On Being the Dreamer and the Dream with Mwamba-Salim Wilson

Greetings Glocal Citizens!

This week on the podcast we’re visiting points east, west, north and south with my guest who began his professional career as a graffiti artist on the streets of Houston, Texas in the late 1990s at the age of 16. By the 2000s, he had evolved into an acclaimed Primitive Abstract and Primitivism painter, a body of work he calls Living Dreams.

As you’ll here in the conversation, he does not sit down and plan his paintings. He dreams them. The images, the phrases, the poetry you see on his canvases come to him in a dream state, and he wakes up and puts them down exactly as he received them. The patterns behind them are sound itself, translated into color and shape. Look closely and you will find Mayan glyphs, Native American symbols, Egyptian and Sumerian script, alongside a language he invented entirely on his own.

His work has traveled as he has. From Houston to London, from Osaka to Miami, from Brooklyn to Bogotá and Cartagena, from Santo Domingo and points beyond. Wherever he lands, the questions in his art stay the same. Wealth against poverty. Integration against segregation. Power, and who gets to hold it.

He does not just make the work for commercial purposes, he gives it away. A significant share of every piece he sells goes straight back to the people he paints alongside, the ones working hard for very little, the ones the world calls poor.

He is, in his own words, the Dreamer and the Dream.

Where to find Wambo?
mwamba-salim-wilson.com

On Instagram
In Books

Other topics of interest:
[U.S. Armed Forces Sports]((https://armedforcessports.defense.gov)
On Abstract Expressionism and Neo Expressionist Artists
Living in Thailand
Visiting Sweden
Fun times @Six Flags
On the Columbian Art Scene

In case you’re curious about the studio tour, check out the video episode on YouTube.