USA TODAY International Edition
‘ An outpouring of public art’
Hundreds of Kobe Bryant murals fill LA landscape and beyond
LOS ANGELES – Close to midnight one day last week, a jogger stopped in the middle of a downtown street and surveyed a peculiar scene.
A video compilation of Kobe Bryant highlights was being projected onto the side of a four- story building.
Two homeless people were sleeping on the sidewalk, oblivious to the footage of Bryant’s drives, dunks and gamewinning shots. They were unaware of a man spraying blue paint on the side of the wall.
Even in the dim lighting, the jogger could tell this was not a delinquent defacing a building that is a notorious target for graffiti.
This was part of a phenomenon displayed on walls across Southern California, the rest of the United States and in more than 30 countries that include Uganda, Haiti and Croatia.
Hundreds of murals have been painted in honor of Bryant, the former Lakers star, and Gianna, his 13- year- old daughter better known as Gigi, along with seven other people who died in a helicopter crash almost a year ago – Jan. 26, 2020.
Tehrell Porter, who was working on a Kobe Bryant mural about a mile from Staples Center as midnight approached, took a break to talk to the onlooker. The jogger explained he is part of a group that every Monday runs 8.24 miles – a nod to Bryant’s jersey numbers, 8 and 24 – on a route featuring Bryant murals.
There are more than three dozen of them within walking distance of Staples Center, where Bryant starred for the Lakers for 20 seasons.
“I’m still trying to grasp it,” Jonas Never, a street artist in Los Angeles, said of the mural madness. “I’ve never seen an outpouring of public art of anyone in the history of the world.”
It’s been driven in part by economics. For example, Porter said he flew to Los Angeles from his home in Hawaii after being contracted by Neman Brothers & Associates, a fabric company that hoped a Bryant mural would deter socalled taggers from covering the wall with graffiti.
Many artists painted multiple murals, according to Never, who in 2015 painted one of the first murals of Bryant in Los Angeles.
“Some people did it for paint and time,” he said. “Some people did it just out of pocket. I’m sure some people did it for huge money.”
No one understands the scope of the mural phenomenon like Mike Asner does. He created kobemural. com, which includes a map accompanied by photos and location of more than 400 murals.
“There are many more than that,” Asner said. “There are probably murals in every corner of the world that I don’t know about.”
He is a lifelong Lakers fan from Los Angeles who considered Bryant a hero and has found new heroes – the artists who have painted the murals. “A lot of them have Mamba mentality,” Asner said, referring to Bryant’s mantra for his relentless work ethic that’s evident around Los Angeles and beyond.
4566 Pickford St., Los Angeles
Jules Muck, a street artist who once angered Larry Bird by painting a mural of him with tattoos he does not have, said her phone started ringing not long after Los Angeles County officials confirmed reports of Bryant’s death.
“There was this girl, she goes by Miss Crazy, and she was just like, ‘ I know you’re going to paint him,’ ” Muck said. “I was like, ‘ Yeah, on the spot, I’ll do it right now.’ And she just walked outside her house to a corner store and asked them if I could paint it and he said yeah.”
Just like that, Muck said, she was driving to Pickford Market, a corner grocery store, with necessary supplies: ladder, air brushes and about a dozen cans of spray paint.
“And during the ride over there is when I heard Gigi was with ( Bryant)” in the helicopter crash, Muck said. “And so that formulated the plan.”
The wall she was cleared to paint included other street art. But Muck found enough room for a portrait of Bryant and Gigi, both smiling, and a banner that reads, “Forever Daddy’s Girl.”
Working at fast- break speed, Muck took less than 90 minutes to complete the mural, during which residents from the neighborhood gathered.
“By the time I finished, like, we were all crying. Super intense. I did end up giving people some hugs. Obviously this was before COVID, so people were coming up and saying thank you.”
A day later, as word of her mural spread, Muck’s Instagram page followers jumped from 50,000 to 90,000.
“There were so many people asking me to paint more, to the point where I was getting upset because I was painting a memorial everyday,” Muck said, acknowledging she got paid for most of the murals. “I painted like nine in a row and I said, ‘ I can’t focus on this anymore, the death thing,’ and so I did hold off for another month or so before one of the last ones I painted.
“A lot I handed off to other artists and spread it around. I mean, everyone wanted him and wanted to be commemorating him.”
1525 South Broadway, Los Angeles
In September, at home in Kailua, Hawaii, Tehrell Porter was checking the listings on beautifyearth. com, which matches muralists with customers.
Bingo: Neman Brothers & Associates Inc., a textile company headquartered in downtown LA, was looking for a massive Kobe mural to cover three sides of its building often plastered with graffiti.
Porter, 30, negotiated a budget of $ 9,000, of which almost $ 2,000 went to beautifyearth. com, without fully understanding the challenges or the amount of time it would take.
Ten days into the project, Porter arrived at the building to discover graffiti covering his partially finished work. He said he tracked down the kids responsible for it and persuaded them to stop. Since then he’s tried different kinds of community outreach, including holding weekly painting lessons where children get a chance to help paint the mural, and arranging for a DJ and taco truck.
Every night, Porter said, he projects movies – and sometimes Bryant highlights – on the side of the building.
Now, he said, someone in the neighborhood buys him lunch nearly everyday.
But the challenges have continued. When the budget proved too small, he was kicked out of his Airbnb because he couldn’t pay the rent and then moved in with a friend, according to Porter.
He had to take side jobs to earn money he needed to send home to his pregnant wife and their two young children.
“I can eat at Jack In The Box every day, but my kids need food,” he said.
One day when he was almost broke, Porter said, a butterfly landed on the air brush he was using. Not long after, the owner from a marijuana dispensary across the street offered him $ 4,200 for signage work and gave Porter a place to store his equipment.
Then Porter found a photograph that shows Bryant has a butterfly tattoo on his right shoulder.
“There’s been some supernatural ( stuff) going on,” Porter said.
Still, he said he has had to draw on
Bryant’s perseverance and determination, regularly working 16 hours or more a day.
Asner said the mural, which will cover three sides of the four- story building, might be the longest in Southern California. Porter said he has used more than 100 gallons of paint and expects to use about 300 gallons before completing the project, likely by the middle of February.
But as midnight approached one day last week, Porter stood back and surveyed a section of the mural.
“Man, I really love how this is coming out,” he said. “I’m so excited because you’re sharing this with all of LA and all of the world at some point.”
1337 Lebanon St., Los Angeles
In an alley less than a mile from Staples Center, hundreds of fans grieving Bryant have congregated at a mural showing Bryant in celebration. The mural was painted in 2015 by Jonas Never and much of it is now covered by messages scrawled in permanent marker.
“You hear about it and you think it’s going to be someone from the neighborhood writing graffiti on the wall,” said Never, 38. “So when I saw it was like, ‘ We love you, Kobe. We miss you,’ like that kind of stuff. I was like, ‘ OK, there’s something to it.’ ”
The building owner called and asked if Never wanted to clean up the mural and paint over the messages.
“And we declined,” Never said. “People from all over the world I’m sure have written on it. That definitely shows the power, what public art and memorial murals and Kobe in particular murals can be.”
Never said he painted the mural “fully illegal.” Meaning he did not get permission to paint the side of the building, although it’s become a prized piece of art.
After Bryant’s death, Never said, he was contracted to paint another mural – with confetti raining down on Bryant – at the nearby Grand Central Market food court. He said he got paid enough to compensate him for his time and materials and that the situation probably varied for each muralist.
“I’d say a lot of people did it for free and a lot of people did it for money,” he said. “I don’t mind people making money off it. If you’re spending that much time on it for free, I think that’s sometimes when people start cutting corners or trying to bang it out. Because you can’t afford to spend the time you should be able to if you’re doing it out of pocket. Paint’s expensive, time’s expensive, travel’s expensive. We live in an expensive world.”
Recently, Never said, he was driving to the paint store and within a mile came across three Bryant murals he’d never seen before.
“It’s literally mind blowing,” he said. “It’s really cool that Kobe inspired such a movement. It could just be his Mamba mentality.”