A Case for Using Street Art to Clean Up Dreary Stretches of the Bronx

Featured on nytimes.com

John Beltran found his muse in a graffiti-covered New York City that was broke, dirty and dangerous. He used to tag along as his father, a numbers runner and loan shark, made his rounds in El Barrio and the South Bronx in the 1970s. The streets were a revelation to him, a child who spent his days drawing pictures from the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Suddenly, what he saw in books couldn’t compete with what he found on walls.

Decades later, Mr. Beltran — now known as SinXero — is a mixed-media artist, painting abstract works whose textures reflect the crumbling buildings of his childhood and whose colors draw upon the rich palette of aerosol art. “Picasso had Guernica, I had the Bronx,” Mr. Beltran, 46, said. “What happened in Guernica affected Picasso and he painted that. Why can’t the socioeconomic situation I grew up in — the economic collapse of the Bronx — be part of what surfaces in my painting?”

That realization has fueled not only his personal work but also his determination to convert drab walls on commercial strips and side streets into alfresco galleries. Over the last three years he has enlisted street artists from New York and beyond to brighten the urban landscape. Last week, the graffiti artist Chris Ellis, who is known as Daze, painted a wall on Westchester Avenue in the Bronx that was made famous by the artists Seen and Duster in the 1983 graffiti documentary “Style Wars.”

To Mr. Beltran, this urge to create is not so different from what he saw as a child, when young graffiti artists had few outlets apart from walls and subway trains. He didn’t go to museums growing up. And even though he attended the High School of Art and Design, his stay was short-lived because of frequent fights and the threat of the Decepticons, a fearsome gang that preyed on teenagers in the 1980s.

After some detours, he went on to college, studying literature and learning photography and graphic design. He had a roster of clients for his design work, as well as a full-time job as a medical office supervisor on Park Avenue in Manhattan. But after growing tired of “helping other people achieve their dreams,” he decided about two years ago to become a full-time artist after being laid off from an office job.

Click here to read the full article.