Once you know Fabian Debora’s story you can’t help wondering whether he did some very bad things as a younger man, such is his determination to make amends now. Understandably, the charismatic former gangster turned artist doesn’t want to say. Instead he tells how graffiti rescued him from the poverty into which he was born and eventually brought him to one of Los Angeles’s most illustrious private art galleries.
“Given the opportunity, look what can happen,” Debora, a first generation Mexican American, says, flinging his heavily tattooed arms wide to indicate his art hanging on the white walls of LA Louver, the gallery on Venice Boulevard that displays works by David Hockney, Leon Kossoff and Edward and Nancy Kienholz.
Debora’s powerful, accessible works, which often feature gang members or his children in a mythologised version of his home city, are displayed there as part of Roll Call, a group exhibition of 11 artists who all started out making graffiti on the streets.
Their craft once put them on a collision course with the city’s authorities, who banned the sale of spray paint to minors, offered rewards of $1,000 for information leading to the arrest of taggers and, in 1992, spent almost $4 million removing tags and murals. Today Los Angeles’s street art draws admirers from around the world.
The LA Louver exhibition is the latest indication that the best street art is now understood as great art. “This is a very, very historic show,” Dan Plasma, an art blogger and street artist, says. A well-dressed crowd has turned out to hear six of the artists, including Debora, speak about their role as architects of the LA graffiti boom.
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“I’ve talked to galleries today and they’re shocked. They can’t believe that they’re showing [the street artists’ work]. It just goes back to the whole discussion between high and low art.”
Debora explains that he grew up in the housing estates of Boyle Heights in east LA during the crack cocaine epidemic of the 1980s. His father was a violent drug dealer and heroin addict who died of an overdose. At 12 Debora joined a gang, “the worst mistake of my life”. He sank into addiction himself and was soon in and out of jail. Many of his friends died but he escaped the life of crime through art and the intervention of a Jesuit priest.
Peter Goulds, the British director of LA Louver, believes that true artists know their vocation by the age of ten; Debora knew at six, when he started hiding under a table to draw as his parents fought. Later he started tagging walls and the concrete banks of the Los Angeles River.
The first person to encourage his talent was Father Greg Boyle, the founder of Homeboy Industries, a rehabilitation programme, who he met when he was ten years old and who introduced him to other Latino artists. The priest became a father figure. “He would say, ‘You can be the next Picasso’,” Debora says with a smile, but Father Greg wouldn’t give him work until he kicked the drugs.
The artist has become the charity’s director of substance abuse programmes, travelling around the world as a spokesman and motivational speaker and opening his Skid Row studio that offers free art classes every week.
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Others in the show feel a similar sense of responsibility. Big Sleeps, a world-renowned tattoo artist, and his friend Prime, a revered graffiti artist, hold workshops for children.
However, according to Retna, one of the most successful artists in Roll Call, who has worked with Nike and Louis Vuitton, most of them still feel the itch to return to the illegal tagging of their youth. So when did he last indulge that temptation? He grins. “You’ll have to talk to my attorney about that.”