Ariel Vergez has an open door policy for curious passersby. That welcome extends to the sweet little cat with the stump tail greeting me as I sit down with the artist, to the mentee at his side, and to the locals he has quickly taught how to paint. Hailing from the Dominican Republic and coming into his own as an artist on the streets of LA and Miami, he has found a home in Cleveland where he was educated at the Cleveland Institute of Art, where his wife comes from, and where the artist collective he’s part of, BlackBrain Group, currently operates.
Now that artist collective is taking to the streets of Cleveland’s West Side neighborhood, adorning local businesses and buildings with murals thanks to the grant they received from the Transformative Art Fund of the city of Cleveland. The resulting project, The Art Garden (TAG), is aptly named, as it seeks to grow artists and art in the community. The project has five explicit goals: train the local talent, paint ten murals, place sculptures, cultivate a community for artists, and put on a show after the work is done.

Most efforts to revitalize a neighborhood start and end in practicalities: installing grocery stores, food banks, shelters, and encouraging small businesses to invest in spaces. Erecting murals as a form of community improvement harkens to the WPA, especially given the state of things politically and economically. But, it’s a way of nourishing the community that Vergez says is more than worthwhile in his interview: “the idea is that we seed our garden through the Transformative Arts Fund Grant. Push it to keep growing and water as much as we can. And let others come in and join the cultivation.”

The City is the Soil

Up until recently, Vergez resided in LA. He spent years in the streetwear and mural scene, honing the BlackBrain persona, one that removed himself from his own ego, embodying others’ stories. 

At first, he was interested in an idea called “vuja-dé,” the inverse of déja-vu, something that evokes a feeling of nostalgia, though it hasn’t been seen before. From there, he touched on politics, but felt dejected in that space: “I was like, let me focus on beauty.”

While he was up on a wall painting a mural honoring the late Kobe Bryant, he realized something: “My head went like, every building is a canvas. So I just painted the city. And I was like, paint the city. I can’t do this myself. There’s no way. I don’t have the energy, period. No one has the energy to do it themselves.”

He reached out to his mentee, a budding artist named Jon Henry, and told him to prepare for the project, to revive the centuries-old apprenticeship model, and to spread beauty across the city. BlackBrain was going to go beyond one person and split into many. 

But plans changed–with his sixth kid on the way, he packed things up to come to Cleveland to be closer to family. No matter, every city is a canvas. He called up Henry to join him in painting the city.

Since then, both artists have found an outpouring of resources and support that have, until now, remained untapped. Vergez says that he expected the typical pushback or competition to hinder their initial attempts to secure funding and support, but instead, he and Henry attended one Assembly for the Arts meeting and were immediately connected with the city, able to show a collection at the Museum of Modern Art, and secure the Transformative Arts Fund soon after.

The city was quick to pull the trigger on using funds to support the project. Perhaps it comes as no surprise, since Cleveland’s Art Museum possesses a billion-dollar endowment according to its 2024 Financial Statement, and is one of the most visited art museums in the world by the metrics of The Art Newspaper’s 2024 list. It’s a city that has a wealth of art projects and artists to start them.

Vergez expresses hope that the Art Garden can centralize artists in the area and bring them together, to maximize the existing support and funds at their disposal. His faith in the community and their unwavering support for the arts encourages him, and in the face of a barrage of defunding, attacks, and belittling of the arts, he takes heart. “I don’t know if all the artists out here really understand how much support they have and how many people are fighting for them to have opportunities.”

Henry also finds the environment for artists in Cleveland refreshing compared to his experience growing up in Miami: “I’ve met and seen a bunch of really, really amazing artists out here, and it’s rich history of art. It’s just more welcoming, not about competition.”

The Artists Plant the Seeds

In order to seed their Art Garden, BlackBrain Group simply invited artists to show up in the summer of 2024. They created a welcome space for complete beginners, amateur artists, and seasoned painters.

These artists then started a collaboration technique— a process BlackBrain Group calls No Pressure, No Diamonds—in learning how to design murals and help paint them. Through workshops, mentorship, and practical experience putting the murals up in the city, the artists learn to operate independently and feel a sense of ownership in the murals around the neighborhood.

One such artist, Emma Stone, joined TAG with an informal illustrative background, excited about the prospect of a challenge in a medium she doesn’t generally enjoy working with. Now, she believes she can take the techniques she learned with BlackBrain Group into her own work, namely the coloring technique.

BlackBrain Group describes this technique as “bioartistry,” a style of painting where one mimics what the natural eye sees. They place color beginning from a blurry layering of hues to an increasingly in-focus image, like turning your eye on something close-up and focusing. 

It’s a forgiving method of painting by design. The idea is for the artists of TAG to be able to paint quickly and without getting bogged down by theory, concept, or perfectionism. The result is a cohort of artists aligned on technique, able to put up all of their murals in less than a year with the aid of Vergez and Henry. Already, four are up in the West Side neighborhood.

Each mural takes a maximum of two weeks to get onto a wall, according to Henry. The process of choosing a subject, getting the building owner or business owner on board, painting the piece, and scaling it upwards can take about two or three months. Though the subject matter varies, as each work comes from an individual artist, they all have the same tone and mood that BlackBrain Group typically projects: a dark background, ethereal figures or majestic birds mixed with natural elements or supernatural forces: encased in crystal, surrounded by light, or in battle armor of futuristic making off to fight a cosmic conflict. 

As for Stone, when I ask to see her mural, her countenance lights up and she beams when she describes the sheer size—eighty feet, by the way. Her piece comes from her character design background; it’s an original character that she turns her phone to show me a sketch of. I recognize it as one of the futurist figures I saw on canvas in the studio. It’s been reworked and styled to match BlackBrain collective’s style and then blown up in scale on the side of a brick building in the Denison neighborhood. 

When asked what she would like viewers of her mural to feel, Stone cites the same word Vergez used to describe the themes of his body of work: beauty. “I think being surrounded by beauty is really helpful to mental health, honestly. General morale.”

The West Side area that TAG has and will put art in—specifically Lorain Ave, Clark Ave, Storer Ave, and Denison Ave—is not part of the group of popular West Side areas that the city has long invested in, such as Ohio City, Tremont, or Gordon Square. It’s residential and often over-looked.

The response to TAG’s work, however, shows BlackBrain Group just how much their art is appreciated and needed. At Brasas & Salsas, a restaurant on Storer Ave, TAG’s mural, “Neon Jungle”, of bright tropical birds and jungle flora blooms on the exterior. It will surely be a visual oasis when the winter seasons gray out the Cleveland vista. When Vergez came to eat, many neighbors and restaurant regulars expressed feelings of nostalgia, wistfully recalling their home countries and family memories.

Those warm feelings will ideally translate into an increase in community engagement, in connecting with one another, and cultivating the beauty that TAG puts there.

The Seeds of The Art Garden Spread

The theme of BlackBrain’s work, beyond beauty, has always been to remove oneself from the art. Painting murals means that the work can be altered and doesn’t belong to anyone. Vergez describes it like this: “as soon as the piece goes on the wall, it now belongs to the public. It belongs to the streets. And the thing is, the streets talk back.” 

When the streets are in dialogue, it could look like tagging, like the sun-bleaching of colors, or the erosion of rain. But this is part and parcel of painting murals. They’re transient. Even graffiti, the ugly stepsister of murals, has its place.

Operating as a collective and without any names, each artist attempts to sacrifice ego for the sake of the stories they’re telling, for the community they are trying to build up. 

New to the collective, Stone has struggled with letting go as an artist: “I definitely–I think the most challenging part has been losing the ego as an artist, because a lot of it is kind of taking your wealth of knowledge or experience as a person and working into this existing, cohesive style the whole project has.” She recognizes, however, that they’re working as a group and that this intention can serve the project’s goal.

Every TAG artist’s commitment to becoming part of the whole, of taking their name off of things, has served the larger more urgent goal of community-building, a crisis that runs throughout the city, the country, and even the world. What better way to tackle an increasingly profit-driven, individual-obsessed culture than dissolving into a larger artistic being, from the altruistic act of erecting art for everyone to witness, without an entrance fee or barrier?

As TAG looks forward to rounding out its project, BlackBrain Group is focusing on an opposing medium: the sculpture. Its more permanent existence will stand as a promise, as a beacon for community members to gather around. Three sculptures are planned so far.

The Art Garden will conclude its first growing season with TAG FST, a festival celebrating the art the collective has created, with art programming that will prepare aspiring artists to spread the project to their own neighborhoods and participate in the collective beyond the project’s planned lifespan.

Here’s hoping more gardens will flourish.

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