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Sketchbook: SANO

As a kid in Cleveland, Ayumi Chisolm, also known as Sano, loved to draw and paint. But he didn't think he could be a professional artist until he started using spray paint.

In the 1980s, he began painting murals on abandoned buildings and under bridges around the city.

Sano became a mentor to a group of young graffiti artists called the Cleveland Skribe Tribe.

Let's meet them! They are the featured artists in this edition of Sketchbook.


Read the script:

-The joy of those guys. There are a couple generations on here. Judging from the condition of it, it's definitely over a decade old. I'm a painter, the thing I gravitated toward were the vibrant, big, colorful, intricate illustrations and that's what I always strove for.

- Now this not a silver spoon kind of art, our art came from struggle. Our whole crew have a backstory, you know?

- As a child, growing up in the inner city, we have all these circles of influence that we can fall into. This one was that one alternative that I had buy-in value 'cause I had something to bring to the table and through that, we nurtured a brotherhood that has been like 25 years plus. ♪ Now with hip hop, break dance and pop ♪ ♪ Electric boogie just won't stop ♪

- Beat Street was the movie that made me say, okay, I'm Ramo, I'm the black Ramo. And that's what gave me a connection that oh, we can really be something. What that was, I didn't know.

- At the time, it was only a dream 'cause I used to get, when I was younger saying, hey, I wanna be a artist and I was always getting the, you wanna be a starving artist? It was like.

- There was a pretty famous guy in the city named Sano and Sano was pretty much the king of the free in Cleveland.

[Naijal] We survived the red line to look at some of the guys that you know influences and we wanted to be like them. 

[Kevin] That was our connection to art, locally, that was our art gallery. You know for our art museum so to speak because you saw that one Sano tag and then you anticipate when is the next one going up?

- It's an acronym, it means various things. It probably started off like sinister artist notorious outlaw, but now it's more like sunny and nice outside and simple art and nice outlines. I think my thing was just to produce and just really I guess vibe out with folks that you know dig what I'm doing. I kinda of made a penny along the red line popular so that was my thing because it was like east side to west side and everybody would see it.

- There are literally buildings in the city of Cleveland that have been dilapidated for generations like our child has grown up, gone to college and may have grandkids and is our right to go in and go painting on 'em.

- The city was falling apart so I chose to do my art on that. I used to sometimes just stand around and see how many people look at it. And you know it catches attention, sometimes you get people to stop and look and go about their business and sometimes, it's just, it motivated me to be better. It also taught me, Sano taught me how to be an entrepreneur.

- What that gave us was a direction in terms of how to monetize our talent. So you're talking about just airbrushing T-shirts and jackets in high school and learning how to turn that into a business. So basically what we're working on is we have been commissioned to do a 60 foot by nine foot mural in Tri-C Metro Campus. And so what we've opted to do is tell the story about how African Americans came here by way of the underground railroad.

[Naijal] These are the sketches that I provided for my section that I'm working on here. What I was showing here is the journey from the south to the north Cleveland was known as the City of Hope.

- Graffiti kinda taught me a little bit about community and sharing and it was like hey, you know, these are some cool camps in my area that I should be sharing with so let me give, show them my books and show them what I'm doing and that was, like I said, that was a learning process.

- It gave me that brotherhood structure, it gave me a foundation, it gave me a direction, it kept me out of trouble, a lot of trouble. This not just happy days in Cleveland, and for our mentor to bring it all together and push out something great, you can't buy that.

- And it's very important to say that this person that found us had one of the most volatile backgrounds like he really wasn't in a space to be taking on all of these kids because as an artist, you weird, period. And I can work it like that too.

- We keep in touch, we call each other, check up on each other and of course, through the miracle of social media, we like each other's work and see what we're doing and stay so inspired by each other.

- Wherever we are, the value that we are as artists in those spaces started with that one person, yeah.

Natalia Garcia is a digital producer for the education team at Ideastream Public Media.