Miami Officials Say Downtown Mural by Artist Lebo Makes the Area Look "Ghetto"

What do they know about art?

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Complex Original

Image via Complex Original

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Lebo is an artist who made an abstract mural entitled “Bee-Bop Into Outer Space” in Miami's Hollywood area downtown last summer. As you can see above, it depicts two jazz players and three owls. However now officials feel the completed work looks too much like graffiti. They even dropped the g-word when describing it.

“We don’t want it to start looking like a ghetto over there,” Patricia Asseff, Hollywood’s City Commissioner, said to the Miami Herald.

Oh no she didn't.

The jazz-inspired mural appears on the side of Hollywood’s Great Southern Hotel. When Lebo began painting, he found that the surface of the wall was rougher than he thought it would be. As a consequence, he was unable to produce the exact design he presented to the city and he had to use spray paint rather than brushes.

“It’s not like I painted a naked girl or anything,” he told the Herald. “That’s what art is… it evolves.” It's also worth noting that Lebo was paid $1,000 to create the work which is just a little bit lower than his usual $20,000 mural commission fee. He also bought his own materials to make the mural.

"The changes I made from the original conceptual sketch were aesthetic changes based on what I felt worked best for the landscape. They were not thematic changes," Lebo said to Huffington Post. "With that being the case, what opinion should a politician have on color or pattern design? The whole thing is laughable because not only did I do the mural for free, I actually came out of pocket for materials."

[via HuffingtonPost / MiamiHerald]

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