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S T O R Y PHOTO BY CHRIS MORTENSON
Artist, muralist and activist Ruben Rojas transforms blank walls into unique empowering messages that are uplifting communities and challenging the public to create new dialogues.
Love Lockdown
Artist and activist Ruben Rojas uplifts others with his empowering murals
By Bridgette M. Redman t’s important what we choose. It’s why Ruben Rojas wants to get his message out as widely as he can in places where as many eyeballs can see it as possible. His message is to choose love. To live love. His medium is painting and his murals can be seen all over Los Angeles and the world. Not that Rojas limits himself to murals. He recently started a podcast called “Live Through Love” and painted a live mural during the NFL Honors After Party during Super Bowl weekend. He’s a TED speaker and a philanthropist. He has a clothing line that is covered
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with his designs. His most recent mural “Human” was unveiled in Marina del Rey to remind everyone of our shared humanity. It was painted to welcome LA out of the long pandemic lockdowns and as a reminder to treat others well. Demetria Johnson of PressPassLA said they were drawn to work with Rojas because his message of “Live through love” has come at such a pivotal time. “You turn on the TV now and the first thing you see is the war going on and it’s just heartbreaking,” Johnson said. “People turn off the TV because they’re like, I can’t deal with it. They want to brush everything
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out versus being like, let me check in on people, what can I do to spread an uplifting message?” While Rojas has been an artist all his life, it was only in 2013 that he started to make the leap to doing it full-time and leaving behind his successful career as a financial advisor. He said he found himself questioning why he did what he did. “I found that the carrot was purely money,” Rojas said. “I mean, it’s good work, but I wasn’t happy. I wasn’t motivated. I was depressed. I was like — I’m successful, I’m healthy, I live in LA. Why am I depressed? Why am I miserable? Why am I unhappy?”
He realized it wasn’t enough just to have a lot of money. He signed up for a class on emotional intelligence, trying to figure things out. He was sketching a design on a piece of paper and his buddies in the class looked at it and told him he needed to put it up on a wall. That became his first mural. For a while he tried being both an artist and a financial planner, but he started sabotaging his career in the finance business because if he kept succeeding, leaving it would be harder. However, he had always been an entrepreneur with good business acumen and he started to figure out how to make money with art, how to pay the
bills and be a success. In 2018, he left finance cold turkey and became a full-time artist. Murals were something that made sense to Rojas as he had always been a fan of graffiti. He never actually did it on the walls in those days, but he filled his sketch books and he hung out with graffiti kids. “I love that kind of art and that concept of writing your name or words—I’m big into words — so it was always there,” Rojas said. “And then when I would travel, I’d take photos of the murals and all the artwork.” While he never thought then that he would be the guy painting the wall, his interest in the genre made a lot of sense
