above, the Forest Green mural at the garden

“It's a great feeling to do something that changes a neighborhood.”

- Ras Malik, Muralist, Illustrator, Teacher, Community Changemaker (1935-2007)

This chronicle is adapted from Philadelphia Murals and the Stories They Tell by Jane Golden, Robin Rice, and Monica Yant Kinney with additions info provided by the Phila. Inquirer, Mother Jones, and the family of Ras Malik. Forward and editorial work by Jeff Carpineta.

The Mural at the Emerald Wildflower Garden, titled FOREST GREEN, was the second public mural work by legacy muralist Ras Malik completed in 1996. The photo at left and right here shows Ras, laughing in front of highly detailed portion of the mural of a lush woodland landscape.

WIthin the Mural there are branches that align perfectly with branches of the tall flowering cherry tree right next to the mural. It’s hard to tell what is Tree and what is painting, what grew from the ground, or what came from Ras’s brush and heart. What’s really baffling: the tree wasn’t there when Ras painted the scene. He was offering a vision of the future, of what could be. He wrote the prescription for us: plants.…wildlife.…color.…water… blossoms… peace…. Here.

Unfortunately we aren’t able to meet him these days to show him the plants, have a garden sit and share the symphony of birds, but we’ll honor his spirit here and that spirit feels present as the garden blooms, and now that the building/mural was just spared from future demolition.

Memory and sharing and celebration all work differently these days. If Ras was doing his thing in the time of Instagram it would all be at our fingertips - what he saw in Korea, the signs he painted around town, every mural, all the sweat on the scaffolds, every student having a breakdown or a breakthrough, every prisoner who’s creative heart he reached for, every tag in a post from a kid watching or helping him who thought hmmm… maybe I can be an artist.

Ras would have ten thousand followers and I might know the name of that prisoner he taught who went on to become a Mural Arts painter themselves. And that portfolio that wow’d Jane Golden might be online. But.. love finds a way, and in an old fashioned way we’re making it a mission to gather all that we can about Ras Malik, here, in one place, before internet links start expiring and the memories, like murals, get a little faded.

So here we’re threading together all the information. There are thousands of people who’s lives have been graced with these murals who don’t know the amazing story of the painter who made it happen. There are countless people he inspired in some way or another. Thanks to Jane Golden who, though she has 1,000 things to do each month, took the immense time to write a book shining love on her family of muralists. What you read below is mostly from Jane’s amazing book Philadelphia Murals and the Stories They Tell. We’re weaving as many details as we can through that, as we continue to learn more. If you see this and you knew Ras, or one of his murals is a part of your life - please send us a note here or email us at emeraldwildflowergarden.org.

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"Ras Malik was the definition of a superb muralist," said Jane Golden, director of Philadelphia's Mural Arts Program. "He was more than a painter. I was moved by his kindness. He was a gentle person who could capture the spirit of a neighborhood. He gave the city a lasting legacy, not only in his murals, but to the young artists he touched."

As my Yoga teacher says, ‘When the student is ready, the master will appear.’ I’ve found that in life,” said the muralist. Although he envisioned himself as an artist from childhood, he says, “I put in a lot of time and made a great sacrifice to paint murals like I do. It’s a type of devotion.”

North Carolina roots…

Born Henry Harris in Henderson North Carolina in 1935, Malik had only eight years of childhood education in a one-room school- house before he had to drop out to work full time in the tobacco fields with his mother and four siblings. His father died when he was seven.

“Sharecropping is a very meager type of living,” he explains. “You have to share half [of] whatever you raise on white man’s land with the land owner. You have to borrow to get stuff to eat and then pay your debt. I saw this as a dead end situation from an early age."

Philadelphia, then the Draft.. When he was eighteen, Malik came to Philadelphia at the invitation of a childhood friend at 18 years old.. Living in North Philadelphia, he worked various jobs, earned his g.e.d, and started a commercial art course before he was drafted into the Army in 1957, serving as a medic in Korea, Germany and Houston. When his superiors discovered his art talent, Malik was drafted again—into making signs and later doing anatomical illustration at a medical facility in Houston. This gave him an opportunity to study the human skeleton and muscular system.

GI Bill - Study at Philadelphia College of Art Upon his discharge, his impressive portfolio and the Gl Bill enabled him to study illustration at the Philadelphia College of Art (PCA). Decades later, in 1985, the College would merge with the Philadelphia College of the Performing Arts to become the University of the Arts we know today.

Making a Difference at the Local Prison.. Almost simultaneously, Malik began work as a corrections officer at Holmesburg Detention Center House of Corrections, where he remained from 1961 to 1974. “It was an extremely hard place to work. I can still smell it—the most horrendous odor in the jails. I can still hear that profanity.”

One day, during Malik’s senior year at PCA, the warden saw him drawing and said, “Oh, you’re a very good artist. Why not teach some art classes?” Some of the men were very receptive. “It was a good way to get them to open up their minds to creativity. It was a good rehabilitative tool.” Later, he formed the Bastille Art League with some of his former students who were no longer incarcerated. The League served as a support group for artists and writers. At least one former member now paints murals with the Mural Arts Program. Malik has worked as a book illustrator and had his own sign-painting business for some fifteen years.

Meeting Jane Golden.. He had already an accomplished teacher when in the late 1980s, he showed Jane Golden his portfolio. She immediately hired him to teach in the Anti-Graffiti workshop at 808 North Broad Street. In 1994, William Freeman offered Malik his first crack at murals. Freeman needed help painting a series of sports figures on the columns beneath a PennDOT overpass at Ridge Avenue and Ferry Road, just off Kelly Drive in the East Falls section of the city. “It was a very good experience. We inspired each other,” Malik remembers. The paintings were seen by large numbers of commuters and aroused positive comment.

The Mural at the Emerald Garden, and move to Kensington… After some time living in Key West, Malik returned to Philadelphia and In following the mural program's reorganization in 1996, Malik began to receive solo commissions. After painting his second mural, the landscape Forest Green (Emerald and Dauphin Streets) near Norris Square, the dread- locked African American decided to move to the welcoming neighborhood despite his rudimentary Spanish. He joined the board of the Norris Square Civic Association and began teaching art to neighborhood children after school. He has since painted several more local murals there, including Recuerdos de Nuestra Tierra Encantada (Memories of our Enchanting Land, 2200 block of North Howard Street, between Susquehanna Avenue and Dauphin Street), picturing a rural Puerto Rican landscape with a field of brilliant tulips and a flaming Royal Poinciana, or flamboya, tree.

He painted the triptych mural Seasons, whose perfect rows of ripe Big Boys are the backdrop, in summer, to real vines growing real tomatoes in a community garden tended by the residents of Howard and Master streets.

Ode to West Philly Mural ….. In 1997 Mercy Management of Southeastern Pennsylvania purchased an former auto showroom-turned medical offices in West Phila at 56th and Walnut. Mercy modernized the medical offices and commissioned a mural, which Ras Malik completed in 1997 and titled “Ode to West Philly,” on the building’s west party wall. The first version was beautifully done but local residents wanted more. “How about putting the boy in a graduation gown, adding a female graduate and nixing the b-ball?” said neighbor Grace. The Inquirer wrote “ It was beautifully done, to be sure, depicting a boy of about 12 with a basketball against a mosaic of city scenes, storefronts, buildings, the Market-Frankford El. But something wasn't right, something failed to capture the ingredient that the young people of West Philadelphia needed more than anything else in their lives - hope. Ras Malik, saw the neighbors' point. “It was a rare request, to alter a painting like that. But the city embraced it, mostly because Grace and her group were so compelling. In April of that year, artist Ras Malik remounted four stories of scaffolding to retool the mural he had created five years earlier. Working freehand with his brushes, Malik preserved the size, form and arm position of the boy but made the face older. He wrapped the boy's fist around a diploma, draped him in royal purple graduation garb, slung a stethoscope around his neck, and painted a female graduate next to him.” "That says a lot about him," said Jane Golden, director of the Mural Arts Program. "He was not only a gifted painter, he was someone who had a tremendous capacity for understanding and representing a community.

Compassion Mural…. During this time he took the African name Ras Malik, which means "loyal tribal leader," said his daughter Denise Henderson. Mr. Malik, who was a student of yoga and Buddhism, painted Compassion at 55th and Regent Streets in 1997, a painting of hands coming down from the sky pouring blessings on the neighborhood. Malik believed that was his third individual effort. At the time, the West Philadelphia neighborhood was overrun with drug dealers and seriously demoralized. “Everybody wanted what they called a ‘spiritual type of mural’— something that would unite the people,” he recalls. His first idea was rejected. Then Phyllis Walker, a well-known community leader, came across a calendar picture of hands over a table with plenty of food and suggested using this idea for the mural. Malik agreed, but then the image prompted other possibilities. “I got to thinking: The hands were the essential thing. Once I began to visualize hands in the sky, something just clicked in my head." In his next sketch, divine hands reach down from the sky, pouring blessings onto a block of row houses that almost mirror the real houses across from the mural. He submitted it to the group, and they were pleased.

In addition to depicting neighborhood houses, the artist says, “I was looking at people and putting them into the picture as I went along. I do that a lot of times.” Although Malik did not ask anyone to pose, he closely observed residents, including a “lady who was always ready to offer me some milk or cookies or something.

“As the mural progressed, the people showed me how they really appreciated it. The wall was on an old dilapidated lot with paper and junk strewn around, but they began to transform the lot into a nice garden area with flowers and everything. It’s a great feeling to do something that can change a neighborhood.” (-Ras Malik)

Archive of All Links About Ras:

• About his meeting with Suzanne Roberts, Phila Philanthropist https://www.suzanne.tv/show.aspx?sid=220

• Mother Jones Article About Mural Arts, with references to Ras’s murals https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2002/07/art-change/

• Hidden CIty Article about site of the Ode to West Philly Mural https://hiddencityphila.org/2016/06/in-west-philly-an-old-auto-showroom-with-a-medical-condition/

• Murals and the Stories They Tell - Temple Press Book by Jane Golden and others https://tupress.temple.edu/book/3416

• About the Ode to West Philly Mural, reworked years later by Ras https://www.inquirer.com/philly/news/He-looked-up-and-it-changed-his-life-.html

• Ras Malik Obituary from the Phila Inquirer : https://www.inquirer.com/philly/obituaries/20070803_Ras_Malik__renowned_city_muralist.html

• Time Magazine Photo Essay - The Murals of Philadelphia http://content.time.com/time/photogallery/0,29307,1649278_1421211,00.html