From DC Comics to Bushwick’s booming mural walls

This designer and artist has made a significant impression on New York City's art scene since arriving here from Philadelphia eight years ago.

Who: Rah Crawford, designer, artist and entrepreneur.

Resume: DC Comics, Viacom, TedX Bushwick, co-owner of World Owned.    

What he loves about design: Creating art, solving problems and communicating new ideas.

Highlights of 2018: My six-story high metallic gold mural “Somos Oro / We are Golden” being completed in Bushwick. Also, one of my prints was stolen, but the thief was caught on camera and I was able to turn the footage into a digital artwork called “The Heist.”

Best career advice received: The photographer Tony Ward told me many years ago, “Just do the work and never state it’s importance on your own—let them do that.”

The best thing about working in NYC: The overstimulation, the diversity, the creative communities and the go, go, go attitudes!

For longtime residents of Bushwick, it’s a surreal spectacle.

Throngs of camera-toting tourists now regularly roam the once treacherous Brooklyn neighborhood, documenting an ever-increasing array of vibrant murals and Instagram-friendly bars and cafes.

Rah Crawford was the creator of one of Bushwick’s first expansive street murals, and has worked at the forefront of this change.

The Philadelphia-bred artist and designer moved to Bushwick more than seven years ago, and currently maintains a studio in the area near Maria Hernandez park.

When he arrived, before the French tour guides and Scandinavian coffee connoisseurs began regularly spilling out of the L Train’s Jefferson Street stop, the area was hardly a tourist magnet.

“It was extremely shady,” Crawford says. “It’s wild how much it’s changed.”

Today the precinct is anchored by a cluster of murals and cafes on Troutman Street. In fact the area is considered almost ground zero for New York City’s hipsters.

And it was here, on this very street, on a wall near the corner of St. Nicholas Avenue belonging to the now-defunct Bodega bar, that Crawford first made his mark.

Back then, he recalls Troutman Street was a place mostly to be avoided: if you had to use it as a thoroughfare, you’d walk “super fast” and keep your head down, he says.

But Crawford was drawn to The Bodega itself and eventually befriended its staff. One day, conversation turned to the walls behind the bar and Crawford volunteered to create a mural.

“I wanted to do an eccentric and interesting mural that would symbolize that the neighborhood was changing and more creatives were arriving,” he recalls.

The expansive mural (pictured above) features elaborately drawn animals and includes a rooster dressed in a tuxedo holding a sign that says “no muse, no art.”

The meaning behind the phrase, he says, is that there is no muse without inspiration and without inspiration, there’s no creation.

“When I was doing this mural, people were freaking out,” he says. “They’d stop their cars and get out to talk to me, it was almost as if they’d never seen a mural happening before. And after I created it, all of the murals starting popping up and this whole new renaissance began.”

Crawford describes himself as a self-taught visual artist, and he credits his mother, who raised him in Philadelphia, for actively pushing him into artistic activities like drawing class and even for a brief moment ballet.

“I was open to everything and enjoyed being immersed in it,” he says. “It helped me focus on creating art around these stories that naturally came to me.”

Although he earned a scholarship to the University of Arts in Philly, he declined the offer.

“I wanted to find my own way,” he says. “The arts come from the soul and the spirit and I don’t think you can be taught that. I have strong intuition and I wanted to go out and figure things out.”

He began working as an illustrator out of high school, working on independent comic books.

“I was airbrushing, drafting my own stories, building up content,” he recalls. “I started painting with acrylic paints and then began doing graphic design right at the beginning of Photoshop.”

He honed his graphic design skills at Disc Makers, where he would spend four years learning the craft by designing album and music packaging for bands, before expanding into branding. This led him to create “art style” posters with pencil and ink for the bands he was working with.

The robust response made Crawford believe he could eke a living in art and design.

He joined a contracting agency in Manhattan and regularly commuted by bus between NYC and Philly for several contract gigs at advertising agencies and consulting firms.

His big break, however, was a role in the licensing department at DC Comics’s Manhattan headquarters before a more permanent position working on The Green Lantern franchise that led to his relocation to New York.

Crawford’s office sat directly across the street from the Ed Sullivan theater during David Letterman’s tenure hosting The Late Show. Letterman’s marquee was visible in his window.

“I learned how to use Illustrator in many different ways,” he says. “I loved working at DC, walking into the building and seeing Batman and Superman statues. Every week they would bring us a stack of new comics to devour. It was heaven. Being in your element like that is exciting.”

Yet when DC Comics was acquired by Warner Brothers, the licensing department in which he worked was relocated to California.

“Having only just established myself in NY, I didn’t want to switch coasts,” he says.

He moved on to Viacom, working at the company’s internal agency Catalyst, and leading an in-house design team that serviced the media conglomerate’s internal brands such as MTV, VH1 and BET.

“I like arts and entertainment, and it was exciting seeing new shows in progress,” he says. “I was brought on because they needed help putting some infrastructure in place for their production systems files, servers and also help with coding and HTML emails. I helped lead the charge on that and worked on production, photo touching, and email marketing.”

After 18 months however, with his own art beginning to flourish, Crawford felt ready to move on.

“I’d had my time in the cubicle trying to crank things out,” he says. “You can work with major media companies, collect a check and keep your head down on production work, but at the same time there’s new platforms, and opportunities for somebody who’s willing to test and try.”

Crawford runs his current business, World Owned in Bushwick with his project manager wife, Michelle Crawford.

“We basically service the arts and entertainment sector,” he says. “We do design and creative content, but we also do a lot of pitching of our own original content. It’s extremely fluid. It’s the new model. I’m looking to work with new technology and learning more about block chain technology and the idea of a distribution system from banking and finance to creatives.”

The business also serves as a platform for Crawford’s own burgeoning visual arts work.

His latest piece (pictured left) is a massive 6 story high mural “Somos Oro, or We are Golden”.

It was commissioned by ODA Architecture last year for the inside of their cavernous Denizen apartment building that occupies two blocks of Bushwick.

It has certainly been a heady eight years for Crawford in New York and he says in his time here, the world of design has been regularly upended.

“We are now so conscious of our image that we’ve become individual brands,” he says.

“There was once a template for designers before but there really isn’t now. I went from pencils to sketching and then worked with a brush, then acrylics and working with oils and Photoshop and then Dream Weaver, doing websites, with coding and Indesign. You’re constantly educating yourself on how things work and I think that the old school designer of ‘just let me know when it’s my turn to just come in and make it pretty,’ get paid much less than they used to nowadays.”

2019 then will be a year for Crawford and his wife to explore some big ideas.

“Everything is changing at the top, and the new way forward hasn’t been written yet,” he says. “The old world of you work hard, buy a house with a white picket fence and retire, that’s dead. We need new content and new ways forward. We have stories, cartoons, narratives and feature films, and I’d like to spend the year looking for the right producers to tell those stories.” 

As for Bushwick, Crawford says the area transformation is hardly unique.

“What’s happening here happens all over the world,” he says, warily. “No matter where you are, the formula to go someplace where it’s affordable and hasn’t yet been spruced up and bring the artists, paint the walls, bring in the coffee shops and cafes - we know how that works. It’s a grand awakening of some sort. I’m not sure if it’s good or bad, it just is.”