Creating murals isn't a simple task. How these 2 Phoenix artists put their mark on the city

Murals are a big part of how Phoenix communicates its identity as a city. Murals often appear on large walls or buildings, and the best ones seem inseparable from their surroundings. When you see them, it can be easy to assume they’ve just always been there. But for the artists that create these large-scale works of public art, that’s no simple task.

What goes into the process of treating the city as a canvas, and transferring your vision to a stucco fence or several stories of a high-rise building downtown? Antoinette Cauley and Giovannie Dixon are artists who’ve done well-known Phoenix murals — from Cauley’s 9-story portrait of James Baldwin downtown to Giovannie’s recreation of Jay-Z and Beyonce on 16th St. They stopped by the studio to talk through their creative process.

Sam Dingman

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KJZZ

Full conversation

ANTOINETTE CAULEY: My roots run so deep here. My family's been here for like 100 years. So I see every wall as an opportunity to impact the community in some way. Like what message am I trying to send? You know, for example, my Baldwin mural, it was going to be monumentous. So I wanted to create a metaphorical mirror for people in the community to see themselves in different ways.

SAM DINGMAN: On like a grand scale?

CAULEY: Yeah, and it's larger than life, you know? And I wanted people to see, especially Black children was like, who I kept like in my heart that whole time. I wanted them to see that like, wow, I'm so important that I am plastered nine stories high on this, you know, building.

DINGMAN: That seems like a really fascinating element of this. Like, when a mural is gonna happen, by virtue of the fact that it is public art and it's becoming part of the inherent landscape of the city. If you're going to put people in it, you want to think really carefully, I would imagine, about who those people are.

CAULEY: Oh, for sure.

DINGMAN: Because that's sending a message about who that city considers to be the people that are worthy of elevating to this grand stature.

GIOVANNIE DIXON: For sure.

DINGMAN: Giovannie, what about you? What do you see as the opportunity of the scale?

DIXON: It all just depends, man, where it's at, where it's located. It's in an alley. Is it on a prominent street? Like, all these things play a factor into what should go there. There's elements on the wall. There's brick lines on the wall sometimes. Sometimes it's smooth. The color that's naturally there. This, yeah, there's a mural that I have, or a picture of a mural I have in studio right now. But that one has a light right above it, right above the face of the character. And I looked at that and immediately was like, okay, bet, perfect. That allows me to put the face right there under center, underneath that light.

DINGMAN: And just for listeners, I should describe the mural. I apologize if this feels reductive, but it's a young woman. She is smiling really widely. She's got her eyes closed. She's holding a rose out in front of her. head is tilted to the side. And as you were just describing, Giovannie, this ... light that was part of the existing wall is kind of just above her forehead. So the light really shines down and illuminates.

DIXON: And illuminates her face. And she's shiny, so she has a shiny bling to her face, basically, 'cause she's a Lego toy. And so at night, it looks like, oh my God, it looks like it's actually just shining the whole time. It's beautiful.

DINGMAN: So how do you both think about color when it comes to mural and is mural a form where? Million dollar question.

DIXON: Deep sigh, I'm like, it's a lot. Color is a lot, man.

CAULEY: Color is complex. I mean, I'm really big on incorporating the actual city, like the desert into my murals. And so I pay attention a lot to what's outside of the building. So, you know, with the Baldwin building, the sky was so blue, you know, around the building and the building was reflective. So I was like, I need to offset the blue of the sky, so I'm going to do fire colors, you know? And I use red as a power color anyways in the way that I dress or in my paintings. If you ever see red, it symbolizes power.

DINGMAN: I should say you have red nails.

CAULEY: Oh, yeah. For all the viewers who can't see, I have my power nails on right now. But that was how I decided which colors to use was what's gonna pop against that skyline.

DINGMAN: Another thing I was interested to ask you both about is in terms of subject matter, are there things that you feel work best in mural when it comes to like landscape versus portraiture or incorporating the two together? And are there things you would like to see more mural work built around that we don't have in the city currently?

CAULEY: I want to see more murals in general. Like when I lived in Berlin, the city was covered in, I mean, the graffiti and the murals, it was everywhere. But I would also like to see more diversity. I don't really have like a subject matter per se. I just want to see everybody represented in different ways.

DINGMAN: Which would imply also, I would imagine, just more people doing it.

CAULEY: Yeah, for sure. And there's a lot of people doing it, but I think, you know, we had this conversation the other day, funnily enough, but like a lot of people are doing it just for the money. There's no like message behind it.

DIXON: Greedy, man, yeah, it's very money hungry right now, unfortunately.

CAULEY: Yeah, I think there's a lot of money to be made in murals, and I think people are seeing that at a high level, though.

DIXON: Yeah, and I think it's taken away from the culture. Now it's just sitting there and it's only this money grab versus they're like, hold on, we used to come together and use this as our voice to say something and, you know, bring protests and stuff, et cetera, but it's now just like corporate.

DINGMAN: I'm curious for both of you when it comes to actually getting the mural on the wall? Do you start with a smaller scale version of it and then use, I don't know, math or geometry to like figure out how to put it up on the wall? Or do you just work directly on the wall itself?

CAULEY: There's like so many ways to approach this, honestly. I am such an old school human being. I love just pencil and paper. But as projects get bigger, I had to level up, and I got an iPad, so I'm like, Oh, how did I get an iPad?

DIXON: Oh god, no, not an iPad. Don't make my life easier, oh my god.

CAULEY: But I use a program called Procreate, and I'll just take a photo of the wall, and then I'll do mock-ups with that, and then I use that mock-up when it's time to actually grid the wall. Actually, Giovannie's the one who taught me how to do murals, but yeah, so my process starts on the iPad with Procreate, And then it goes into gridding the wall out and hand sketching everything with chalk onto the walls. And then starting to lay all the paint down.

DINGMAN: Giovannie, talk about what you taught Antoinette.

CAULEY: Everything.

DIXON: Everything. I mean, it's very simple, man. I started with Procreate. I have it on my phone as well. So that's what also makes it easy. So I'll take a photo of the wall. Then you superimpose your image on top of it. you use those marks to see where like the eyeball will land or the nose will land or where it starts and stops and stuff like that.

So it just makes your process a lot quicker so you're not sitting there trying to like sketch and always take a bunch of steps back and look at it. Does it look good? Is my proportions right? It just kind of cuts that time down. And then there's other ways, projectors, all these other ways to do it as well.

CAULEY: 3D goggles. Virtual goggles.

DIXON: Meta.

DINGMAN: Wow.

CAULEY: Where it projects the sketch for you and no matter how you move, it just stays still. I haven't tried it yet.

DIXON: I have. I don't like it personally. I feel so disconnected. That's the opposite purpose of why I even do large scale. It's this full body experience for me that I enjoy. It's connectivity that, and I'm like, I feel like there's a disconnection.

DINGMAN: One of the things I think is really beautiful about murals is that most forms of art that I interact with, whether it's a painting or a podcast or a book or a movie, I am seeking that thing out. But usually a mural happens to me. I'm just moving through the city and there it is.

DIXON: Yeah.

DINGMAN: Is that part of your thought process in making a mural?

DIXON: It is for me. There was a phrase that I heard somebody say a long time ago and they were like, murals are 30 mile per hour art. And it was like, so most people are driving by and catching a mural, are you capturing that person's attention fast enough for them to actually want to maybe stop.

If you get someone to pull over, stop their car, and go to your wall, that's a big deal. I feel like that's a big deal to me. That's one of those achievements. It's like somebody comes to me and I'm like, Man, I pulled over in my car to go see this. I love those reactions. I'm like, Yo, OK. I love that what I'm doing is really speaking to somebody. It's hitting people. So I definitely think about that element.

DINGMAN: As we were talking about earlier, When you make a mural, you're making something that becomes part of the fabric of the city. And in a lot of cases, it's gonna be there 10, 20, 30, hopefully, you know, 50 years, who knows?

DIXON: Who knows?

DINGMAN: How do you think about that element of it, the time factor and the fact that you're really, you're putting your mark on the face of the city in this very particular way?

CAULEY: I think about it ... I kind of go in to every mural with the understanding that it's temporary. I think very rarely do you get like a permanent mural and it's just a part of the game.

DIXON: There's so many people that get so bothered by a mural being covered or even getting dissed. I'm like, even the mere fact that these are on the street. If the city or the streets don't like it, it's going to get tagged. That makes sense. But it's out and open. Be prepared that might happen to your work. And if so, just be ready to go fix it. Or be quiet and let it and just let them take it over. You know what I mean? There's either one, you know, so I don't know.

But I feel like people get so attached to these and I'm just like, dude, that building can go tomorrow and it's gone. So it's like, I don't know why the attachment is so strong, but ...

CAULEY: I think people are emotionally dysregulated. So in general.

DIXON: True.

DINGMAN: I wonder why?

DIXON: Right.

CAULEY: I don't blame him right now, but even with my, you know, my regular work that I make in my studio, I create it with the understanding that it will be gone one day. And I'm okay with that. I view every project as a release of something, of an emotion, a feeling, a thought, and all of those things are fleeting.

DINGMAN: Well, I've been speaking with the Phoenix muralists, Antoinette Cawley and Giovannie. You can see both of their work all over the city. Thank you both so much for this conversation.

CAULEY: Thank you.

DIXON: Thank you.