The young boy approached the wall with a crayon in each hand. He was quiet as he made it his canvas, tracing a red crayon across the white paint.
Halfway through writing his name, his mother burst around the corner.
“Walls are not to be drawn on,” Jair Rodriguez remembered his mother telling him.
Decades later, Rodriguez, 29, has built a career out of decorating the walls of Omaha as a muralist. In 2019, he and a team of artists finished the Threads of Life Mural, a large-scale ode to South Omaha immigrants with Mayan heritage, painted at 2401 N St. Since May of 2022, the Omaha Summer Arts Festival has featured his and other artists’ work through a project placing pop-up mural cubes throughout the city.
Rodriguez first found his love for art by drawing in notebooks after coming to the United States as a five-year-old from Mexico City.
“In elementary school I was finding my art skills and my classmates recognized that too,” Rodriguez said. “I was — and still am — kind of shy and I mostly express myself with art but seeing the recognition and feeling that from my peers felt pretty good.”
When Rodriguez returned to Mexico City at the age of 10, he noticed the colorful, bold graffiti displayed on walls around the city. This graffiti looked different from the simple, gang-related tags he saw back in Omaha, he said, and it got him thinking of how he could adapt the style.
Rodriguez began tagging walls around South Omaha, looking to his uncle, Ivan Rodriguez, who also moved from Mexico City to Omaha, for inspiration.
“[My uncle] had an influence on me because he has done some murals around here as well,” Rodriguez said. “There’s one here on the corner of 24th and N [streets] that he did and it’s about Mexican heritage. Surprisingly, I was able to do a mural across the street from his not too long after.”
Rogriguez also found a community of artists through graffiti events held by the Bancroft Street Market, 2702 S. 10th St., a project space known for hosting exhibitions, specialty markets, music and performances. There, Rodriguez and other youth in the community were given the opportunity to tag the outside of the building with their names for a contest where Rodriguez and his partner won first place. From then on he started his career by combining graffiti and mural art elements together.
Rodriguez’s first graffiti mural was on the back of a person’s garage. He did a simple design, some graffiti letters and his favorite element, a skull.
After his garage mural, he worked with other local artists and began his first official project through a Habitat for Humanity graffiti mentoring program. With the help of his friend Diego Zuñiga, Rodriguez completed his first large scale mural at Louie M’s Burgerlust on 17th and Vinton streets in 2012.
Rodriguez recently served as the lead muralist on the Threads of Life Mural in 2019 which depicted the stories and heritage of the Pixan Ixim community members in Omaha, behind Kubat’s Pharmacy on 24th and N streets. This mural is a part of the South Omaha Mural Project which aims to provide different neighborhoods with unique murals designed to represent the immigrants in the area, Rodriguez said. This is one of multiple murals Rodriguez has helped to produce within the Mural Project.
“[South Omaha Mural Project] was when I got my first taste of community murals,” Rodriguez said. “I liked hearing stories from the community and what they have to say and then deciding how to design their stories into a cohesive mural. It was pretty fun, and I actually had my cousin, who is the son of my uncle that does murals, help out.”
These large-scale community murals can take between three and four months to complete, Rodriguez said. Part of that time is spent engaging with the community in the planning and creation process. The public is invited to give their opinions on the design elements of the mural, attend chalk nights to map out the mural on a wall and sometimes aid in painting the mural as well.
After the Mayan Mural project ended, Rodriguez started working on a mural cube for the Summer Arts Festival that embodies what summer means to him. These mural cubes will be placed around Omaha from May 23 to June 13 with each side of the cube featuring a different local artist.
“It really reminds me of summer,” Rodriguez said of the piece. “It shows these cats that I have that come into my backyard that try to bat at the flies and butterflies in the tall grass now that it is summertime.”
Right now, Rodriguez is still trying to make murals his full-time job. Currently he commissions paintings, graphic design and website design to fill the gaps. However, his passion still lies with community-centered murals, whether he’s trying to make a statement about difficult issues or simply giving something beautiful to a neighborhood.
“I like how murals can change the landscape or the environment that they are in,” Rodriguez said. “I also like it for more personal reasons because I did that and it’s going to be there for a while… People often tell me that they’re glad that the gray wall is gone and now there’s something beautiful to look at. I wish I could paint every wall that’s ugly.”