Muralist Sends Message of Empowerment, Spreads Positivity at Inner City Schools

It was Kristin McNeil’s husband who saw it first: the painting of the children, one of them in particular was smiling brightly with his hand raised. There was no mistaking it. The boy with the caramel-colored skin, short afro and bright brown eyes in the mural was her son. And McNeil froze.

It was their son’s open house and the principal and administrator had escorted them to see their surprise. McNeil’s 6-year-old son bounced around in delight. He insisted on having his picture taken with the still likeness of himself.

“I was just smiling,” McNeil said. “I did not cry. I was more so shock than anything. I couldn’t believe that was my child out of so many.

“The crazy part is, it actually looks like him,” McNeil said. “Whoever did this is a professional. It definitely looks like him. I want to thank him, he or she is very talented.”

Picture This

He was Muhammad Yungai. The 45-year-old muralist who has become known for his vibrantly-colored murals that depict inspirational and diverse images of people of color; and which adorns the walls at most of the KIPP charter schools and others in the Atlanta Public Schools system as well as schools in Tennessee and Washington, D.C.

He has done murals of legends and icons of Black empowerment. But most of his murals are of students. Often, they are standing on the shoulders or in the hands of these legends and icons.

His goal for the students is, “Having them see themselves in a positive light with a message that says they are beautiful and they are powerful,” Yungai said.

For decades African American artists have been seeking to gain control over the representation of Black culture and experience. They want to tell their own stories, portray their own history, empower their own people. And that’s what motivates Yungai.

“The stories I’m trying to tell are all around student empowerment,” Yungai said.

The New Orleans native remembered how when he was a child, he would often see the Sunbeam truck going through his neighborhood, a little white girl eating white bread painted on the truck.

“There were a lot of advertisements with white kids, a lot of television programs with white kids,” Yungai said. But, he added, “There were not a lot of black kids.”

That’s why he places the murals in high-trafficked areas such as in the hallways, classrooms and even the cafeteria of the schools. He wants them to consistently see positive images of themselves.

Yungai, now a longtime Atlanta resident, always loved creating art but never had any formal training, so he taught himself. And when his daughter was enrolled at KIPP WAYS Academy in northwest Atlanta he decided to donate his time and talent to the school.

“Just the energy of that building was incredible. I felt the dedication of the teachers and saw the discipline in the students,” Yungai said. “You would hear kids chanting, teachers rapping, trying to create a formula for their students to recall without even trying.”

And they were often doing it in buildings that had for many years gone unused and uncared for. So, he began painting murals to raise the aesthetics of the building where he was teaching; to transform the feeling of the school.

“I was trying to make it look as good as the spirit of teaching,” Yungai said. “That’s what I was trying to replicate with the murals. I was trying to bring the building up to the standard of where their teaching was.”

In turn, Yungai discovered his passion for creating murals, and his life’s calling as an artist. His inspirational images drew the attention of others and he started getting calls for his work. And in 2016, the husband and father of two, quit teaching to become a full-time in-demand muralist.

Since then he has painted murals for eleven schools. But recently, he stepped outside the schools to do four murals for the Super Bowl’s Off the Wall project. He was selected out of an untold number of candidates and his murals are now on buildings across Atlanta spreading hope, highlighting issues such as gentrification and challenging those who see them to give back and to remember Black pioneers.

Still, his passion is doing murals in schools where he can have a positive impact on the students’ lives. His years in the schools taught him that many of them don’t really believe in themselves. He saw it in their actions when they don’t take their work seriously. He heard it in their words: “We’re not going use this. We’re not going to do any of this stuff.’

“They don’t believe they can accomplish their dreams,” he said. And he wants to change that. “I want to empower them, to take away the stereotype, I want them to see how beautiful they were and start believing they could do anything.”

For many of these students, he knows school is their only place of refuge. That’s why his heart is warmed when he hears stories of how his murals help. The teachers tell him, “a lot of time when the kids are having a bad day and are acting out, they let them go outside and look up at the murals,” Yungai said. “They would stare at the murals. It was something different to look at, to take their minds off whatever was troubling them.”

A teacher from the D.C. school shared how his mural impacted one girl. It was the day after he had finished the mural and in it there was a girl with two afro puffs. The student was wearing her hair the same way. She saw the mural and smiled.

“’That girl looks just like me.’”

Yungai understands. “They go by what they see around them and what adults value as beautiful. That affirmation for kids six and seven years old is extremely powerful.”

Still, he said, “We have a long way to go in changing the narrative about what’s beautiful.”

Perhaps, that’s one of the reasons Yungai and his wife plan to renovate a school bus, turn it into an RV and travel to different schools to do murals. They already have the bus and are raising funds through donations to complete the renovations in order to get on the road by winter.

This he said, “would allow us to get more jobs done.”