The Miami Art Blog by Heike Dempster

One of the guys from The London Police asked me and a bunch of other artists from all over the world to come to Miami and paint walls. It was curated together with a gallery from Amsterdam. It is me, Lister, The London Police and many other artists.

I am from New York. I am living in Brooklyn right now.

My art is always pretty figurative but it is always influenced by animal spirits and combines animals and people. It is very colorful and I always like to consider my women that I paint to be warriors around the street. They are warriors and protectors and animal spirits and kind of fierce ladies. I put them up around the streets in New York and wherever I travel.

I do a little bit of gallery work but I started out doing only street art.

I started painting the wall white just to buff it and then, in my buff, I kind of started playing around with shapes and it started to evolve. I was just playing with the shape of the wall and this just happened to evolve out of it. It is a woman and an animal that keeps transforming. First, it was a wolf and then it was a rat and now it looks like a kangaroo. It is evolving as I go. Very animalistic. It is a hybrid animal. It is a work in progress so we will see what happens.

There is a personal reason that I do not disclose but also, I lived in France for a year, and “elle” means “she” and when I started doing street art and graffiti there was a very limited woman’s presence and I wanted it to be known that I was a female presence and also that I was representing all of the women. I am actually starting this girl crew, “Garmy,” which is Girl Army, and I am trying to include all of the powerful street artists and graffiti artists. Really awesome women that are kicking ass in their field.

All over the world but not just street artists. Women who are really killing it in their fields anywhere. Like a support network. I am taking the idea of a crew from graffiti. We need to make our presence felt. When I put up a big “Elle” I hope that everyone can just feel that that represents them.

Definitely.

There are more of us but very few of us. It is pretty limited but I think we are coming up. We are about to take over from the men.

Street art comes from the graffiti scene and there are a lot less women in graffiti. They don’t really wanna go to jail. There are more muralists and street artists than graffiti artists. There are a lot of risks that you take doing graffiti.

I started with street art and then I actually got into graffiti. I saw street art when I first moved to New York about six years ago and fell in love. I was like, man, this is such a gift, and I really wanna do that. It started with street art and then I started to appreciate graffiti as well. I started to try using spray cans and realized that it is so technical. It is just so beautiful and amazing, the things that you can make with it, so I got really involved with that as well and now I do a little bit of both.

It is a mystery.