After spending my second day beneath the blaring sun in the back parking lot of Kingsway Shopping Center in Eden, NC, I watched a group of artists spray paint individual canvases at a killer clip throughout the entryway to a well-appointed loft. My cells vibrated while Noé Barnett, Dale Conboy, Jenna Rice, Aaron Golbeck, Chad Bolsinger, Overton Window, Artist Raman, and Growr raced through the 15 minute Barn Bombers painting competition that’d come together just days prior, the first storied event of its class to take place since the pandemic began.
Our host was Marty Kotis, the commercial real estate developer behind Greensboro-based Kick Ass Concepts. Since his first full-scale commission around 2017, Kotis has also operated Kotis Street Art, which facilitates world-class murals by local and international artists alike on the facades of his many real estate holdings—public buildings such as shopping centers and cinemas and restaurants. Kotis built out the loft, or “art barn” as it’s lovingly, colloquially called, for anyone visiting town to work with Kotis Street Art.
Barn might not be the right word, save for a matter of atmosphere. Fragrant with plywood and covered in bold burners and throwies, the loft sleeps at least five artists. It has an indoor studio with empty walls and proper ventilation for spray painting. Another room stocks every shade of spray paint imaginable.
At 11PM the night before, Barnett, Golbeck, Bolsinger and I departed the loft for Graffiti of Eden, the mural installation underway at Kotis’s Kingsway Shopping Center. We trucked at a quiet pace under cover of another hypnotic southern night in the tricked out art van Golbeck had recently renovated for cross-country painting. We arrived in Eden to the vacant lot behind the Dollar Tree, Planet Fitness and their brethren. I picked at an article while the artists assembled their projector and lift setups to outline Barnett’s flowering mural in what felt like a matter of twenty minutes. The next morning, I was shocked to see how well their efforts filled out the surrounding smattering of incredible murals and vacant walls, the project in progress.
The human impulse to leave a literal mark has existed as long as our species, but the current phenomenon of public murals is fairly recent, resulting from a perfect cultural convergence. Today’s rising generation is flocking to cities from the countryside, perpetuating a universal cosmopolitan aesthetic whose influence only grows thanks to social media. There is a hunger for authenticity that graffiti and muralism’s bombast can sate. Where graffiti styles once harkened only to an illegal art form, the medium has coalesced into something closer to the fine art world, raising questions about the validity of ‘classifications’ in art at all.
Kotis’s curatorial focus on the city’s very name with Graffiti of Eden has sparked discussions beginning with the place’s own lush natural heritage. From there, conversations about paradise and community and paint have ensued. Every hour I spent pouring sweat and parsing sentences in that parking lot while the artists painted, cars cruised through to witness the activity for themselves. There’s virtually no art gallery, no art museum, and no public art in Eden. I stood by several car windows and spoke to strangers for ten, fifteen minutes at a time. No one had seen anything like it in their hometown. Their excitement lent a palpable electricity.
“What else could you put on there that would make a shopping center back so interesting?” Kotis had asked me over the phone when I interviewed him about the project prior to my visit. “Absent a gallery or museum, this becomes an outdoor gallery and museum. It becomes a cultural hub.”
Kotis Street Art fosters the growth of every creative collaborator not only by offering material support, but also by providing free range in concept. Kotis often asks artists what project they would paint if they could wave a magic wand. When Australian street artist Adnate travelled to Greensboro with Luxembourg-based Eric Mangen, Kotis asked the latter this very question. Mangen often works with fire extinguishers, and mentioned he’d like to try painting with a firetruck. Kotis Street Art secured the vehicle. Mangen’s eye-catching purple and green avant-gardism set an eye-catching stage for Adnate’s realistic portraits of two Cherokee Women, a tribute to the area’s original inhabitants that covers the entire building and rushes forth onto the parking lot.
“Marty is brilliant in that he understands by giving the artists more freedom he gets more in return, and so does everybody else who views the art,” Golbeck observed. “It’s just like music—we put this thing into our art, and if we’re not in it, it’s going to suffer.” Both of Golbeck’s murals at Graffiti of Eden collaborate with contributions from his colleagues, using their free will to explore unexpected angles to the creation tale. Not only does this open the doors to new insights for the viewer, it also enhances their art education, illustrating the countless approaches that can be taken to the same subject matter.
Not satisfied to simply craft an outdoor art education with curriculum grounded at home and reaching all over the globe, Kotis works from the back and front of house to revitalize each installation from start to finish. Sometimes he acquires buildings with plans to renovate them into better street art canvases. Before painting, he hires a crew to perfectly prime each facade. After a project completes, he adds final touches like festival lights, amenities which turn forgotten spaces back into destinations.
“Marty has a passion for street art I haven’t seen yet in any other business man,” Artist Raman said. “He has so many buildings and businesses and money to do anything, but he takes out time and money to create art in the city. I think that’s not just heartening, but commendable.” An undeniable synergy exists between street art and real estate development, but their partnership only reaches its full potential when built on genuine reciprocity and respect. Curating new murals satisfies Kotis’s love for extreme makeovers and new challenges. The profession also enables him to collect ideas that he encounters while traveling the world, sharing his findings with his hometown neighbors while supporting living artists in a real way.
Golbeck added that Kotis’s tastes account for street art’s roots, including full pieces and motifs in homage to those good old days. “Graffiti is literally the only reason why all of this exists,” he said. “Street art would not be here without that evolution of letters and characters.” As this once-decried medium grows cozier with mass adoration and institutional prestige, prioritizing the human element of its revolutionary beginnings proves the best hope for preserving street art’s spirit. I thought about this while I watched my new colleagues compete in the art barn, Earl Sweatshirt overpowering their hissing aerosol.
My cells vibrated on their behalf, but also my own. Kotis had invited me to participate in the second round of the competition’s painting. I’d never picked up a spray can seriously for myself, and admired every one of the bonafide experts there. An anxious, acrid taste crept up the back of my throat, but I calmed it with memories from my interviews with Greensboro-based artists like Doug Cason, Jenna Rice, and Artist Raman. Each had told me of their own initial trepidations, and how Kotis encouraged them to take new leaps when they were scared. Kotis called the first round and I took a deep breath, put the caps on my cans, and joined the ranks of artists working together to make their own way in this rapidly evolving world.
