Morazul: The Streets Belong to Everyone

An interview with Diana Herrera, the Colombian urban artist known as Morazul, who has been painting the streets of cities across Latin America and now Miami for twenty years.

Her first mural happened at age five. No permission, no plan - just her hands and whatever paint was within reach, pressed against her mother's wall. She doesn't describe it as the beginning of a career.

She describes it as the beginning of a conversation.

Twenty years later, Morazul is still having that conversation, only now the walls are several stories tall and the neighborhoods are different cities, different countries, different worlds from the one she grew up in. She studied at the Universidad Javeriana in Bogotá, traveled to Buenos Aires at eighteen, and found herself standing in front of a graffiti festival watching people paint walls so large they seemed impossible.

Se me volo la peluca, she says. It blew my mind completely. She was in love before the day was over. She never looked back.

What draws her to the street rather than the studio is something she has thought about carefully. The street, she says, belongs to everyone. Not to a particular social class, religion, skin color, or gender - to everyone. A piece of work placed on a wall will be seen by the person going to the supermarket, the person who just had the worst fight of their life, the child on the way to school, the person with no home walking the same block over and over. Nobody had to decide to go to a museum. Nobody had to know anything about art. The work simply enters their life, the way a song does when it comes through an open window.

There is also the experience of making it.

When you paint a mural, you are there for seven, ten days. People watch you work. They ask where you are from, how you do it, why. You learn the neighborhood. You go places you would never have gone - other barrios, other cities, other countries - and you come back changed. Con la experiencia y con la foto, she says. With the experience and with the photograph. That's what you keep.

The most challenging moment of her career happened on a scaffold above one of Buenos Aires' most ambitious public art projects - a collaboration led by Martín Ron, one of the best muralists in the world, painting every column of an underpass in the Liniers-Ciudadela intersection. Seven artists, thirty people, walls taller than anything she had painted before.

And somewhere above a certain height, she discovered something she had never known about herself: she was afraid.

Not of the wall. Of the height.

She had ridden roller coasters, climbed mountains, never noticed. But here, on scaffolding above Buenos Aires, the fear arrived and she didn't know what to do with it. What she tound was a mantra - something related to love, she remembers, though the exact words have blurred with time - and she sang it to herself until she could finish the mural.

Then she spent years finding where the fear had originally come from, what wound it was protecting, and how to move through it rather than around it.

Simplemente lo trasciendes, she says. You simply transcend it. Not by eliminating the fear, but by choosing a higher vibration - love, gratitude, joy - and letting that be stronger.

She has since learned that some of the best muralists in the world have the same fear. They just don't talk about it. She thinks they should.

The other challenge has been her subject matter. Morazul paints women - not decorative women, not passive women, but women connected to their power, their bodies, their divinity. A vulva painted in Bogotá, framed like a rose, with the center of a galaxy behind it, caused enough conversation in the neighborhood that she ended up in deep dialogue with a sixty-year-old neighbor whose perspective was entirely different from hers.

Eso me encantó, she says. That, she loved. Art that provokes is art that works.

Colleagues have told her it doesn't sell. Family members have questioned it. She keeps painting.

The inner work - meditation, breathwork, processes of healing she describes with a list long enough to fill a page - is what keeps her grounded in her own voice. She is not painting for the market. She is painting because she has something to say, and she intends to keep saying it. Se vienen unos murales picantes, she says, and smiles. Hot ones are coming.

The piece of public art in Miami that has stayed with her is not her own. It's a mural by Criola, a Brazilian artist, at Jungle Plaza in the Design District. Two women with blue braids. Hummingbirds - one of the four sacred animals in indigenous cosmogony, alongside the jaguar, the condor, and the serpent.

Figures behind them that feel like ancestors, or like the mystical, healing part of womanhood that carries knowledge across generations. Serpents winding upward, representing

transformation, the shedding of old skin, the energy that rises through the body toward something like illumination.

She passes it almost every day, on the way to the gym or simply moving through the city. There are moments, she says. When she feels disconnected - when Miami still feels new, the territory unfamiliar, the community not yet fully hers. And then she sees the mural, and it brings her back to her center.

Amiga, tú sabes cuál es tu propósito.

Friend, you know what your purpose is.

She does.

Morazul is a Colombian urban artist based in Miami. Find her work at @morazul.art