Abstract
In this 2025 interview, Kevin “mr. soul” Harp discusses his early life in Lee-Harvard, his early education, and his early interest in comic books and graffiti as a form of artistic expression. He describes the rise of hip hop in Cleveland, his involvement in the graffiti art scene, and other artists and collaborators that he worked alongside. Harp discusses his life after leaving Cleveland: attending art school in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, spending time in Chicago, and eventually moving to Atlanta, Georgia in 1996, where, through his artwork, he became associated with Organized Noize, the Dungeon Family, and Patchwerk Studios. Finally, he describes his return to Cleveland in 2016 and his work as a mural artist.
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Interviewee
Harp, Kevin (interviewee)
Interviewer
Carubia, Ava (interviewer)
Project
Union-Miles
Date
7-16-2025
Document Type
Oral History
Duration
54 minutes
Recommended Citation
"Kevin Harp interview, 16 July 2025" (2025). Cleveland Regional Oral History Collection. Interview 483026.
https://engagedscholarship.csuohio.edu/crohc000/1397
Transcript
Ava Carubia [00:00:00] Today is July 16, 2025. My name is Ava Carubia, and I’m here at the Earle B. Turner Recreation center in Cleveland, Ohio. Interviewing Kevin “mr. soul” Harp, for the Cleveland Regional Oral History Project, thank you for agreeing to be interviewed today.
Kevin Harp [00:00:17] Thank you for reaching out.
Ava Carubia [00:00:19] And then can you please state your name, the year you were born and where you were born for the record?
Kevin Harp [00:00:25] My name is Kevin Harp. My creative colleagues know me as mr. soul, and I was born…1974, at St. Luke’s Hospital in Cleveland, and I’m from the Lee and Harvard community.
Ava Carubia [00:00:41] Perfect. I just want to get started right there. Can you talk a little bit about growing up in Lee-Harvard?
Kevin Harp [00:00:46] Growing up in Lee and Harvard. So probably around if I can think back maybe four, five years old, is when I moved to Lee and Harvard. And I remember going to a daycare, Land of the Little People, over on I forgot the street. I’m drawing a blank right now. And I went to Gracemount for elementary school and went on to Whitney M. Young. They deemed me as being one of the smart kids. So at the time, Whitney Young was a major work school. And so seventh and eighth grade I went there. And then from there I went to John Marshall High School and I went to John Marshall during the time that busing was still a thing, they were taking east side kids busing them to the west side, west side kids busing them to the east side.
[00:01:48] And because I was in this major works program, those of us on the east side who were who are part of that program, we went to John Marshall. And that is, in a nutshell, loosely, my trajectory from 5 years old to 18 years old. And I can go into further detail if you if you want me to just tell the story or if you have some particular questions.
Ava Carubia [00:02:16] I have some questions.
Kevin Harp [00:02:17] Okay.
Ava Carubia [00:02:18] As a kid, you said that you were considered one of the smart kids, but what kind of things did you like to do in your free time?
Kevin Harp [00:02:26] So I say that in quotes, one of the smart kids, because, you know, there was a system of tests that, you know, students to this day still endure to determine their intelligence level. And those of us who went to Whitney M. Young on Harvard were deemed to have tested higher, which, you know, they made us feel like we were the smarter kids.
[00:02:51] I know a lot of those smart kids that still didn’t make it. But so that’s kind of like what it was. And then for me, growing up, I was I was always into art. Like from 5 years old, my mother used to I had a cousin, my Cousin Terry and his sister Missy, they were my two favorite cousins.
[00:03:16] And mostly because Terry was the artist. So he used to draw comic book characters, cartoon characters, Bruce Lee, all the things that I was into, you know, going into the first grade, second grade. So that was my inspiration. And most of my time was spent trying to learn how to be as good as he was.
[00:03:39] So in my free time, I did a lot of that. Comic books. Me and my cousin used to hop on a train, go downtown to the arcade to collect comic books. That was always an inspiration for me. And that transcended to me around third or fourth grade, probably around third grade, that I remember hip hop culture being born and then me being able to identify graffiti as the art form that would be what would capture my attention for the rest of my life and would influence me to become the artist I am today. You know, outside of that, I was a student, not a student. I was like a lot of children from the Lee and Harvard community. We all played baseball at St. Henry’s baseball. I played for the miserable Mets. We could never win. Like, we was just so horrible. Like, God, we was like. We’d be like 1 in 14, 3 and 12. Like, it was. It was pretty depressing as a kid. Like, damn, we can’t never win. But more importantly than the wins it taught a lot about.
[00:04:52] There was my introduction to community outside of school, and it was centered around Little League baseball. I think that that league, you know, for some others, it was power football. But St. Henry’s baseball gave us a platform to learn a lot about life outside of baseball. But art has always been the thing that I did in my free time that always attracted me.
[00:05:18] Various forms of art, graffiti art, like I said, comic books, cartoon characters and stuff like that has always been my go to thing.
Ava Carubia [00:05:27] And then can you describe what Lee-Harvard was like when you were growing up there?
Kevin Harp [00:05:32] To the best of my ability, I will. You know, I’m old now, so. But Lee and Harvard was exactly what it was. It was the Lee and Harvard community, not the Lee and Harvard neighborhood. And I learned from a good friend of mine, Fred Ward, who’s from Glenville, who adamantly makes it a point to communicate the difference between neighborhood and community. A neighborhood where a bunch of people live together. A community is where those people share common unity around certain morals, principles. And so I would say that Lee and Harvard was more of a community. I was having this conversation not too long ago about, actually when I was in Detroit talking to my cousin, we were talking about growing up.
[00:06:18] And I remember you Know, my parents going to Lee and Harvard to the butcher shop to get the meat. Like there was no, like that’s what was 4th of July or Labor Day. We went to the butcher to get the meat. So to me, that’s an experience. I remember when we talk about the industrialization of our food and things of that nature, I remember H & B Discount, which was a store we used to go to every Tuesday to get the new music on.
[00:06:49] It was cassette tapes for us back in the day. I remember, like I said, the St. Henry’s baseball. There were a lot of the men in the community who were the coaches. You know, there were fathers, there was uncles and big cousins who all played a role in showing some form of leadership for young Black men.
[00:07:13] I definitely won’t deny that that came from going to, you know, engage in the little league baseball. So Lee and Harvard to me was. It was ultimately, it was more of a community. It felt like people were together. Not to say that, you know, communities didn’t have their issues, but far different than what I would say I experience to this day for Lee and Harvard. Yeah.
Ava Carubia [00:07:42] And then I want to go back even further and just ask you about how your family originally came to Cleveland.
Kevin Harp [00:07:50] So my, my family came. So my mother came to Cleveland with her, with my grandmother and grandfather, her brothers and sisters by way of West Virginia. And then my father came to Cleveland by way of Alabama. And I believe that, you know, growing up I used to visit those spaces a lot, those places a lot. You know, my father made it a point every summer to go to Alabama, not just to see his parents, but to connect me to how he grew up. And so going to Alabama. Centre, Alabama, to be specific, which is really a city that’s just a cross. It’s literally just a crossroad. Right. And so my grandfather’s house, my grandparents house, was on a farm.
[00:08:44] You know, you walk out the back to the left is this, this big field of cotton. And then on the other side of that is a lake. And then when you go to the right and down was the barn shed where he kept his tractors. I used to always love going down there to my cousin Edward would put me on the tractors, let me drive the tractor.
[00:09:06] And when you go further down to the right, that was all the farmland. And it was an interesting experience because it’s like it smelled like cow manure every morning. And it made me learn about appreciating the lesser things in life. Because living on a farm and engaging in farm life for. We would probably be down there for about a week or so or something like that.
[00:09:39] It was just an interesting experience. And so when they came to Cleveland, my mom, my father came to Cleveland, obviously they brought these experiences, you know, with them. And. Yeah, so they’ve both, you know, my father passed away nine years ago in October, and always made it. Made it a point to make sure I was connected to even where they came from, my mother and my father.
Ava Carubia [00:10:08] And what year did they come to Cleveland?
Kevin Harp [00:10:10] That question I can’t answer for you. I don’t remember. I don’t remember. And that’s interesting. I’ll have to ask, because I don’t think that I have even asked. Now, I do know that my mother went to high school here. She went to Shaw. So my grandparents lived in East Cleveland at the time, when it wasn’t popular for black people to live in East Cleveland.
[00:10:36] I learned that my grandfather used to have to go to Shaw on occasion to, you know, set things straight when her daughter. When his daughters were being mistreated. So East Cleveland at that time was a suburb, predominantly white. My grandfather felt like, you know, this was the place where he wanted to raise his family.
[00:11:00] And so to this day, you know, that house. And my grandmother and my grandfather passed away, but a group of cousins owned the house that, you know, our parents grew up in. So, yeah, that’s a pretty cool piece of history to still be attached to. So my mother was here definitely earlier years, maybe junior high school, but definitely high school. She. Because she graduated from Shaw.
Ava Carubia [00:11:31] I want to ask you, you talked about. You first got involved in graffiti culture, and that was out of the hip hop culture as well. So can you talk more about the hip hop scene in Cleveland and how you started becoming a graffiti artist?
Kevin Harp [00:11:47] So at the time, you know, you gotta keep in mind that there’s no social media. There’s no way to really know what’s going on on the other side of town unless you connected to somebody that’s connected to what’s going on on that side of town. Outside of that, it was the music. So however we got to music, you know, there was radio shows that we listening to, and occasionally maybe something came on on tv.
[00:12:18] Then Beat street came out. Beat street was the pivotal experience for me because it was the first movie that was made that was a commercial representation of hip hop culture. It was a storyline centered around a graffiti artist, a DJ, the B-Boys and an emcee and all the things that came with that.
[00:12:41] So earlier media at the time was what provided the influence for hip hop culture. And then there as I got older, I learned about, you know, OG’s like Cochise, who is deemed as the. The OG of Cleveland hip hop, like putting a lot of DJs on, one of those being DJ Johnny’ O, who is also an OG in the game.
[00:13:07] And, you know, my friend, mentor, brother, Sano was the person that you wanted to meet if you was into graffiti culture. So now we moving towards high school, you know, maybe like in the middle of seventh grade, going to eighth grade, but surely going into the ninth grade, you know, this culture was beginning to expose itself in, in the form of pieces we would see when we grow out, go out.
[00:13:37] So there were graffiti artists like Ranger, who was what we would deem as a legend. And for myself, Sano, for myself and others, Sano was the de facto person you had to see, meet if you were a kid at the time who was really into graffiti culture. So my friends and I, we would go downtown to a record store, Downtown Records, which was another place that we bought music from.
[00:14:10] And Sano would have pieces from his black book that he would leave on the wall. There was a wall that they left for the graffiti artist to leave pieces and all that type of stuff. So we would experience his work there, but we would also experience it on the Red Line going downtown.
[00:14:29] So we’re talking about mid-80s at this point. And that was the experience that really made a lot of us say, like, this is what we’re doing, right. And that from fourth grade, Beat Street, coming out on into, you know, ninth grade and even graduating. Graffiti culture and hip hop culture were the things that, excuse me, that influenced me.
[00:15:01] And as I got older, I began get exposed to other things that were happening. Like I said, the DJs, Johnny’ O. Johnny’ O used to do these parties, you know, over on in the St. Clair Glenville community, Collinwood, and we would hear about these parties. And then Sano would go on to do design work for Johnny’ O.
[00:15:26] And so all of these things, elements of the culture started to build, blend together. And so that was pretty much my experience. We did our experience with hip hop concerts were mostly at Cleveland Public Auditorium, to which I actually last year did a mural to honor that hip hop culture inside of Cleveland Public Auditorium.
[00:15:54] So those were the experiences and the outlets at the time for us to embrace and fellowship around hip hop culture. And this is during a time where there’s no social media, there’s really no form of communication other than riding a red line and eventually getting to high school and just flat out stalking Sano.
[00:16:18] Like, I don’t have. We don’t have classes on the third floor, but we know his locker is on the third floor. So some kind of way we gonna find our way to Sano’s locker to show some artwork. He would keep his locker open because he was a show off, right? He would keep his locker open, but he would have these pieces and just this immaculate work that he created.
[00:16:42] And that was the source of inspiration in high school. Even to this day, like, we still have a rapport as my mentor, my big bro. So that was kind of like my feeling officially accepted into Cleveland’s graffiti art culture, because Sano and Doing Everything Funky, which was the name of the crew, was the crew that you wanted to be in, if you wanted to be in graffiti culture.
[00:17:12] And Sano embraced me and several other, several, several others. And to this day, we still pay homage to him for doing that.
Ava Carubia [00:17:23] And then did you have any idea at the time of how Cleveland’s hip hop scene was maybe different to other cities?
Kevin Harp [00:17:30] Definitely not, because again, there’s not a lot of exposure around hip hop. The only thing we do have as a comparison is the Mecca, which is New York City. So all the music is coming out of the South Bronx, Queens, and, you know, all the boroughs of. Of New York. And at at a point in time, a book came out called Subway Art.
[00:17:55] So this is like, at the time, this was. I think this was ’85 or ’86. This is the holy grail of graffiti. Right. It’s almost like having a DJ Kool Herc mixtape. So Subway Art was a book published by Henry Chalfant and Martha Cooper. And all during the 70s, into the 80s, they just documented the culture.
[00:18:20] And it was brilliant because they were these two white people who were in the trenches of the South Bronx who earned the trust of all these Black and Latino kids. And they did that culture the greatest service because they documented it. And we were able to buy into that in the form of this book, Subway Art.
[00:18:39] So that gave us exposure to styles, writers, and all these things in graffiti culture through this book. And I believe that played an integral role on a lot of our development as, you know, graffiti artists over the years.
Ava Carubia [00:19:00] What year did you graduate high school?
Kevin Harp [00:19:01] I graduated John Marshall in June 1992.
Ava Carubia [00:19:06] And then after that, were you still continuing on with this graffiti art?
Kevin Harp [00:19:11] Yes. I mean, even to this day, graffiti is. That’s the nucleus that created the artist. Now I’m a multidisciplinary artist at this moment, but from high school I went to me and a friend of mine, we went to the Art Institute of Pittsburgh. And when we got there, naturally, the extension was to find who’s part of the culture here.
[00:19:35] So we met other graffiti artists in Pittsburgh, fellowshiped with them, learned that Pittsburgh had different styles, a different history and connection to the culture than we did. But it was all based off of the same underlying. Underlying foundation that was established in New York. So from high school, I definitely continued the trajectory.
[00:19:58] Now when I went to art school, I was going with the intentions of learning how to. How to. Or what to do to become a professional artist. And during that journey, graffiti was always a part of my. And still is a part of my. A very important part of my life.
Ava Carubia [00:20:19] Well, you said that Pittsburgh had a different iteration of style. Can you talk about what the Cleveland style of graffiti was maybe comparative to other cities?
Kevin Harp [00:20:29] So that’s interesting. I don’t know if it’s anything that I can put into words, because Cleveland had a. A relatively small scene. You know, there were a couple of artists. Nomad, Oops, Ranger, then there were Sano. There was a few artists who were the. The pivotal artists who laid the. The backbone for Cleveland.
[00:20:55] And so I don’t think there was a particular style that I could communicate verbally, but I learned that in when we got to Pittsburgh. Like, the letterforms, how they did letter forms was different. How the tags looked were a little different. And I think it came from how they interpreted and how they interpreted what they learned from New York culture and how they turned that into what their style was.
[00:21:29] And such is the case for Philly, even though I had never been to Philly, what Subway Art did for us at that time was connect us to some of the subtle differences. You know, like on the west coast at that time, a lot of artists use a lot of characters. There were a lot more
[00:21:51] Bigger productions in terms of backgrounds, where in New York, it’s really about letters, right? Graffiti is about the letters first. And so a lot of those things were learned as more books came out than there were magazines or zines, as we called them, where people would submit images from all over the world.
[00:22:12] And you can go to certain stores, buy these zines, and you can now see graffiti in Switzerland, graffiti in somewhere in Africa, Graffiti at the top of Mount Rushmore if somebody made it there, right? So that just gave more exposure to the culture and allowed all of us from all over to learn and to adopt different techniques and styles from one another.
Ava Carubia [00:22:36] How long did you stay in Pittsburgh for?
Kevin Harp [00:22:38] Two years. I was there from September ’92 to December ’94, when I graduated and, you know, initially out of high school, I wanted to move to Atlanta, but I felt that it. I don’t think I was ready to be that far away from home. So Pittsburgh was still accessible to where I could hop on the Greyhound and be in Cleveland in two and a half hours or whatever.
[00:23:07] But so I spent two years there. And after those two years, there was definitely no question in the world that I was moving back to Cleveland. And so I came back to Cleveland after that.
Ava Carubia [00:23:19] And then can you talk a little bit about what it was like to come back after being away?
Kevin Harp [00:23:26] It was almost like I really wasn’t away because it was so close. Like, we came home often. It seemed, you know, now it seemed. It seemed like we came home every other weekend almost, or at least once a month or something like that. And maybe in the second year, it spread open more because we were becoming more independent.
[00:23:47] And it’s like, oh, we don’t need to go back to Cleveland. We grown. But coming back to Cleveland was a cool thing for me because at that point, I was set on what I wanted to do. I wanted to do music package design and logos for rappers and entertainers. And so for me, I left Cleveland having a community of friends who were already making music, producing and doing events and stuff like that.
[00:24:17] So when I came back home, there were flyers to do, there were cassette covers to do. Not CD covers, not yet, almost. There were these different things to do. So I came back with an entrepreneurial spirit because while in Pittsburgh, I took a community college course, How to Start a Small Business. And it gave me just enough to come back to Cleveland to function or operate as a business selling these creative services.
[00:24:46] So I have friends, like my friend Jasmark in the Soulful Senate. Dominator, and all these people who are part of this Soulful Senate Collective, which is a collective of writers, MCs, and producers. So everybody needed cassette covers for their projects, flyers, and all these types of things. And so that’s where I started to get deeper into the enterprise of art.
[00:25:16] Flashback to seventh, eighth, ninth grade through high school, though, I was one of the go to airbrush guys. So that was popular culture back then. So high school, I was doing a lot of airbrushing. Jean jackets, jeans, after prom, homecoming outfits, that type of stuff. So I had already, at a very early age, learned how to monetize my skill set and my passion.
[00:25:44] And so when I came back home, I was just operating on that with a different level of knowledge and wisdom applied to that. And so when I came back, I knew that I’m gonna hang out at the Soulful Senate because these people, that’s these artists over here need my services. And, you know, word of mouth travels.
[00:26:04] And so that’s kind of like what it was like. So I came back in December ’94, officially January ’95. Now in January ’95, I’m in Chicago because my girlfriend at the time, who I met in Pittsburgh, she was from Chicago and I had family in Chicago. So I was. After I came from Pittsburgh, I knew I was coming back to Cleveland, but I was also entertaining being somewhere else.
[00:26:34] Atlanta was on that list as well. But Chicago was still relatively close. So I went to Chicago, January ’95. My girlfriend at the time, her parents let me stay with them for about a week and a half, two weeks. I did interviews with ad agencies, Ebony, Jet. I went everywhere I thought that I could, but it was negative 17 degrees.
[00:26:58] And I said, oh, hell no. I’m not leaving one cold place and going to a super hella colder place. So came back from Chicago and it’s like I have to figure out what I’m gonna do in Cleveland or how I’m gonna make Cleveland work, right? And around June, so I’m doing my thing June, I meet my friend Rashad, who had a magazine at the time.
[00:27:27] It’s called Planet Black magazine. This was before Black Planet was even a thought just for everybody out there to know. We to this day believe that they got their name by reversing our name. But he had been doing his magazine for a year. About a year before I met him was called Planet Black Magazine.
[00:27:47] It was an eight page zine that was a feature insert of the Call & Post. And the Call & Post was one of the few Black owned, Black operated self printing newspapers in the country who were at 105 and Chester at the time. So I became a part of Planet Black magazine and, you know, started doing a layout.
[00:28:15] I read this rebranded, redesigned everything. And that took us to Chicago, that took us to Atlanta, that took us to Milwaukee, that took us to DC. It took it to wherever there took us to wherever there was a music conference at the time. Back then in the mid-90s, you had Jack the Rapper, that was in Atlanta, you had How Can I Be Down?
[00:28:37] Which was in Miami, Florida. You had the BME conference, Black Music Excellence. You had all of these music conferences centered around Black music at the time. So for us, we had to go to those places because none of that was happening in Cleveland. Even though there was a scene in Cleveland, you know, around this time.
[00:28:56] Bone Thugs and Harmony have been introduced to the world. But as a zine, there was only so much survival we could do off a local business advertisement. So we had to go where the industry was to create relationships, which is what we did. And ultimately that’s what down the road led to me eventually moving to Atlanta.
[00:29:22] So from ’95 to June of ’95 to September ’96, it’s all Cleveland. But I’m moving around. We’re moving around because I’m spending the majority of my time like I’m an entrepreneur at this time, the magazine is paying me and then I’m doing freelance work. And so being part of this, we’re traveling around, going to these different conventions and stuff like that.
[00:29:50] And then we ended up in one in September ’96. I’ll never forget it. And I won’t forget because this is the weekend that Tupac passed away. And I remember going to a vigil at Clark University where they were paying respect to Tupac. And the last night of that visit is when we decided that the next time we come to Atlanta would be to move.
[00:30:18] So from ’95 to ’96, I was still in Cleveland, still based in Cleveland, but we were operating abroad because we were expanding beyond Cleveland, even though we were Cleveland-based zine at the time. And so that would be my much of my experience from ’95, when I came home from Pittsburgh. So I spent a good year and a few months back in Cleveland before I decided that I would eventually move to Atlanta.
Ava Carubia [00:30:49] And then what year did you move to Atlanta?
Kevin Harp [00:30:51] November 1996 is when I moved to Atlanta. Yep. And so we were there in September and then he and I both agreed. I’ll never forget the last night of us being in Atlanta. We decided that the next time we come back it would be to look for somewhere to live. So we went back in October, a little more or a little less than a month later, and we stayed for a week.
[00:31:22] We ate Waffle House for a week for breakfast and lunch. Right. So that eventually when I moved to Atlanta, I ain’t want no parts of Waffle House. But we stayed there for a week. We eventually found somewhere to stay and we came back here. And so for me, I’m thinking, okay, bet we got our eyes set on blah, blah, blah, blah, we leaving at the top of the year.
[00:31:45] But my friend who at this time, he has a wife, a three year old son and a newborn, he’s like, well, I guess I’ll see you when you come down. So I’m like, damn, he got all this. I don’t have no children. I don’t have no wife, so I’m going, too. And so we ended up in Atlanta in November ’96.
Ava Carubia [00:32:08] Can you talk about how you entered into the art scene down there?
Kevin Harp [00:32:15] So when we moved to Atlanta, we still had the magazine. That was our primary reason for moving. We felt like we had a goal in Cleveland to have our hands on everything going on in Cleveland through this magazine. And we were doing that. We put. We were the first to put Bone on the cover of a magazine.
[00:32:34] Now, at the time, our little magazine wasn’t nationally significant, but for us, it meant a lot to know that we were in a position to have them on the cover. And so we understood the impact that the magazine could have, but we needed to be in a market where it could be supported.
[00:32:51] And so we went to Atlanta off of that. I’m still freelancing, and we get an office, and we’re doing that. So with the magazine, it’s putting us in spaces where I’m meeting people where I can network. And, you know, one of my main reasons at that time, also I wanted to move to Atlanta is because I wanted to work with Organized Noize in some capacity.
[00:33:16] For those of you who. Who don’t know, Organized Noize is the production company that discovered Outkast. And so I was like, around ’94, ’93, ’94 is when Outkast was introduced to us. And instantly I was like, whatever this sounds like, I want my art to look like this. Right? There was a combination of soul, gospel, rock, funk, and hip hop.
[00:33:47] It was like a mesh, and then it was live instrumentation. It was just amazing to me. But I knew I had to be in Atlanta to make that connection because trying to make that connection from Cleveland wasn’t happening. And so once I got there, like, I always kept in my mind that these were things that I wanted to accomplish.
[00:34:10] My break came when, in ’97. So when going to Atlanta, I kind of went with a predefined list of people, places, and spaces I needed to go to. And back then, when we used to buy music, you can open up the CD cover. CDs are out at this time, and you can read the liner notes.
[00:34:31] And you can not just read who the art director was, who did the album cover. Excuse me, who did the photography. But you can also learn where the music was recorded. So Patchwerk Recording Studios, Doppler. And it was another one that I don’t remember. I don’t remember at the time. Well, the main studios where a lot of the Atlanta music was being recorded.
[00:34:53] So in ’97, after we got set up properly between like November, December, January, I started doing cold calls and I landed an opportunity to come show my work at Patchwerk. And from that day to this day, I have been a member of this family, which oddly enough, at the end of this month celebrates 30 years.
[00:35:21] And I’ve been a part of that family for about 28, 29 of those years. But what Patchwerk did for me in terms of getting into the art scene as a graphic artist, because I’m doing graphic design at this time. As a graphic artist, what PatchWerk did for me, is exposed me to the industry.
[00:35:38] Outkast, Toni Braxton, the Goodie Mob, all the Lil Face projects, [unclear], you name it, anything. Lil Jon and the Eastside Boyz, the YoungBloodz, TLC, you name it. It was being recorded at PatchWerk recording studio. So that gave me a level of credibility where I was doing flyers and branding work for PatchWerk.
[00:36:04] And then they also had a record label at the time and the flagship artist was Ras Kass. So any of the hip hop lyricists out there who know who Ras Kass is at the time, and to this day he’s considered one of the most lyrically elevated individuals in the game. I was doing work for some of these for promotional, then they had other independent artists.
[00:36:28] I was doing album covers and stuff like that. So it gave me an opportunity to have my name seen. So if I did a. A studio flyer for PatchWerk, they print 5, 10, 15, 20, 000 flyers. That’s free advertisement for me. So then I started to get calls started to get referred and then that’s how my network grew. Through PatchWerk
[00:36:52] This would be in 2002, after they had moved into the new studio complex, the co-owner, one of the co owners, Curtis Daniel, who today is I would consider a big brother and a mentor, he co owns the studio at the time. He introduced me to a guy, Miya Bailey. And Miya Bailey and his crew at the time were the first collective of Black tattoo artists.
[00:37:21] I thought they were like aliens or something, because I didn’t even. I didn’t know Black tattoo artists existed, let alone a collective of them. And so I just made myself a part. I just came and kicked my feet up basically, right? I started hanging out and that’s where I started to bridge the gap between graphic art and then getting back into fine art, painting, drawing, mentoring artists and all the things that I’ve done, you know, as part of being with Miya Bailey and that collective that went on to become known as City of Ink, which is historic in itself.
[00:38:01] So that’s the trajectory from ’96 to maybe 2000. Well, really up until I had to move back home, 2016. And then to this day, I still go to Atlanta. I’m still part of that collective. I’m one of the co founders of that collective. And this past February, we celebrated 18 years of doing the anniversary art show to honor the
[00:38:28] This collective and all of the other artists that were a part of our community. We all come together, we do this big art show. So that’s pretty much my trajectory. There’s some other details in there. Like, so I moved to Atlanta to meet, I want to work with Organized Noize. In Cleveland,
[00:38:48] I’m FedExing packages and sending faxes. Y’ all don’t know nothing about that. And it wasn’t working. But when I moved to Atlanta, by chance, one day I was walking through Greenbrier Mall, a mall that I heard about in the Outkast songs, and I run into Sleepy Brown. And so I passed him one of my business cards that he looked at, and he was like, we’re looking for somebody to do something for a project.
[00:39:18] And, like, your work looks like you the person. And so that was my first official invitation to the Dungeon, where I would meet Rico Wade and Ray Murray, the three people who make up Organized Noize. And a special rest in peace to Rico Wade, who passed away last year. And so those are some of the middle details about my trajectory, moving to Atlanta and up to the point that I had to move back home to Cleveland.
Ava Carubia [00:39:50] And then you mentioned you were doing painting and drawing stuff, but how did you get into mural art?
Kevin Harp [00:39:55] Graffiti is a form of mural art. It’s just illegal, and it’s misunderstood. It’s a culture. And street art, you know, which they call it now and whatnot, is a byproduct of graffiti culture. So painting things large on a wall with spray paint has always been my thing, you know. And again, my mentor Sano, who taught us.
[00:40:25] He taught us how to do illustration, how to airbrush, how to use markers, pen and ink, and how to translate that to a wall or mural. So there were. There were indicators that that was just something I was supposed to be doing. I didn’t do a lot of. I didn’t really do no mural work in Atlanta, though those 20 years, I might have painted two murals over that time frame, because most of my work was centered around graphic design, brand identity, and things of that nature.
[00:41:03] And then coming back home, what happened was when I moved back home in October 2016, I knew that and what brought me back home is that my father passed away unexpectedly. My mother was sick at the time and I’m their only child. So I felt that the response to my father passing away was being back home, accessible to my mom and to be able to help her out.
[00:41:30] But when I came back, I knew that there were no. There was going to be a major shift. Like, you know, a blue collar worker would pay me $1,500 for a logo because they, Atlanta is a city of entrepreneurship. And so people would work white collar, blue collar jobs. But they were always investing in their side hustles.
[00:41:55] They needed logos, they needed branding, they needed all of that. But moving back home to Cleveland, I knew that Cleveland didn’t have the Black middle class dollar that Atlanta had. And so the I knew and then nor did it have the music industry for me to sustain off of. You know, I could work in the independent sector and I worked on major.
[00:42:18] I worked with Def Jam, Interscope, Motown Records, I had rap a lot. I worked with a lot of labels when I was in Atlanta because that traffic is intermingling there. So when I came back home, I had to figure something out. And then there was a brother from the Buckeye community, Julian Khan, who had been following me before I moved to Cleveland, back home to Cleveland.
[00:42:40] And so when I came back, he had brought me into an opportunity to do a mural over on Buckeye, which today is 117th and Buckeye. So a mural of Maya Angelou, to which I hired my mentor and brought him back from LA. Sano lives in LA now. I brought him back not just to be a part of the project, but to low key, teach me how to do the project too, right?
[00:43:08] So I allowed him to lead. And that’s really where I got into the murals. I was like, oh, they giving away money to paint big on the walls, Sign me up. And then I started to learn that system. And then I started to learn that the most important thing was that this, you know, I felt was a divine pathway to me being able to establish a legacy around my work.
[00:43:39] While I’m very proud of some of the things I was able to, a lot of the things I was able to accomplish in Atlanta, though a lot of that was centered around what the record label wanted, the artist wanted, production company wanted, and they entrusted me and loved my skillset to do that.
[00:43:57] But coming back home doing murals with the intention of putting public art on the southeast side of Cleveland was the thing that I could speak to as a legacy that was strictly driven by my own intention to service my community with inspirational, informative messaging through public art.
Ava Carubia [00:44:20] How had Cleveland changed in the 20 years that you left?
Kevin Harp [00:44:25] You know, what’s so crazy is that I don’t think it had changed. When I left Cleveland, it was in the top five most segregated cities in the country. When I came back, it was still that. When I left, the east side and west side was divided. It’s still that when I left, St.
[00:44:44] Clair, East Cleveland, Kinsman, everywhere the Black population existed, with exception to Lee and Harvard, which was the Black middle class community, all those places had gotten worse as opposed to progressively better. So I realized that there was no development happening in the city in the areas that I was accustomed to. Because growing up, the only west side involvement I had was being bused to John Marshall.
[00:45:17] So for myself, Cleveland hadn’t really changed a lot. And I think that was one of the things that catered to me, flirting with a form of depression because I was somewhere 20 years. And I watched not just my own growth in those 20 years, but I watched everything around me growing. I watched people around me grow.
[00:45:40] I watched things change. I saw things be built. You know, I saw things like PatchWerk. To this day, celebrating 30 years still sustained. So when I came back home, I didn’t see much change. And I definitely didn’t see the intentions to put public art in the communities that I was from. So that was some of my experiences coming home.
[00:46:09] But I also came back with a progressive thought process. And I realized that in order to make things happen, I would have to diversify where I put placed myself. Which means that, you know, I had to come outside of the southeast side box. I had to be in rooms and spaces where the decision makiers were, decision makers were in art.
[00:46:40] And, you know, I learned that a lot of those decision makers didn’t look like me. So it just became a whole political thing that catered to the Cleveland experience that I remember before I left. So, you know, in short, I, from my own perspective, I didn’t see much that had changed. I saw, unless you’re talking about going from okay to terrible, you know, like East Cleveland, like over the 20 years that I was in Atlanta, my grandparents, my grandmom is in, or my grandmother at the time is still in East Cleveland.
[00:47:24] So I’m watching it deteriorate to this day. Like the house that we own on that street in East Cleveland is a neglected space because it’s predominantly Black. And there’s a lot of politics that govern why these predominantly Black communities are starving for resources. And that was a progression that went from maybe not good to extra bad.
Ava Carubia [00:47:57] Well, I just have two more questions for you, and one is, how do you think that being from Lee-Harvard impacted you as a person?
Kevin Harp [00:48:06] Being from Lee and Harvard impacted me because, again, you know, there was. I had developed community. You know, a lot of the kids at the time that I went to school with, we spent four years riding the same bus back and forth to the west side. And I learned or I experienced what I acknowledge now is my first form of community engagement as it pertains to my work.
[00:48:45] You know, while in junior high school and high school, it was my classmates who was my community engagement, because if it was whack, somebody was going to tell you, and if it wasn’t, I got hired to paint it or it was celebrated. So that impacted me because those friends from that community, they helped me develop my sense of pride and my confidence around the artwork.
[00:49:12] That’s why I was able to go to Atlanta with my chest out, because my community had built me for that. I would say Lee and Harvard has impacted my life because just relationships, I guess, and I guess it wouldn’t be no different for me. It probably wouldn’t have been no different if I grew up in Glenville, because even moving to Atlanta, not knowing anybody and building community, I believe that would have been my trajectory anyway.
[00:49:46] I believe that’s my. My purpose on Earth through art. Build community, inspire, inform, educate, uplift. So I don’t think Lee and Harvard’s experience is exclusive to that. I think my purpose is more exclusive to that. And Lee and Harvard just happened to be the community that nurtured me to become who I am.
Ava Carubia [00:50:10] Well, my last question is, what message would you like to leave for future generations?
Kevin Harp [00:50:17] Right now, it’s the message I was giving you earlier today. Right. Always do things with purpose. Always lead to inspire, inform, uplift, and educate. It’s okay to entertain, too, but I think we’re living in a space where entertainment is in abundance in comparison to all those other things combined. And I would say for, you know, young people to embrace and learn about AI blockchain technology and cryptocurrency, it’s very important to understand the size and magnitude of the changes that are happening right in front of our face right now that we can ride the wave on and sustain, or that we fall off the wave and have an intense time to prevent ourselves from drowning trying to get back to the top.
[00:51:25] It’s imperative to understand what blockchain technology is. It’s imperative to know how to utilize AI to stay ahead and to sustain and to grow in this society where it’s going. And it’s very important to understand the value of cryptocurrency and what crypto projects, the utility that crypto projects are bringing to the future.
[00:51:50] Because I grew up listening to music on a record player, then a cassette tape, then a CD player, then an iPod shuffle to I don’t even buy the music no more. We pay for it to be streamed. In my lifetime, that’s what, four or five different ways to experience art, I mean to experience music.
[00:52:12] And I’m saying right now, as a 51 year old man, we are about to experience a different form of interacting with currency and money and how we send money and how we exchange money and how we invest in things. And we’re in a space right now where it’s low tier entry point if we pay attention to what’s happening and are not swayed away by the media.
[00:52:38] So those are some of the things that I would say at this point because those are the things that are going to define those who secret sink or swim.
Ava Carubia [00:52:49] Well, those are all my questions, but do you have anything you want to add that I didn’t ask you about?
Kevin Harp [00:52:56] I’m trying to think what else could I. I do so much better with questions because it provides a narrative to the expression. So off the head, I can’t think of anything specifically. But I hope that I was, you know, informative enough for why you wanted to sit down and have this conversation.
Ava Carubia [00:53:21] Yes, thank you so much.
Kevin Harp [00:53:23] Thanks for having me. Thanks for the opportunity and yeah, thanks.
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