For Brooklyn-based graffiti and street artist Elle, art is about empowering women. “I’m a proponent of women doing what they want to do,” she told Not A Crime as she painted a fresh line of blue spray-paint on her mural in central Harlem. She pulled her arm back from the detailing on a collage of female faces. “It’s always about empowering women.”
Elle, 30, is finishing up a towering work of art stretched across a brick wall on Public School 154 behind Harlem’s historic Apollo Theater. The mural features two women facing one another — Elle explained the two women are actually a collage of multiple people. One woman reads a book with the acronym BIHE printed on the cover, the acronym for the Baha’i Institute for Higher Education, a secret university in Iran established by Baha’is. The other woman gazes into her cupped hands, which have just released a bird as a symbol of freedom.
“It’s about the fact that we’re all human. We all deserve to be free, and live the life that we deserve,” she said.
The Not A Crime campaign commissioned Elle to help expose the persecution of Baha’is in Iran. The Baha’is, whose faith originated in Iran in the 19th century, is the country’s largest religious minority. Adherents to the religion are systematically oppressed in a variety of ways, including being barred from studying and teaching at university. According to the Baha’i International Community, since 2013, “at least 108 Baha’is have been arrested, 22 Baha’is have been expelled from university, and more than 200 Baha’i-owned businesses have been shut down or been threatened.” The community also reported in May that “more than 7,000 pieces of anti-Baha’i propaganda have been disseminated in the Iranian media.”
One of the central tenets of the Baha’i faith is a belief in equality, and Elle says this resonated particularly with her. “It spoke to me that the Baha’i are for equality between men and women and all religions,” she said, rattling a can of spray-paint to free up the next color for her piece. “Coming up in graffiti, it’s very much a man’s world, and in galleries, the representation of women is like 15 percent.”
Not A Crime works with Street Art Anarchy, a New York-based organization, to select artists and place their work throughout Harlem. Elle’s mural is the sixth to have gone up since late April. Before the end of the summer, nine more will dot the neighborhood’s landscape, drawing attention to the Baha’i situation in Iran to coincide with the United Nations General Assembly conference held in the city in September. Iranian president Hassan Rouhani and 150 other world leaders will travel to the city to attend the assembly meetings.
“We want to get a diversity of artists,” said Andrew Laubie, the co-founder of Street Art Anarchy, and curator of the Not A Crime murals. “We don’t want all the artists to be doing the same kind of thing. We want different kinds of thoughts, different kind of philosophies, different kind of contributions, but all at a high quality.” Laubie has followed Elle’s work for years. “Even though she came late into the scene, she’s really somebody that’s adding some new colors, technique, meaning, [and] really hoping to push a conversation forward with public art and street art,” he said.
Elle told IranWire she became interested in street art at a time when she was disillusioned with art in general, and had just moved to New York. “I wasn’t going to paint any more, and I went to the galleries in Chelsea just to see what there was. Nothing really spoke to me,” she said. “Then I saw a street art piece, one by Gaia and one by Swoon, and they were both wheat pastes. They were both just really phenomenal — and I thought, these are such treasures, what a gift that someone would come and leave these on the street for me.”
With fingers caked in a collage of blue and green paint, she pushed back the brim of her hat and gazed up at the brick wall. “So that night I connected with a friend of mine who was dating a street artist, and he was like, ‘I’ll teach you how to do it.’” She went to his studio, created a piece, and put it up that night. The next day her work was posted on the popular Brooklyn Street Art website and other blogs.
Prior to that experience, Elle said, almost nobody had seen the work that she had done over the previous year. “Street art was the perfect way for me to allow my art to interact with passersby. They were posting it, and I was like, ‘Wow, they really enjoy it, and people are liking it. So it became a dialogue, and that was really interesting,” she explained.
“I was hooked after that,” she said.
Stopping to look at Elle’s latest work during her lunch break from work, Sabrina Ellis, 53, admired the mural’s celebration of education. “I love the fact that, because this is Harlem, they have a black child there with a book.” Ellis, who wore a long white flowery dress and glasses in the shining sun, said it also spoke of opportunity. “It speaks volumes because it’s all about the fact that it’s not about color. It’s about the fact that all different races, ethnicities, and so forth need education, and that black children, in this particular community, can be just as educated too. They have the opportunity.”
Local handyman Oscar Castilo, 70, also stopped to look at Elle’s mural. “This wall used to be empty all the time, and now they’ve got something to put there for the children,” he said.“We’ve got so many empty spaces." Then he turned from the wall, smiled and exclaimed, “It’s beautiful!”
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New Mural Exposes Education Apartheid in Iran
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