On the street with Michelangelo
A sidewalk artist wants to make the Renaissance master “popular” in New York
By Pooja Singh
It’s a sunny 12:45. And like on most New York afternoons, people are walking in all directions at the corner of 79th Street and Central Park West. A woman, with earphones plugged in and eyes fixed on her phone, walks straight over the face of Delphic Sibyl. “Oops,” she apologizes. “Be careful while you walk,” replies Hani Shihada, with a faint smile. Shihada, an artist who draws with chalk on New York sidewalks, is used to hearing such apologies. He’s also used to being asked the woman’s following question: “What are you making?” Pat comes the reply: “Michelangelo.”
Shihada has spent much of his four decade-long career drawing works of the Italian master on the busy streets of New York. Many people, he says, can recognize a Michelangelo only when there’s a placard near it. That’s why he decided to bring him out of the museum and into the streets, “so that” — even while the Metropolitan Museum has an exhibition of Michelangelo’s drawings — “people see him every day.”
It was Shihada’s love for drawing that drew him to Michelangelo at the age of 13. Every afternoon after school he would go through books on artists at an Italian center’s library in Amman, Jordan, where his Palestinian family landed as refugees from the Arab-Israeli war of 1967. Shihada tried to copy the outlines of the artists’ work in his notebook. He liked Raphael, Botticelli and Titian, but Michelangelo “spoke” to him because “his colors, lines, and postures were so much more defined and real.” His admiration grew stronger at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Roma in Italy, from which he graduated in fine arts in 1979 — the same year he landed in New York, the “crazy city of possibilities,” to begin his career in sidewalk art.
The artist, 58, follows four steps before making any work: for high visibility he picks one of the busiest streets (usually near offices, schools or universities); he surveys the area for a day to find the most trafficked spot; requests permission from shopowners in case the spot is outside a store; and keeps a close eye on the weather forecast. Although his handmade chalks (a mix of glue and pigments) are waterproof, he avoids working in rain and snow.
Once set, he randomly selects a photograph from his collection of 35 Michelangelo works and starts planning its outline. David and Delphic Sibyl are his favourites — he draws them at least twice every three months.
The next morning at 8, wearing his “artist attire” — a colourful shirt under a worn-out oversized Levi’s denim jacket and an equally tattered pair of light-blue jeans — he leaves his upstate New York house, where he lives with his wife and four children. He drives to the selected street with a box of chalks and a metal tinbox, in case passers-by feel generous. Shihada then cleans the spot with a piece of cloth and water — which takes up about an hour depending on how much chewing gum he has to scrape off. He first draws the outline of the figures in a free, dancing hand, and then slowly fills in each area with pastel shades and smooths them together with his hands so that the colors blend well. His calloused and ash-black fingertips show how much time and effort go into mixing and blending the colors. “The sidewalk is a very rough surface; I try hard to breathe some life into it,” he says.
Since Shihada prefers to work with early, “more authentic” reproductions of Michelangelo, which are mostly in black and white, he chooses his own colors. He uses bright shades so that the work draws attention; otherwise, he stays true to the photograph to avoid being “blasphemous.”
The background of David, which he made on 50th street in August, for instance, was as radiant as the sky. Colleen Itzen says that as she was crossing the street, she was immediately drawn to the “huge clouds of blue hues surrounding a naked, hunky man in the middle.” A teacher at Greenwich House Music in the West Village, Itzen had been on her way to the subway when she noticed the lanky man on all fours spraying something over the drawing. “It was a beautiful sight and it stood out since everything else was so grey,” she says. The spray was the weather-proof adhesive chemical that Shihada uses on each of his two- to three-days’ of work to ensure it stays put for three months.
But the work will fade away and Shihada understands the ephemerality of his art. Sidewalk art is looked at, photographed, and discussed, all the while being slowly rubbed away by pedestrians who walk over it. That’s the beauty of it, he says, drawing a parallel between life and sidewalk art. “Life is short and unpredictable, and that’s why we need to fill it with as many colors as possible.”
His art is also participatory by nature, he adds: “The passers-by become part of the work by the act of erasing it. Such a bond cannot be made when you are at a gallery or a museum.”
Street art instantly transforms space “as a mode for physical transport and as a medium for transport of visual information through art,” notes the art critic and historian G. James Diachendt. “When art meets us where we live, it reaches more people and makes a bigger impact. It then doesn’t matter how long it stays because it makes an instant connect.”
Such a belief in street art prompted Irene Zola, the founder of the local non-profit LiLY (Lifeforce In Later Years), to hire Shihada in September to draw on the 114th Street sidewalk for the International Day of Older Persons (1 October). Since keeping a steady source of income is a constant struggle, Shihada often takes up advertising campaigns for companies like Fuji Film and Adidas and local non-profits like LiLY. (He makes four to five logos a month, with each fetching between $1,500 and $2,000, and he earns about $50 from donations on the street.) His wife supports the family as well by growing and selling organic vegetables in their local greenmarket. Still, it’s always a hand- to- mouth situation.
Zola learned about Shihada a few months earlier after seeing his version of Moses on Lexington Avenue, and commissioned the project. Until then, LiLY publicized the Day through pamphlets, billboards, and advertisements on buses and subway trains. “Street art stays in one place; you can always come back to it, unlike the bus or the train which disappears within 10 seconds,” says Zola. She also noticed how Shihada’s work made an instant connection with the passers-by. “It made people stop and start a conversation that we would otherwise have to seek out,” she says. Since October 1, LiLY has gained 20 new volunteers in for its Upper West Side chapter, a 50 per cent jump compared to last year’s campaign.
Daichendt recognizes the role of street art, murals, and public art in helping start a conversation about “pretty much anything under the sun.” Social media platforms Instagram, Facebook and Twitter help drive this conversation further, he says. “Today, a picture with a three-word caption can start a debate across the world. It’s insane.”
Shihada has social media to thank for his popularity. While over the past two decades he has featured many times in publications like the New Yorker and the New York Daily News (it hailed him as the “Picasso of pavement”), today he has some 4,000 followers on his Instagram account, where he posts a picture each time he finishes a drawing. He even has a Hollywood career, albeit short-lived, to boast about: he played himself in the 2007 Catherine Zeta-Jones-starrer No Reservation. He was also the subject of a four-minute documentary, Renaissance Man, in which he talked about his life as an artist and the role of street art in the social landscape.
Martin Irvine of Georgetown University in Washington D.C., too, discussed the growing role of street art and graffiti in shaping social interaction and perception in his 2012 book The Handbook Of Visual Culture. While charting the history of street art that began “as an underground, anarchic, in-your-face appropriation of public visual surfaces” in the 1970s to “a recognized art movement crossing over into the museum and gallery” today, Irvine writes that street art can work as an intervention, a commentary, a dialogic critique, an individual or collective manifesto, or raw energy of pent-up democratic desires for expression and self-assertion.
Shihada’s art sometimes takes on a distinct socio-political tint. In 2009, for instance, he chalked up a pastel portrait of Sonia Sotomayor, the first Hispanic to be appointed to the Supreme Court. That portrait, on Broadway near 97th street, “the area that has a lot of ethnic diversity,” Shihada notes, drew crowds. “People were coming from everywhere to see a Hispanic lady who made it to the top,” says Emily Lootens, a nearby resident.
But drawing political figures has also provoked hostility from some observers. In 2011, Michael Schrage, a resident of the Upper West Side and a research fellow at the MIT Sloan School’s Center for Digital Business, commissioned Shihada to create in his neighborhood portraits of the former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher and other conservative public figures like the Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek and American economist and columnist Thomas Sowell. Schrage, whose own politics lie right of center, says he wasn’t making a political statement through the project, but was aiming to inject “diversity” into the neighborhood. “It was supposed to be a fun project which I was hoping would generate a productive discussion and debate. But it back-fired,” he admits. Shihada was surprised by some of the reactions. “People, especially those in the 50s and 60s, were so angry that they made their dogs pee over the portraits. Someone even scrawled ‘murderer’ over Thatcher,” recalls Shihada, who considers himself politically “in the gray area,” not conservative or liberal.
So profound was the impact of this incident that Shihada didn’t take up any politics-related project for a long time. “I can’t afford to be seen in any political light, it can hurt my prospects of getting assignments,” he says. He continued working on advertising campaigns and Michelangelo.
Till 2016. In September, the advocacy group World Vision International approached him to draw for the UN Summit for Refugees and Migrants to draw attention to the plight of refugees. He couldn’t say no, for it was a subject he could relate to. He’s well familiar with “that fear and pain.”
Shihada became a refugee when he was nine. “During that time [the 1967 War], I couldn’t understand what was happening around me. My brothers, my home, my toys, everything was taken away for no reason,” he says. “Life becomes very different when you don’t live a normal childhood, you know.”
His colorful, yet pale image of refugee children pressing against a wire fence in the hope of someone letting them through, reflected his own experiences. That project, he says, helped him express his own feelings, the feelings of “struggle for freedom, need for peace and the fragility of life.”
For Shihada, art was a way to find freedom and peace. The one-hour-ritual after school at the Italian center’s library helped him switch off from his world, which was engulfed in violence following the war. After losing two elder brothers in the war, Shihada, along with his father, mother, and 12 siblings immigrated to Jordan from Jerusalem. “Once I was 16, my father asked me to join the Army [of the Palestine Liberation Organization]. It was considered a proof of being a man at the time,” recalls Shihada. But he didn’t want to kill. “I wanted to create my own career, be an artist, away from all this violence.”
Shihada credits his public school art teacher for encouraging him to pursue his talents instead of becoming a militant. “Had it not been for Aziz Almora, I would have been dead by now,” he says. His friends supported him, too; he made greeting cards using oil paints for them to give to their girlfriends.
With support from his mother “who wanted to see me alive,” Shihada managed to book an air ticket to Rome. While taking odd jobs as a waiter and servant for six months, he gained admission to the Accademia di Belle Arti di Roma, but he couldn’t afford to attend for long. He had to drop out.
Then, one summer day in 1978, he saw a woman in Perugia — the Italian city known for its chocolate — drawing Madonna on the sidewalk, and people donating money to her. “She was drawing in the Italian tradition of Madonnari,” he says, referring to a popular traditional Italian technique of sidewalk painting using pastels. That was his Eureka moment. The next day he made a “passable” David on a street and, keeping up the practice, eventually made enough money to study again. “People in Italy are very supportive and not stingy like New Yorkers,” he recalls. That’s one of his three complaints about New York.
Another is the police, who initially harassed him almost every week. “I have been taken to the court almost 30 times for drawing on the sidewalk and each time the charges were dismissed,” he says. As per the law, one can draw or paint close to the edge of the sidewalk, a rule Shihada says he always abides by. Now, the authorities have become more understanding because they know how popular Shihada is in the neighborhood. “Being famous helps,” says Shihada, with a spark in his green eyes. He quickly adds, “Street art is no longer considered a crime as such anymore, so the police is no longer so strict.”
He’s waiting for another wish to be answered: cleaner stretches of sidewalk to work on.
“New York City sidewalks can be really, really, really filthy, with lots of chewing gum,” he says.
These, however, are small problems compared to the joy he gets from doing his job. “I have a career that I like, that helps feed my family, that helps pay my bills, that helps make the world fall in love with Michelangelo.” That, he says, was the dream.
