Leon Reid

Leon Reid, aka Darius Jones, aka Verbs... chances are if you've been to New York or London in the last few years you've seen his work.  With his street art, Leon is contributing to the public space and attempting to bring peace to the world...




Chief Magazine: What were some of your earliest influences?

Science. My dad was into science, he’s an eye physician. I would draw spaceships, I was really into them. I’m taking it really far back here. Around adolescence I got into comic books, and then at around 15 I got into graffiti. My parents let me go to an art high school and there was graffiti on the walls and in the bathrooms and I thought that this would be a cool thing to be a part of. It’s something I felt I had an equal shot at being recognized at. Because, you know in the Western European canon of art, there’s not really too many places for minorities so felt that graffiti was the only art form that I would have an equal shot at. I could never see myself stepping foot into the gallery and being credited as an equal at all so I felt that graffiti was the way for me to go. So that was a major influence, and it took me here to New York City. Then I met a bunch of different artists here and it became street art. It’s kind of a complex way to get into what influenced me, but I have tons of different influences, not just art but music as well. Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, they make my hair stand on end. That’s what music does. If I go into a gallery and look at a painting, it doesn’t do that to me. So if I can make people’s hair stand on end, then I’ll be successful in a certain way.

So you’re trying to do that with visual art?

Yeah, if I could. And further than that now I’m trying to make art that hopefully will stop wars or people destroying each other. This is kind of a new development for me, so I can’t speak too at length about it. I’d like to contribute to society in the same way that my father did, which was healing people. Can art do this? This is a question that I’ve been asking myself. This is into the future now.

Where are you from originally? How did it shape you or contribute to your development?

Leon Reid: I was born in Richmond, Virginia in 1979, but I was raised in Cincinnati, Ohio. It’s a very conservative city, so being an artist I always felt like the odd man out or the odd kid out or sort of isolated in a sense. I started hanging out with a guy named Andre Hyland at a very early age in kindergarten and we were sort of art buddies, so I had a sort of kindred spirit. I still know him now, and we talk to each other very frequently. But Cincinnati, being as conservative as it is, didn’t really contribute to my artistic development. Anything I wanted to know I had to research myself. Cincinnati itself made me want to get out of Cincinnati.

What were you like as a kid, were you always artistic or did you find out one day by accident?

As a kid I always had some ability to convey images on paper that people were attracted to. So before I knew it, I had a bunch of kids around me saying, “Hey, draw me this, draw me that.” I was like their servant or something. I was the guy to go to if you wanted something cool on your paper or your binder or your bookbag. So ever since I remember, I always felt like a servant or someone that has to give something to people. I had it at a very early age and it’s stuck with me to the point where I feel like I have a duty now to keep giving things to the world. It’s a burden, but it’s also something I’m very proud of. It’s a double-edged sword in some cases.

Do you have any specific process that you go through, or a certain starting point?

The starting point is observation. That’s my food for inspiration. You have to be a good observer if you want to be a good artist. You have to be aware of your environment. Otherwise you’re doing something that is selfish and masturbatory; you have to be aware of your surroundings. Then you have to be aware of what’s missing from those surroundings, and what could make the world better if those surroundings had what you have to give. So it’s a process of looking, seeing what’s missing, thinking about what could make it better, and then making it and putting it out there. That’s my process for making art.

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Can you walk me through your decision to go from the name Verbs, to Darius Jones, and now to Leon Reid?

I started writing graffiti as Verbs, but I’d done drawings and things like that beforehand. I started writing Verbs at 15. Then I came to New York City and hooked up with a guy named Brad Downey, and the guy Andre, who I was telling you about before, got into street art and graffiti as well. He never used a graffiti name. He used the name Buddy Lembeck. I decided to drop the name Verbs, and at Buddy Lembeck’s suggestion, I started signing my street art under Darius Jones. After five years of doing Darius Jones, I had a new revelation that I could only go so far with my vest and my hard hat. My ideas started exceeding my means. I could only go so far doing work illegally with no budget. My ideas now involve more than that. They definitely involve a budget, and the dropping of Darius Jones signifies that transformation for me. But this is the last transformation I’m going to make. No more names.

Did you decision to make street art come from a frustration with fine arts?

Yeah. I think the whole graffiti and street art thing, for me, was a frustration with the fine arts. I could never see myself accepted inside the “art world.” Therefore I didn’t want to be accepted into it. I still don’t care for it. But in terms of dropping Verbs for Darius Jones, that was me coming up against a wall where Verbs can only say so much for me after writing it for five years over and over again, you begin to realize that you’re more than that. You have more to say than your own name. I have sensitivities, feelings, this, that and the other that I couldn’t say with Verbs. So I had to go over the wall, and drop that name. Going into street art, which wasn’t called that at the time, freed me up to say things that I couldn’t say as Verbs. Just like now, with Leon Reid, that’s going to free me up with things that I couldn’t do as Darius Jones.

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It seems like a lot of the time with graffiti, the artists are just trying to get their name recognized.

Yeah, that’s a very human activity. It’s been going on forever. I always use the example of when we went to the moon in 1969. One of the first things we did up there was to establish our identity with the American flag, you know? Kind of like, “we were here first.” That’s just a glorified way of making graffiti. When I was in Cairo and other parts of Egypt in ’97, there was graffiti from the British Empire. You know “Tom Smith, eighteen whatever.” You see that in Rome and every ancient monument. It’s very rudimentary in terms of creative possibilities because you’re stating where you are and who you are at the same time. It’s just saying the same thing over and over again.

I don’t regret at any moment doing graffiti, but I’ve matured, or progressed I guess you could say. That’s what a lot of people out here in New York are still doing: they’re putting up their names because they need a voice, they don’t have any other way to express their place in society. So they’re going out, just like I did, and putting their identity out there. I’m not saying that it’s good or bad; it is what it is. I’m just saying that I had to go over that wall years ago.

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In an article in Creative Review you said that it’s important to “adapt to different environments, different sensibilities, and different people’s sense of humor.” I was wondering, since you went to London for your Master’s Degree, how you found those differences here and in England? How did your art work vary in each place according to those differences?

In transitioning from New York to London, there were a couple different changes. The first thing, on a practical level, was that the vest that I usually used over here in New York was orange and yellow. Over there it was yellow and white. The landscape and the physical street furniture were different. The Belicia Beacons, the black and white striped poles with the yellow balls on top. All of this was completely foreign to New York. They had the crosswalk signs with the green man flashing, and then the red man flashing. We didn’t really get those over here until about seven years ago, it was just “walk” or “don’t walk.” The narrow, winding streets; the temperament, or the way the London municipalities keep up their streets is a lot different. It’s pretty rigorously kept.

Would you find your street art taken down quickly?

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Definitely. Here in Brooklyn things have lasted for years. I have one piece that’s lasted for seven years. Over there it wouldn’t be uncommon to put a piece up one day and then the next day it’s gone. That happens sometimes here in New York, but stuff disappears much quicker in London. I think this is because it’s a little more regimented of a society. On the escalators you have to stand to the right and walk on the left. It’s much cleaner than New York. So if you’re going to put up some street art and drill it into the concrete, don’t expect it to last as long as it would in New York. These are things that I observed after a while. Also being out there, I was always scared that someone would come up and detect our American accents and immediately say, “Something’s wrong with this. Two American guys doing blue collar work in Britain. This doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.”

Do you ever find it frustrating when you spend so much time creating and installing a piece that the next day it may be gone? Or do you force yourself to accept that that’s the way it has to be?

If you don’t accept that this is a temporary form of art then you’re going to be upset and you’re going to get your heart broken every time. So you have to put it up and prepare yourself to know that this isn’t going to last a very long time. If it does, then great! But if it doesn’t, fine, move on. What I find is that mentality keeps the artist more productive. I know artists that keep their paintings in their studio for years and let it collect dust, and at the same time, their paintings look all the same, and they’ve only created a very small amount of them. This art form keeps us on our toes.

So it makes it kind of a living thing then?

Yeah. It has a life span. The way that I learned this lesson was quite literally. I put a piece that I was quite proud of on Broadway and Lafayette in Manhattan and it was gone within two weeks. I must have put two months worth of work into it. I was crushed and heartbroken. A few weeks after it had been taken down, me, Brad Downey and another guy came across some guy selling the piece on a street corner. So I said, “Hey that’s my piece! What are you doing?” He was going to sell it, because he had just exchanged money with another guy. He had a whole bunch of work up there. He denied it because he was probably surprised that some guy showed up and it was actually his work. Sure enough, he was not only selling it but he was a street artist and a graffiti artist, which made the plot thicken even more after that. It’s like, “Why would you sell out your own art form?” So he had all these reasons to justify what he was doing. After that experience I was shown that I can’t get to emotionally attached to this work. I mean, I put my emotions into it, but to save my feelings I can’t reasonably think that it’s going to last forever. You have to learn to accept change and learn to accept that things just don’t last forever.

In The New York Times, you said that the public nature of your art “brings up questions of ownership and what the public is allowed to do with things in public space.” Do you feel that you and other public artists are reclaiming space that has been taken over by corporate advertising?

I wouldn’t use the word “reclaiming” because I don’t think we ever owned it to begin with. I would say contributing. We’re contributing to public space. Reclaiming it implies that we owned it at one point. The argument could go a long way, like, it’s Mother Nature anyway and this is man’s slicing and dicing of Mother Nature’s land. I wouldn’t go into that argument but I would say we’re contributing and giving something to the city, hopefully rather than taking away from it. Also, we’re giving something that doesn’t necessarily ask for anything back because we’re not getting paid to do this.

And it’s basically anonymous, right?

Yes, for the most part it’s anonymous.

If your art had to be signed, would that change it? Do you consider the anonymity an important part of what you do?

In some cases, yeah. Actually, when I turned to Darius Jones, the first four pieces I made had no signature on them. Then Andre convinced that for continuity’s sake it would be wise to sign them and have an identity. So ever since then I’ve signed everything very small or even beneath the piece so that the name wouldn’t be important. If you look at any artwork from antiquity, there isn’t any signature up there. They weren’t valued as important because they were servants. I guess Michelangelo, in his Pieta, the scene where the Virgin Mary is holding Jesus, the story goes that he had made this for the Pope and he had placed it in the Vatican. So Michelangelo was walking by one day and noticed an Italian family looking at the piece and they said, “Oh I know who did this, it was some guy from so on and so forth.” It wasn’t Michelangelo that they were talking about. So later that night, Michelangelo being a very proud guy, carved “Michelangelo Buonarrati did this” into a strap that was across Mary’s breast. I’m not sure if this is the first instance of an artist signing their work, but after the renaissance, everyone signed their work. So the signing of work is kind of a new development. Now it’s not as important in some cases. For validity it is. In the earlier 20th century it was very important, like in Picasso, to have your name on the front of the painting.

Do you feel that kind of frees you up since ambition doesn’t really play into it? Does it change the nature of the art since there’s no money or recognition involved?

Absolutely. When you don’t sign something, it frees your personality from the piece, and it can stand on its own. The thing is that if you do it within a certain style, people are going to recognize it as your style. People are always going to want to know “who did it.”

So what’s your impression now of the stuff you did back when you were a teenager as Verbs?

I look at it as a progression. I look at it as the early beginnings in the making of public work that I can see myself doing for the rest of my life. Like I said before, I don’t need a gallery’s stamp of approval. In fact, I’d rather not have that stamp of approval. I feel at this point that the gallery is choke-holding the power of art; it’s limiting what art is capable of doing in society and the way that art functions in society. It’s limited by the “art world.” So I look at my early graffiti days as a beginning to a life of public works through various transformations from Darius Jones, now to Leon Reid, etc. Even though it was early I don’t regret it for a second.

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How was the reception to this early work? Did you ever feel yourself becoming a scapegoat due to any public disdain of graffiti art as a whole, especially given your young age?

I didn’t really know the public’s reaction too well, I only knew the reaction in my small group of graffiti writers. But in Cincinnati I know it was looked at as a detriment to society. Because they couldn’t read it, they couldn’t understand it and usually things that you don’t understand, you fear. A good example of this is that in the winter of 2000, after I dropped Verbs, my friend Andre Highland and I wrote these messages on the highway overpasses in Cincinnati, and they were all jokes on Cincinnati’s TV personalities. It was on the news twice, we were on the radio twice and there were all these news articles about it just because of the fact that we wrote something which people were able to read. There was a huge response to that, but five years of writing Verbs didn’t get me any publicity. Once you write things that people can understand they can either appreciate it, or they can hate it. That’s just the way it is, you have to communicate with people.

I notice that a lot of your art is very subtle; you may have to walk past it four or five times before you notice it, especially your phone signs. Do you consider that subtlety an important part of your work, to blend into the urban landscape and become a part of it?

It’s subtle for two reasons: it’s practical, and it’s also just a part of my personality. Practical so that it would last a little longer, second of all I am naturally a shy person. Even though I’m getting used to speaking now, in art I’m more introverted and introspective and kind of subtle about things so that my art is just a natural product of who I am. I’m not being over the top or beating people over the head with messages. I have done that, but naturally I’m a little more reserved.

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I read that you teach kids art in a school in Harlem. Do you find that working with kids helps your art, with their openness and lack of pretense?

Of course. The thing with kids is that they’ll tell you the straight up truth, considering your feelings or not. For instance, this project that I was doing, we were making giraffes and I was wrapping a giraffe with wire, and this kid came over and was like, “You’re gonna wrap that whole thing like that?” At that point I knew it wasn’t working and finally I was like, “You know what? I should give this up, because it’s not working.” The way she said it so candidly, you wouldn’t get that from an adult. They would try to work their way around it. Working with the kids always keeps me fresh, my brain doesn’t get too locked up.

Do you ever feel yourself wanting to recommend street art to them, as a form of expression? How easy is it to censor your past from them if they ask about your history as an outlaw turned legitimate artist?

I don’t because I teach graffiti. [Laughs] It’s kind of weird thing because there’s graffiti in good taste and there’s graffiti in bad taste, there’s no wrong or right. I teach them how to do it, but I also teach them to have good intentions in mind. I tell them to try and reach people in a positive way. I don’t actually teach them how to get away from the police. I’ll have to teach them that when we’re not in a classroom. [Laughs]

Would you ever consider going the route of Shepard Fairey and the whole “Obey” sticker phenomenon? If one of your pieces became really popular, would you try to support yourself by allowing it to be mass-produced, or are you against mixing your work with commercialism?

That’s hard to say. I don’t really think that I do the kind of work that’s in the position to be mass produced. Shepard puts out a very distinct and mass-producible work. I don’t really do prints. I mean I have pieces that are photographs, but I think his work definitely lends itself to being mass produced, like Andy Warhol. I’m not really into design like that. I’m into large scale public works. Not to discredit what he does, it’s just not what I do.

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Is there anybody out there right now doing great stuff who you’d like to mention?

Andre Hyland, my boyhood friend, is doing a lot of funny videos out in Los Angeles, and he was the one that told me to use Darius Jones as a name. He’s doing a lot of work with Revver, which is kind of like an extension of YouTube. He’s a great inspiration, always has been.

What’s your current project?

There’s the book with Brad Downey. Also I’m making 40 giraffes to go in the parks uptown, like, families of giraffes. I’m doing lectures on how street art is the 21st century’s art form. I think in the 20th century it was still more about something being shown in a gallery, but in the 21st century we have so many different means and methods and tools that it’s kind of grown out of that. I’m also planning for public works that hopefully will contribute to society and stop people from destroying each other. I don’t really want to go into too much detail about these because if I do and something ends up not working out than it will make me look like a bullshitter. I’m working to bring peace to the world… somehow.

I just want to express that I’m someone who’s working outside of the “art world” and I want artists to realize that they don’t have to be out here waiting for someone to discover them to get their art out. You’re wasting your time if you’re waiting to get discovered. The “art world” thinks that street artists are out here trying to get discovered by them, and that’s just arrogant. They need to realize that street art and outdoor work just communicates to a lot more people. Art used to be a necessary function in society, now it’s separate. It’s an isolated world where very few people from society ever go. It’s not for everybody, and it used to be for everybody. It used to be about communication and sharing ideas. Now art is marginalized, and I want to try and find a way to get it back to where it’s affecting people by any means necessary. It’s like chefs. When they make food all day, they don’t want to eat it. They want other people to enjoy it.

Photo

Elisa Settimi and Randy Smith

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