”
When asked his age, Push initially paused to think, then said 38, almost in the form of a question. “Too old,” he said with a chuckle. “Too old to be doing this. I was just thinking today, ‘What 38-year-old would be doing this right now?’ It’s so hot, and my body’s just like ‘aah.'”
Cohn said that, initially, he was a bit concerned about what the subject matter of the mural would be, considering where the Expo Arts Center is located.
“At first, my only concern was, ‘Which artist would they assign?” Cohn said. “We had talked about how we’re right in the middle of a bedroom community and we couldn’t have any design that was way too far out there that would be offensive at all to the neighborhood. We obviously don’t want a woman in a bikini holding a machine gun— nothing too crazy-street-art like that. When we saw that it would be abstract, we said it’s perfect because it really matches the style and goes with the architecture. It’s just colorful and bright and, I think, really is a perfect match for right here.”