'We're doing this for the community'; Wall 2 Wall graffiti art group spends the summer creating murals

Aug 19, 2023

Wall 2 Wall's latest mural at Crowded Kitchen, located on N. Plum Street, sits almost completed with one major aspect to be finished, on Wednesday, Aug. 30, 2023.

Amid the ceaseless metal rattle of spray paint cans and classic hip-hop playing from a small Bluetooth speaker, a giant wizard will soon take up residency overlooking the winding cemetery curve of New Holland Avenue.

Over the course of two weeks, the side wall of Crowded Kitchen at 347 N. Plum St.in Lancaster city was transformed from a newly blank orange wall to a phantasmagoric display that also includes mountains, a castle and most crucially, a lot of impressive graffiti art.

Wall 2 Wall, a loose collective of top graffiti artists in and around the central Pennsylvania area, marked the end of a monthslong mural project with the Crowded Kitchen piece in time for a First Friday showcase at Eso Arts, 317 N. Queen St. in downtown Lancaster. Helmed mostly by Eric Regester, with help from Derek Cochran, Anthony Yoder and Aaron Brown, the Crowded Kitchen mural marked the 20th mural created by Wall 2 Wall since work began in May. Regester estimates that nearly 2,100 spray cans and 1,000 man hours from over 15 artists went into their summer of murals.

A Coatesville, Chester County, native that first moved to Lancaster County in 2000, Regester says he has seen the rise of graffiti simultaneously as a positive platform for artists, as well as one villainized by people outside of the art world. From the mid-’80s to mid-’90s, Lancaster city cracked down hard on the then-burgeoning artform, not only creating anti-graffiti laws, but also the forming of an anti-graffiti task force whose goal was to cover up graffiti within 24 hours of it appearing.

“It's been 23 years of showing people that we can paint and that we're not going to put, like, wieners and pentagrams on your wall, you know?” Regester says. “As soon as spray paint comes into the mix, they think it's either not going to be good, or it's going to bring riffraff.”

Due to those lingering feelings of undesirability, Wall 2 Wall reached out to local business owners that they already had connections to instead of Lancaster city’s Office of Public Art. The pitches for this first go-around were simple – cover the cost of the paint and provide the team a meal or two, and me and my friends will create something cool on your wall.Regester didn’t give specific details but said all murals were created for a fraction of the price of a normal commissioned piece, which can sometimes be more than $15,000 depending on wall size and man hours.

It’s a passion project out of necessity.

“The people that own properties around Lancaster, the demographics of that are starting to change and the ages are starting to change,” Regester says. “Because the art scene is starting to bloom, people are more open to stuff, but...not everybody can dump the resources into it. The opportunity was not going to get presented to us, so we had to make that. We had to make something up so we can do it.”

Anthony Yoder, who owns a private tattoo studio near Crowded Kitchen, was tired of looking at the same faded wall day after day. A previous mural had not only faded with time but had lost whole chunks out of it due to cars whipping around the corner and crashing into the wall.

As Wall 2 Wall was gathering spots to paint, Yoder suggested the Crowded Kitchen wall and he and Regester presented their plan to Drew Moore, owner of the space. Due to both the lack of funds, as well as Regester’s personal dislike of “art by committee,” each mural was created by Regester and his friends without the usual revisions or back-and-forth that many mural projects in the city feature.

"The wall was looking really rough after the second car [hit it], so Anthony came over and said, 'I'm a muralist, and I've been looking at that mural for 11 years...'” Moore says. “He just got to me. I'm an artist too, so that would drive me nuts, to see this wall that needs to be redone."

With an appreciation for tattoo culture’s love of the fantastical, Regester sketched up a scene of a wizard fighting back hordes in front of an “East End” gate, one of the few specific references to the area of the city it is located in.

As each of the artists also have day jobs, workdays began at different times for everybody. Cochran, for example, could only work on his part of the mural – a meticulous set of interlocking shapes with six different colors and twinkling stars – on weekends. That allowed him the week to plan.

“I wasn’t happy with it last week,” says Cochran, motioning to his portion of the wall on the right side. “But I figured it out.”

Despite working from a rough sketch, the artists nevertheless improvised on aspects of the wall, right down to how to present the wizard’s lush beard.

“Are we gonna do it fuzzy, or graphic-looking?” Regester asked at one point, his head moving up and down between his sketch and the 10-foot-high-by-75-foot-long wall.

“Maybe we can find a way to make it look like light coming through it? That would be cool,” Yoder replied.

The Crowded Kitchen wall, like the other Wall 2 Wall projects before it, is a testament to how far artists can take spray paint as a tool for creation. Vivid shading, intricate 3D–style lettering, and an array of styles – Regester says the Wall 2 Wall murals encapsulate nearly every genre of graffiti art, to show Lancaster city a different form of expression.

Assuming businesses can pay for future murals, Regester hopes to continue Wall 2 Wall until it becomes his and his fellow artists’ main jobs.

“We're doing this out of the passion of giving people dope art to look at,” Regester says. “We're not doing this for a check this time, we're doing this for the community. It can be very community-driven, without people telling you what to paint.”

WALL 2 WALL MURALS

Check out other murals in Lancaster city created by Wall 2 Wall over the past few months and visit EsoArts at 317 N. Queen St. at 5 p.m. Friday for the Wall 2 Wall gallery showcase. -The Fridge, 534 N. Mulberry St. -Let’s Roll Electric Bike Shop, 23 E. Walnut St. -Little Mutants Fermentary, 841 N. Prince St. -Pennsylvania College of Art &Design Art Garden, 49 W. Chestnut St. -Southside Neighborhood, South Plum and Dauphin streets -Tint Express Auto Accessories, 315 E. Walnut St.

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