BY BENJY CAPLAN

Oscar “Trek6” Montes (above) and Chor Boogie restored their Everlasting Bass boombox mural this year. It is a reinvention of Argentine artist Sonni’s 2010 original (below).

Chor Boogie worked on restoration of the boombox.

PIONEER

Oscar Montes is about as close to an elder statesman as there is in the Miami graffiti world — “elder” meaning he has finally hit his 40s. Having painted Miami since 1989, he moves a little more stiffly now and fills out his T-shirts a bit more. He’s an éminence grise whose unkempt beard has only just begun to gray — though juggling his newborn son and spray cans might finish the job. Under the name “Trek6,” he’s working on his fourth mural in a ten-day stretch and still has two more to go before the fairs open in four days.

“When we were kids, you would just come to Wynwood to get tags or bomb,” he says. “You didn’t come here to fuck around. You would bomb on a mission. You got in; you got out.”

That Wynwood was “what you see in every place that’s oppressed: drug use out in the open, stealing metal, breaking in. It was just really rough.”

The neighborhood was blighted for decades before 2002’s first installment of Art Basel Miami Beach. It made a rare jaunt into awareness outside Miami in 1988 when a crack dealer was beaten to death in his Wynwood apartment by six police officers who were later acquitted of wrongdoing. The streets were ravaged by riots — partly by local Puerto Ricans who complained about years of abuse in the neighborhood — and three buildings were burned down.

Montes didn’t live in Wynwood then but, as a painter and a Puerto Rican, considered himself part of the neighborhood. “I remember [the cops] beating a dude senseless,” he says. “I remember being bothered for my community. I couldn’t understand trashing your neighborhood. It’s the mom-and-pop store that gets hit.”

Wincing as he sits down on the sidewalk opposite the wall he’s working on, he leans his back against the window of a design shop selling chrome piggy banks for $250. He’s been steadily breathing in paint fumes for more than half his life, but he waves a calloused hand at a nearby gallery as if it has fouled the air.

“Some of these galleries, I know they’re struggling,” Montes says. “And the fairs can be just a big-ass rave. They do drive interest into the neighborhood, and I wouldn’t have as much of a problem if there was more support for the community that’s here all year long.”

 Montes is something of a bearded Buddha sitting under the bodhi tree. A fractured toe and a pinched nerve in his back have slowed his progress. He gazes toward the 700 cans of paint and ponders the work he has left. “I just want to get these walls done and get an x-ray and be myself again.” he says.

For some locals, there is a growing sense that in the handful of years since Wynwood’s rejuvenation began in earnest, there is no longer a place for the people like Montes who made it what it is. Another of the most important forces behind the artistic renaissance in Wynwood was Primary Flight, a duo comprising Miami artists Darin “Books IIII” Bischof and Michael “Typoe” Gran.

Though he began as a illegal graffiti artist, there’s something almost professorial about Bischof, broad-shouldered but bearded and in thin-rimmed glasses. He wears sport coats to work at his downtown space, Primary, which he runs with Gran.

In 2007, Primary Flight took on the task of not only cataloguing what was on walls throughout Wynwood but also curating the murals and finding money to invite artists in during the neighborhood’s early days of reinvention. One of the most recognized of their projects is a single-story building facing I-95, painted to look like a giant boombox. It was created by the Argentine artist Sonni in 2010 in his signature cartoon-like style after Bischof and Gran selected his proposal for the building.

“The boombox is Miami,” Montes says. “It’s a sign that you’re entering South Florida, at least for my generation. It’s a way to communicate with Miami, not just Wynwood. You’re speaking to the whole damn city.”

Within a year, the mural was covered by advertisements and dashed-off graffiti. Montes wanted to reclaim the boombox, but he knew neither Sonni nor Primary Flight. He was acquainted with Chor Boogie, a West Coast painter he had met in Wynwood during Art Basel. Chor Boogie is a muscular recovering addict who has sold single works for more than a half-million dollars.

Montes says of Chor Boogie: “His craft is very pure. He doesn’t use any fancy tools. It’s just straight ‘What can I do with the can?’ And I needed someone who was a workhorse like me.”

Chor Boogie readily agreed to help Montes reclaim the building. “Yeah, we’ve got mad love for that [boombox],” Chor Boogie says. “I’ve got mad love for Trek too.”

The pair funded the job by selling Montes’ canvases through Instagram. Montes then “rented a lift for a week and bought $2,000 in paint,” he says. “And I’m there every single month for the last two years, calling the city to let them know a light is broken. Weeding. People write on it; I clean it up. If it chips, I fix it.

Fila painted under the name “Krave.” Though he now shaves his head clean and wraps T-shirts around it like a bedouin for protection from the sun, there’s something eternally youthful about Fila. He seems as ready today to fling himself over a barbed-wire fence as he was decades ago.

“What we had was completely authentic: an indigenous art movement, born in dilapidated properties of a city that had gone to shit,” he says. “Now there’s so much of an onslaught of out-of-town art. Even the local guys... look like they’re from L.A. even though they’re not.”

Without the internet or the ability to travel widely, the only outside graffiti Fila and his friends saw was on the sides of trains from up North or in visitors’ sketchbooks or the occasional magazine. “When I would go out bombing with Atomik,” Fila says, “we felt like we were inventing this while we were doing it.”

Even the bright, primary colors Fila and his friends used, which have become part of the Miami style, were dictated by the limited paint brands available at the hardware store.

Often, Miami graffiti writers paint a double line on the edges of their pieces, something that came out of having extra time to paint without police interference in the forgotten expanses of ’90s Wynwood. “I still push that same wild style in some of my movements,” Fila says. “I think my hand styles are authentic to Miami. I’ve scaled back on some of the colors.”

Many graf writers keep what they call their bibles, black hardbound books in which they sketch ideas. These become not only self-portraiture but also, with the addition of other writers’ work pasted in, documentation of moments in time. Fila keeps his 1996 book in his Little Havana studio and consults it at least once a month. “I invested every moment in this,” he says while paging through it. “I rolled my joints in this. There was no ‘Will this sell?’ ”

He stops on an intricate tag and smiles as if looking at a photo album. “There’s Bhakti Baxter,” he says of a high school friend who has also become a studio artist. “All these people I interacted with. My day-to-day life. Drawing on the bus. They’re so innocent, but they were pure expression.”

He pauses again, a page corner curled up as he is about to turn it, on what is obviously a drawing of himself. A swirl of unkempt hair, a teenaged body hunched in agony. “This book, this was right before I started dating girls,” he says. “After that, the books started filling up more slowly. Then I was like, eh, the book is number two. But here, I’m totally naked on paper.”

Though Fila has an art school education, the street is still his inspiration. Shienbaum understands the appeal to both artists and their audiences. “It’s beautiful to see art on the side of a building, on such a large scale,” Shienbaum says. “When you see a painting on the white wall of a gallery, you could be anywhere. But when you’re walking around and you have the whole environment — the grass, the chainlink fence, and cars whizzing by you — that’s something else altogether.”

That “something else altogether” is what Fila is chasing this Basel season. Now he has a wife, liability insurance, and paint costs that reach into the thousands per project.

Before the fairs open, Fila must finish four murals. They push the limits of what is commonly thought of as a street art mural, both in technique and content.

Fila shows up to some walls before dawn so he can use a video projector to lay out his designs. He says he treated his wall at Wynwood Central “like a sketchbook, with lots of different layers.” He used several types of paint, hand-drawn and -painted elements, and embedded small objects in the paint. “It will change what you see based on how close you are to the wall,” he says.

His exterior mural for Wynwood Brewing Company depicts something like a living room. For a several-thousand-dollar commission, Fila produced a portrait of himself sitting in a chair and watching the neighborhood change. He even affixed salvaged picture frames to the walls, “which has a nice contrast to some of the more hard-core graffiti that’s right around there.”

At the pet-grooming shop D.O.G., he paints a utility pole the same yellow as the neighborhood fire hydrants and affixes mock plugs. He wants dogs to feel like they’ve arrived in urinary heaven. The walls feature a trippy version of “the neighborhood the way a dog might see it.” Everything is bottom-heavy, viewed from below. Flowers and curbs unfurl across the landscape while the buildings shrink away. Fila’s own dog is immortalized on the wall too. It’s good to be the girlfriend of a rock star and also to be the dog of a sought-after muralist.

Along a narrow alleyway beside Mitrani Warehouse, Fila paints a knotted, tumbling design without the ability to step back and view his work as he creates it. What begins as rough vines blooms into something more fanciful and amorphous as a person walks down the alley to the lot behind the warehouse. A pop-up beer garden will occupy the space for the duration of the fairs, and Fila wants to transport visitors from the bustle of the street to the suspended calm tucked away.

A few blocks south at his gallery, Shienbaum plans his January show, a massive Shepard Fairey retrospective. But aside from his big-ticket artists, he also represents two local artists, Ahol Sniffs Glue and Clandestine Culture, who came out of Miami’s graffiti scene.

“ ‘Street artist’ is a bad name for them,” Shienbaum says. Like Fila, “they paint in studios, and their paintings sell at auctions and galleries. Their medium — one of them — is the street. If Wynwood were just graffiti, people wouldn’t be flying in from around the world to see it. When people come to Miami now, they go to two places: South Beach and Wynwood.”

“When people come to Miami now, they go to two places: South Beach and Wynwood.”

Her biggest project of the Basel season is a wall she’s painting with the Few&Far collective, an international crew of more than a dozen female street artists who were selected by the Goldmans as part of a push for more women artists. Maciver, too, joined that initiative.

By the time Williams arrives at the Few&Far artists’ spot on NW 24th Street, hurried and overloaded with buckets of paint in each fist, the other five women are bent over one another’s sketches and detailed plans. They’re pondering how to connect the disparate pieces into a unified wall.

Williams points at a small ledge jutting over a gated doorway. “I want to be up there,” she says. “I want to just paint and be up in my work.”

It’s a more difficult perch than most because she’ll never be able to view the wall from a distance. But Williams plans to paint her most frequent subject: highly stylized women moving in usual ways. So she doesn’t need a model or much room. “I’m just painting myself over and over, with different looks or in past lives,” she says. “They’re outer reflections of inner reflections.”

As the others get to work, gridding out their sections, Williams sits on the ledge and stares at something only she can see. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, when she begins to work, she paints a woman sitting on a ledge and gazing into the distance.

“All the girls love how I do patterns in my women’s hair, so I did that all over the piece to connect all of our work. They are such primal patterns that you see in everything,” she says, pointing out other pieces of the design. “The zigzag is every mountain or cloud you see. The florets are the flowers or fingers. Patterns like these are very resonant of what we see around us, so we can connect with it very easily.”

She looks down at her hands again. “The things we can do with these,” she marvels. “I always carry a marker around or a tiny can of spray paint. I’ll bust it out and make all my friends get down, even if they don’t write or do art. You just have to do it, with your hands. Make something, write a haiku on a bathroom wall.”