We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Hillel Smith. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Hillel below.

Alright, Hillel thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Can you talk to us about a project that’s meant a lot to you?

The mural projects I get to do each have a different story but are as a whole the projects that I feel most deeply about. As a young kid first experiencing murals around Los Angeles, one thing that stuck with me was how these murals often represented something about the artists who painted them, the communities they came from, and the locations the murals mark. Claiming space and visibility like this is a powerful, political act, and when I started painting my own murals, it was important to me that my Jewish community be represented in this way alongside all of the other communities I encountered. I think very intently about place when designing a mural. How can my art not only beautify a building but craft a deliberate message for people who see it?

One mural I painted, in the same alleys I first encountered street art as a kid, is in an area where one of LA’s ultra-Orthodox Jewish neighborhoods meets LA’s gay neighborhood, two communities that historically don’t see eye to eye. The 90 foot rainbow mural I painted there features an ancient Jewish blessing thanking God for “making me according to Your will.” The mural features the blessing in Hebrew and a rough translation in English of “I was made as intended.” Connecting both communities in language familiar and treasured by both was a way of creating a bridge between them. It’s even more meaningful to me when people tag the mural on Instagram and tell me how much the message behind the mural meant to them too.

Another mural I painted at the Jewish Community Center in St. Paul, Minnesota, was innitiated after the building had been defaced with antisemitic graffiti. Rather than try to simply remove the graffiti, they thought to reimagine the entire facade with something new. The mural I designed features the values of the center from their mission statement — respect, community, and from generation to generation — culminating in an outstretched hand welcoming visitors to the building. In this way, my art could be the start of a new chapter, an opening of conversation between the center and surrounding community.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

I’m a designer and artist working digitally, with paper, and in large scale mural and installation projects. I’ve been drawing and painting since I was a little kid and am very grateful that now I get to do this full time. I started my career designing theater posters in college for friends’ productions, and then designed for professional companies. I’ve done a number of tour posters  for Patton Oswalt and other comedians, which are always a fun opportunity to make outlandish things. A love for silkscreen led me to spray paint stenciling, which led me to mural painting. A major focus of my work is Jewish identity and ritual. I am proud to have designed giant mall Hanukkah displays, public Jewish murals around the world, educational products for kids, and pieces for advocacy organizations pressing for change in areas like immigration and LGBTQ rights. I like using bright colors and bold imagery to create pieces that grab the viewer and engage them to look closer and find deeper meaning in the work. Some of my work is client-based, and some is self-generated, and in both cases, I enjoy the opportunity to make things that bring people together and teach them something new.

What do you find most rewarding about being a creative?

It’s definitely the impact I know my work has on people. I’ve designed a few products for kids to learn about different Jewish topics through an organization called PJ Library. These products were then sent out to over 100,000 families around the US. Friends would send me photos and texts of their kids using the things I made, and how much they enjoyed them. My mural projects similarly go out into the world to take on their own lives, and while I hope they have an impact, I don’t always know until I get tagged in a post by someone saying that it meant something to them. One goal with my murals in particular is to inspire other young Jewish artists (and really, any artists from marginalized backgrounds) to also lend their creativity to making public Jewish work (or work about their other individual heritages) that’s vibrant and current. I once reached out to a younger artist to be a part of a mural festival I was organizing. He said he started making his own Jewish art because he had seen a mural I painted at a bakery where his sister worked. Things like that make all the hard work more than worth it.

What can society do to ensure an environment that’s helpful to artists and creatives?

It’s not controversial that art enriches our lives and brings people together. But art is also too often seen as an extravagance, something that city and community budgets can only cover if there’s room to spare. Reframing how society sees art in the context of all parts of administration would go a long way in creating stronger, safer, and more engaged communities. Here’s an example. Cities are suffering from too many vacant storefronts as a result of COVID and rising rents. Derelict facades perpetuate a cycle of disinterest that leads to other problems stemming from neglect. Murals can make streets more inviting, increase people’s willingness to walk rather than drive and to patronize local businesses, and keep further decay at bay. Murals painted on streets themselves can be used as traffic calming pedestrian safety measures. Paying local artists to make these murals instills civic pride and can create artist communities. Thriving art scenes lead to more tourism and urban exploration. If cities and communities thought more broadly about how the arts can be part of larger efforts to improve the places we live and work, involving artists at all stages of the process and not just with a sliver of budget excess at the end, we’d all be better for it.

Contact Info:

• Website: hillelsmith.info
• Instagram: http://instagram.com/thehillelsmith
• Other: online store: storenvy.hillelsmith.com

Image Credits
Cover photo credit Westfield Century City. All other images courtesy of Hillel Smith.