“I’m conscious, I’m aware, I’m pro-black, but I’m not anti-anything else”
“I
love you, Problak!” These words echo down Tremont Street as graffiti artist Rob “Problak” Gibbs works on the second mural in his Breathe Life series in his hometown of Roxbury, Massachusetts. Spray paint can in hand, Gibbs steps off the lift he is standing atop to greet the source of this unabashed proclamation. The speaker, who Gibbs presumes is a supporter stopping by to show some love as Gibbs wraps up his latest project, explains to Gibbs that his younger brother had gone missing a few years ago. The man then points at the boy in Gibbs’ mural, who has a younger girl perched on his shoulders, both of them grinning from ear to ear in a display of the pure, uninhibited joy of childhood. “I just found him,” he says.
Having grown up in the ‘90s, during the Golden Age of hip hop (think A Tribe Called Quest, Public Enemy, Big Daddy Kane), Gibbs was heavily influenced by the music of his adolescence and established a lifelong goal of using his art to display the same message of social consciousness that his favorite musicians conveyed through their songs. A self-taught graffiti artist and cofounder of the Boston-based organization Artists For Humanity (AFH), Gibbs uses his art to shine a light on the injustices faced by racial and economic minorities in America. Gibbs strives to represent these inequities in a way that embodies hope for change while acknowledging the pain they cause among marginalized communities.
At a staggering 1,700 square feet in area, Breathe Life 3 is one of Gibbs’ largest projects to date—and certainly one of his most socially and emotionally impactful. The boy in Breathe Life 3 is an updated depiction of the boy in Breathe Life 1, now a few years older and shown holding his younger sister up in praise as the two sign the phrase “Breathe Life” in American Sign Language. The uplifting mural is a quintessential embodiment of the positivity Gibbs aims to promote through his work.
“Being a black man, I feel as though I can’t be as expressive as I would like to be, because it gets categorized differently… I try to convey a message that I would love to be seen and heard and have people be able to look at, digest, and feel smart at the end of the day when they look at it,” said Gibbs.
“I never approach a piece with anger because I think that’s the easiest thing to do, is to get mad. The hard thing to do is to try to find the resolution… I don’t want to disservice anybody looking at my work by being like, ‘I’m mad, and you have to feel it, too,’” said Gibbs.
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AFH, an organization Gibbs cofounded as a teenager in 1991 with five of his friends, provides under-resourced teens the keys to self-sufficiency through paid employment in art and design. It is said that the most powerful thing one can do when one has a platform is to pass the mic, and by fostering creativity in young people who otherwise do not have the means to express their artistry readily available to them, this is exactly what AFH is doing.