‘Not just a layer of color’: Mural artist paints KC cityscape with social commentary
Editor’s note: During the month of February, in honor of Black History Month and the vibrant Black community in Kansas City, The Star will feature profiles of Black Kansas Citians by telling their stories and highlighting their businesses, causes and passions.
To Phil “Sike Style” Shafer, art is part of a conversation, and through murals across all corners of the metro, he’s giving Kansas City something to say.
Shafer, who painted the vast, colorful mural at the MLB Urban Youth Academy in Kansas City’s 18th and Vine District, pointed to the 2017 piece depicting baseball history through a Kansas City lens as an obvious example.
He has heard fathers standing at the mural tell their sons they can be paid to be artists. He’s listened as they recount the legacies of Bo Jackson and Frank White Jr. One pointed to the section of the mural depicting a softball game, showing that women can play ball just as hard as men can.
“I really want to leave a lasting impression on the city that adds not just a layer of color, but a layer of commentary,” Shafer said.
On Main Street, a mural inspired by Bob Marley lyrics reads “wake up and live.” Shafer, also the recipient of the 2017 KC Urban Hero award, meant the piece as a call to action for passing commuters.
In the wake of protests following the killing of George Floyd, Shafer helped Community Christian Church affix a collage of posters he designed to the church, adding Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery and the words “march together” to the forefront of the conversation.
In years past, on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, Shafer has donated his time to create inspirational murals at schools and community centers. He’s left the words of Barack Obama and Malcolm X painted in vibrant colors across school walls.
On a recent unseasonably warm February day, Shafer, 42, worked in his Crossroads studio on Oak Street. He is surrounded by a colorful and eclectic array of bits and pieces of conversation starters: canvases, prints, sculptures and T-shirts. He has designed, hung and stacked his pieces every which way in the building that once was a small theater.
He sits in front of a wall of stereos speakers, part of an art installation from Kingston, Jamaica, — a project he headed up a couple years back. Leaned against the speakers are colorful Black Power fists and art of Martin Luther King Jr., part of a project he did for a Metropolitan Community College fundraiser last month.
King is contemplative, his pointer finger and thumb cradling his face to support the weight of his head, and layered over a colorful backdrop. The text on the piece quotes one of King’s many famous lines, “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”
Shafer’s love for creating was planted and nurtured early on by his mother, who he said never pushed him to pursue a white collar career over his passion. For that he’s grateful.
At four years old, Shafer, who lived in New York City at the time, passed his hours on the subway drawing. The commutes with his mother from their home in Brooklyn to her classes at City College of New York in Harlem were two hours each way.
His family moved to Kansas City in 1989, when Shafer was 10. He attended J.A. Rogers Elementary School, just north of Blue Valley Park where he said he was often distracted, drawing in the margins of his papers. He went on to Paseo Academy of Fine and Performing Arts and then the Kansas City Art Institute, where he coined the name most people know him by now: Sike.
He took up the nickname, a word he and his friends had tossed around in Brooklyn, as he started to put up street art in town. Since then, all of his businesses have taken on the moniker in some form.
Shafer started Sike Style Industries in 2006 while working full-time as a graphic specialist at KU Medical Center. But a couple of years ago he left the hospital to start Sike Style Industries full time.
The business, which he describes it as a tiny design firm specializing in murals and brand integration, now helps create art for The Royals, The Chiefs and Patrick Mahomes. In the hours leading up to the Super Bowl this year, fans posed for pictures in front of his Mahomes mural outside Westport Ale House.
Many people likely know the art better than the artist, but Shafer has left clues about his own life story in obvious places — a bit of him in conversation with his art.
Take for example his 2014 piece, Angry Zebra, which had a temporary home at East 12th Street and Grand Boulevard. It was an austere animal looking down on the Power and Light District with a suspect eye, Shafer said.
The stripes of the zebra, meant to look like a chess piece, was for his family: his mother is Black, his father white. The scar across the zebra’s body symbolized the struggles of both bi-racial people and artists moving through life.
The Angry Zebra was eventually replaced by a Royals mural, but a new energetic and colorful zebra was later born. That mural, Angry Zebra 2.0 now dashes across the top of the Boulevard tavern in the Crossroads.
“I feel that’s a reflection of my own artistic journey from being tense about what I’m doing to really flourishing and saying OK, we’re taking off and we’re going to run,” he said.
Julie Johnson, a board liaison with the Crossroads Community Association, said many of Shafer’s pieces, like Angry Zebra, are jumping off points for larger conversations.
Mural art can be very whimsical, Johnson added, but Shafer’s art is on a different level.
“He is more than just a mural artist,” she said. “He walks the talk just getting people involved and asking tough questions and presenting it in a non-threatening, thoughtful way.”
Kansas City Art Institute President Tony Jones lauded Shafer’s work, calling it “heroic” to leave the comfort of a studio to take on the physically demanding task and engineering feat of painting a huge wall.
“The enormity of the task and the difficulty of the task, it’s quite extraordinary,” he said.
Once it’s complete, it’s free and accessible art for the community. Jones sees Shafer’s work in particular as taking shape as reminders and instructions intended to uplift the spirit.
“I should tell you I’m proud of him,” Jones said. ”He’s doing first-class work, I mean this is really dynamic work.”
Shafer estimates he’s created at least 100 murals across the metro, the result of decades of hustle. He draws much of his artistic inspiration from the hip hop scene, 80s graffiti in New York City and early 20th century propaganda, as well as artists like Aaron Douglas and Keith Herring.
“You definitely can thrive, not just survive, being an artist in Kansas City,” he said, adding that he wants to help challenge the starving artist stereotype, particularly in Kansas City, where he feels the arts are well-supported.
His advice to young artists: preach self-promotion; find inner drive.
And, he says, “your input into the world is your creativity.”
Last year, Shafer saw a blank wall in the River Market, tucked away near Harry’s Country Club, and had an idea. With the Missouri Department of Transportation’s permission, a colorful mural of a man riding a bicycle was unveiled about six months later.
The mural of his friend James “J-Wizz” Hawthorn is an example of what Shafer calls his “passion projects,” art that isn’t commissioned by companies, but rather is self-funded or grant-funded.
The mural of Hawthorn, who turns 50 this year, is just a picture of a guy, Shafer says.
But it’s also more than that.
It’s a tribute to a friend who’s often found breakdancing by the Plaza or riding around midtown clutching high-rise handlebars. It’s recognition of cyclists. It’s urban revitalization. It’s a tribute to everyday Kansas Citians.
“Art can do so many things on so many levels. It can be part of a political movement, it can be part of a social justice statement, it could also be part of your self-healing,” he said.
“You find some people paint ... for their own sense of peace and calm, and other people paint because there’s injustice in the world and they need to make a statement. Sometimes those statements are made with a fist in the air or an angry zebra. Sometimes they’re made just by a Black man riding a bicycle.”
This story was originally published February 26, 2021 at 5:00 AM.
