There are art shows, and then there are art fights.
Richmond gets its art fight later this month when Secret Walls rolls into the Richmond Tattoo & Arts Convention October 23rd and 24th, putting tattoo artists and fine artists head-to-head in front of a crowd with a clock running.
Eight artists will compete across two nights, with two-on-two battles scheduled for Friday and Saturday at 11:30 p.m.
We got on a call with Secret Walls’ Kevin Collins.
“You almost think of it like UFC, like weight classes a little bit, the different disciplines that we bring onto these stages,” Collins told us. “We’ve got tattoo artists, we’ve got cartoonists, illustrators, graffiti writers, contemporary artists, muralists, all sorts of different disciplines that show up on these stages.
“And even if you have the same artist on a stage battling two years later, it’s going to be brand new because of whatever they’re working through in their head or what they want to get out of their head and onto a canvas that they’ve not been able to scratch the itch of. That’s kind of the beauty of these. It’s a fight club of the art world, so we’re gonna bring it, and we’ll see what happens when tattoo takes on fine art.”
Founded by Terry Guy in London in 2006, Secret Walls has been doing some version of this for 20 years.
“Secret Walls was spawned out of the beauty of gathering around similar disciplines like MC battles and the hip-hop music scene and the punk rock scene in those days in London. We kind of brought the art to the forefront of the stage, threw 90 minutes on the clock, and let some of the best, most talented artists in the world compete like sport in front of five, six hundred people at a time in a warehouse to watch the craft, watch the freestyle off the dome, and really, at the end of the day, make space for the scene in a new way.
“Fast forward 20 years, we’ve battled and curated and programmed in 50 countries, 150 cities. We have thousands of artists that we call family that have blessed our stages and rooms, and now we’re bringing it to Richmond in a really beautiful way with folks that make space for the scene in very similar ways. So it’s been a long time coming, but we’re blessed to show up at the end of the month.”
From Graffiti to Main Street
Richmond has had its own complicated relationship with graffiti, murals and street art. What was once punished with jail time as vandalism has become a recognizable part of the city’s visual identity.
The timing of Secret Walls’ arrival in Richmond feels right. Our street art scene is established, we’ve developed local talent across the board, and city government has increasingly embraced its potential to drive change in places like the Broad Street corridor and elsewhere.
Collins has watched the same shift happen in cities around the world.
“There’s a lot of dialogue that comes around that narrative of vandalism, beautification,” Collins said. “The same people that were buffing walls before or writing tickets are now breathing and celebrating it to beautify spaces in new ways, and I think that’s incredible.”
“When you can beautify space or bring the arts forward and watch it help grow the very real economic side of neighborhoods all over the world, we want to be at those tables. We want to be early. We want to be upstream with all of it as much as we can, not for the selfish reason of growing Secret Walls, but to make sure the right talent is paired with the right moment, the right city. The voices and the personality of neighborhoods with artists from those blocks and from those cities are massive. You can see yourself in the art,” Collins said. “That’s a big deal.”
“The evolution of art at large has really beautifully grown into a space that’s for all, for everyone. We really try to democratize the space as much as we can and make it accessible for not just the select few, but for everybody.”
Social media, particularly Instagram, helped change the game. Murals work well on a platform built around images, but Collins thinks the bigger change was giving people access to everything that happens before the finished piece appears on a wall.
“Before, it used to just be seeing the finished product, either in a gallery or on the wall, or as you’re driving to work or through your commute,” Collins said. “But now you get to see the process, and you get to see the inspiration behind it, and you get to know the artists a little bit more. What drives them, what inspires them, who inspires them.”
“I think the growth of social access to the process has definitely helped grow it, and I think we’re in a time right now, a changing human landscape and coming out of the chaos of 2020 and all the fallout of that, people looked to the arts to help bring us back to main streets and to gather and to rally around corners and neighborhoods. I think the arts are having a moment, and that moment’s going to stay active for quite some time.”
That access has helped turn individual street artists into recognizable names and murals themselves into destinations.
“The celebrity that’s come with social media and evolved digital marketing of these talented humans is beautiful as well,” Collins said. “They’re growing and being followed, and people plan trips and vacations and road trips around murals and celebrating the scene in new ways.”
For Secret Walls, that visibility is also an opportunity to direct some of the attention toward the next generation of artists.
“We want to make sure that we do everything we can to put lights on and build stages for the scene when and however we can,” Collins said. “Continuing to do what we can to get eyeballs on not just the established artists and the folks that we all know or drive by every day on big murals, but who’s next? Who’s coming up? Who’s putting in the work?”
That idea is summed up in one of Secret Walls’ guiding phrases: SYLA = Support Your Local Artists.
“Looking around, buying a T-shirt, buying the prints, and supporting however you can in your neighborhood is the name of the game and how this is going to keep growing.”
You Can Smell the Paint
With AI becoming such a dominant part of the conversation around art, I asked Collins about the value of watching someone create something live and without computer assistance.
“You walk into a room of ours, you can smell the paint,” Collins said. “It’s like being at the chef’s table of your favorite restaurant. You get to watch everything off the dome fall onto a canvas, and I think at an age of what’s real and what’s not, there’s a really beautiful space that I think we can provide to an authentic, very real, very visceral live experience in celebrating the scene with a little bit of sport mixed in and a countdown clock and everything that comes with some of our battle rooms.”
Twenty years after Secret Walls started in Shoreditch, after battles in cities around the world and thousands of artists coming through its rooms, the basic appeal hasn’t changed much.
Put artists together, start the clock and watch what happens.
More information on Secret Walls in Richmond HERE
Tickets for Richmond Tattoo & Arts Convention HERE
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