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Mucking It Up Venice artist celebrates her unique style PHOTOS COURTESY OF JULES MUCK
Jules Muck is a Venice-based graffiti, mural and fine artist. By Bridgette M. Redman Jules Muck has learned to celebrate who she is as an artist and who she is as a person. A first-generation immigrant, Muck was on the streets of New York at a young age after her parents returned to their home country. She had no thoughts of being an artist then and making money for what she did was far from her mind. Her goal at the time was to avoid being arrested for creating her art. As a street artist, Muck’s graffiti was made anonymously in the middle of the night. She started out just doing stylized words, often just the last name she had adopted: Muck. Now, years later, she has a studio in Venice and her work is in high demand. She just bought her third house using money made from her art. A self-made artist, she encourages young people to pursue art if it is their dream, no matter how much others might discourage them or try to minimize what they do as a hobby. “You don’t have to give up,” Muck said. “You just have to work hard and do it every day. If you do what you love and you open up, it works out. The
community takes care of me 100% — that has been true wherever I go.” In addition to numerous walls in Southern California, Muck’s work is displayed on her Instagram account and on her website. She credits the artist Lady Pink for taking her under her arm and making her believe she could do more than what she was doing. “Lady Pink took me on as an apprentice,” Muck said. “The way she orchestrated my apprenticeship, as I worked for a living, she shifted me and gave me work that helped me navigate and slowly transitioned me to being my own thing.” It is a connection that has persisted through the years. Muck said even this past summer when she was in Upstate New York, Lady Pink, who is one of the pioneers of graffiti art, made sure she had work. “She has helped me and so many other young women and men find their way into the art world,” Muck said. “We’re all people who didn’t have access to a formal art education. We had no nepotism, no family connections. She’s so amazing
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in that way. She has no fear, to be able to hand off work like that.”
They all came down and painted together.
Where art meets crime
Muck moved to Venice and immersed herself in the community there. People responded to her art and Venice would become the “most Mucked city” in the world, with her murals going up everywhere. “I have to say that all of Southern California has felt very art-friendly,” Muck said. “I liked Venice because they let me do a lot more art and most of the people there were really receptive to it. When I moved there, there were a lot of artists. I can’t really say that now. Most of my friends are gone. They moved to the east side or all over.” She said she loves the energy of Venice and will always be inspired by it, but because of the scale and amount she paints, she has to move around. If she stayed in Venice, she would run out of space. Muck’s work has taken her all around the world. She’s painted in New Orleans, Miami, Indianapolis, Michigan, anywhere that has work for her. She recently painted a Syrian
Muck said that before Lady Pink, she didn’t believe that she was worthy. She ran around at night under the cover of anonymity, painting and then running away with no one knowing it was her. “My intense urge to create was bad and illegal, it was very hidden,” Muck said. Then things began to change. She was arrested and her family found out what she was doing. She started to see people talking about her work in AOL chat rooms. They always referred to her as “this guy” and that “he” did all these crazy things. “It made me start coming forward as a woman and I had this idea to paint female walls with all women and to celebrate that and to let it be known we were girls,” Muck said. Fast forward to 2001 and Muck was one of the first women invited to paint the Wall of Fame in New York. The following year they gave her a massive wall and asked her to invite all the women she knew.
Mucking up Venice
refugee camp. Sometimes she is surprised by the reception she receives. “For me, the most bizarre was Indianapolis,” Muck said. “I couldn’t believe how receptive they were to my art.” She was supposed to spend three days there a few years ago, but she ended up staying longer and doing more than 100 murals. She was in demand from businesses and residences. After she left, they threw a huge mural festival. “People wanted art on their houses, their garages, their cars,” Muck said. “They were so thrilled with this kind of mural work that they had seen when they traveled to Portland and California and New York, that they wanted it and now they have it.”
Pandemic painting online During the pandemic, Muck found herself in isolation like so many other people. She quarantined with the family of her boyfriend and needed to come up with things to do. She partnered with a friend of hers who was an out-of-work web designer. Together, they created coloring pages of her art and an
