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A run-down park on San Antonio's East Side has been given new life by an artist whose career started with late-night graffiti but then blossomed into something else altogether.
At the Healy-Murphy Park an artist aims to build: the state's largest outdoor mural gallery.
I-37 is just a block away, so there’s always a light din of traffic. Artist and muralist, Shek Vega, said this acre-slice of San Antonio’s East Side is special.
“Right now, we're at 210 Nolan at Healy-Murphy Park. This was a park that had seen better days,” Vega said. “It sits in an interesting area in the center of a once industrial area.”
The neighborhood around the '70s-era park has largely disappeared, so Healy-Murphy had come to be used for other activities.
“So we have a park that was not available to a regular neighborhood and became kind of a holding tank for anti-social behavior,” he said.
Then happenstance aligned the stars and magic happened.
“I was watching TV one day and I saw Councilman Jalen McKee-Rodriguez talking about how he wanted to bring more art into the East Side,” Vega said.
Like most ambitious folks, Vega didn’t have to be asked twice. He runs a non-profit company that aims to change the way we think about street art.
“San Antonio Street Art Initiative is a local nonprofit that started back in 2018, that introduces educates and cultivates street art and mural culture here in the city,” he said.
The initiative was uniquely qualified to deliver on that District 2 request.
“We all felt that it was a great opportunity to team up and kind of use artwork and what we do as a spark to maybe ignite that creativity in the east side again,” Vega said.
Partner Burgundy Woods Rodriguez said to pull off a project of this magnitude took more than creativity.
“We excelled creatively, but we were also excelling with a business savvy mind,” she said.
Woods Rodriguez said that the young artists they worked with get taught something that many artists don’t bother to learn.
“Our secret sauce is the business education, and we've been doing it since 2018, but aside from that, it’s definitely being able to cross-pollinate our artists with other artists, because you can't make a living off of San Antonio alone,” Woods Rodriguez said.
Artists securing their reputations in San Antonio position themselves well for additional work in the region. Young Shek Vega’s roots had one set of goals: develop skills without getting caught.
“Graffiti is a young man's sport, right? Can't be jumping fences and running too much as you get up there in age,” Vega said. “But I decided to take what I had learned in that genre and kind of make it work for myself.”
He was able to turn what he’d learned into two successful businesses: Los Otros Murals with artist partner Nik Soupe, and Gravelmouth Gallery, just two blocks away from Healy-Murphy Park.
“It's all part of building a new mural district, a new arts hub. We're calling it the DREAM district. So [it] stands for Dance, Recreation, Empowerment, Art and Music,” Vega said.
The first East Side project was this park, in which they built a basketball court, sidewalks, a break-dancing pad and ten 14 by 10-foot concrete painting pads onto which 10 young artists painted murals. They opened last Saturday. Those murals will change out every year.
“It was really heartwarming to see all the smiles, the variety of people, you know, not just street artists, art enthusiasts and patrons, local celebrities, community members,” he said. “I think that's what all the blood, sweat and tears is for—for things like this to happen in the neighborhood. It was fun.”
The revitalization of this park is another step that would cement their dream of having the largest outdoor gallery in Texas. Vega and his partners are writing this novel in a stream of consciousness way.
“Yeah, there was no road map for something like this here in the city,” Vega said. “Now that it's here and we've seen how positive it can be, we kind of got a map of that journey, and it'll be easier next time around.”
Maybe someday soon Healy-Murphy won’t always be the only city park with a mural gallery.
