At 17 years old, Justin Wagher is St. Pete’s youngest wall muralist. The Gibbs High School senior has eight murals painted in and around St. Pete on the sides of buildings. The works were a part of Wagher’s senior project at the Pinellas County Center for the Arts program.
Each of the young man’s murals contains a similar motif. They all depict a woman in grayscale with flashes of pink as an accent. And they’re not just pretty pictures. Wagher has a story behind his art. He described the works to ARTiculate Suncoast.
“I wanted to touch on feminist qualities throughout my portfolio and concentration. Typically throughout history, women’s opinions were pushed to the side, like that whole attitude of this being a man’s world,” Wagher told the local arts blog. “So I tried to do a juxtaposition playing off that, putting a big woman’s face up there, right in your face so you couldn’t miss it when you drove or walked by.”
In one of the paintings, there is a diamond around the woman’s head. Wagher said that represents a new awakening. The pink in each of the photos, Wagher said, is a bit of irony playing at the typical cliché that all girls like pink, something Wagher said is not true. The gray scale was intended as his own personal touch personalizing the projects.
Wagher had just 18 weeks to complete his project, and he’s the first student at Gibbs to undertake such a massive senior project.
Wagher’s art appears in places like the Amsterdam in the Edge District and Reno Downtown on Fourth Street. One of the biggest challenges Wagher faced in his project was getting permission to paint on the walls.
He took reference photos and developed detailed mock-ups of his plan for each space to show business owners and building owners in order to get approval.
“A building owner and a business letting a 17-year-old high school kid tackle such a large project on their wall was really eye-opening, and showed me how supportive everybody in St. Pete is,” Wagher said.
Aside from being St. Pete’s youngest muralist, Wagher is perhaps most impressive because of how quickly he honed his skill. The high school senior didn’t pick up art until high school.
He became interested in drawing as a freshman and then decided to audition for the PCCA program at Gibbs that year. He was accepted and started the program as a sophomore. That means Wagher spent just two full years studying his art before beginning a project that many seasoned artists wouldn’t have even been able to handle.
Wagher doesn’t want to stop there. After graduation, he plans to attend a community college and obtain an Associate’s degree. He said he decided not to go to a serious art school because most students do that for the creative environment. That’s something Wagher said he gets in St. Pete anyway.
He plans to continue working with the city, but also branching out into other art mediums as he continues to study.
More information about Wagher and his work can be found in ARTiculate’s full Q&A with the young artist.
