ICU Art Brings California/LA Roots to Swing States with Vote-Inspired Murals for Harris Campaign

ICU Art or In Creative Unity has designed and painted a dozen murals for the Harris for President Campaign in seven cities within six swing states. 

But this company has a history in Los Angeles too. Back in 2000, ICU Art founded the Venice Art Walls program for the City of Los Angeles. The Venice Art Walls is a legal graffiti art park on the beach where artists constantly paint new layers of graffiti and street art murals. ICU Art believes in showcasing artwork as public murals on walls that change and evolve over time.

Painted by prominent local muralists, these murals serve as a message in support of Kamala Harris and to encourage people to vote by Nov. 5. A majority of the artists that painted the murals started as graffiti artists or street artists, and most of the murals were painted with spray paint.

Many of the artists who painted a mural in their community also designed that mural. In other cases, the mural designs were created by Los Angeles based Swank One and then carefully rendered by local muralists. Because ICU Art had a very limited amount of time to design and paint these murals, they decided to utilize their top designer in LA, Swank, to quickly design compelling concepts that could be painted on each wall. All of the murals were completed by Oct. 21 so that they would run for the final two weeks of the election.

The Kamala Harris for President campaign contracted ICU Art to design and paint 12 murals to be painted on buildings in six states leading up to the Nov. 5 presidential election. ICU Art commissioned local artist production teams in each city to paint murals on the sides of buildings in support of Kamala Harris and to inspire people to vote. Murals were painted in the cities of Atlanta, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Tucson, Milwaukee and Las Vegas, within the swing states of Georgia, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, Arizona and Nevada as part of an effort to get out the Democratic base to vote.

ICU Art is a mural painting and media company based in Oakland, California. ICU Art has been designing and painting murals for more than 30 years. As a community based mural production company that started in Los Angeles in the early 1990’s, ICU Art has always worked with talented graffiti artists and street artists. Today, the organization is a media company with a network of walls around the country that ICU paints murals on for various causes and clients. ICU Art is co-owned by CEO Jeanna Penn, and founder of ICU Art Stash Maleski who is also production manager for this project. In addition, and notable for the Harris campaign, ICU Art is majority owned and run by a Black woman based in Oakland, California, where the vice president was born and where she began her law career in the office of the district attorney in Alameda County.

It was important to the Harris campaign to use local workers and artists. This worked well for ICU Art since the company generally uses local muralists and production crews for the murals in the spirit of election-related media.

Some of the murals feature the name “KAMALA” prominently with a tagline encouraging people to vote by Nov. 5. Other murals feature a portrait of the Vice President in a photorealistic style or a more stylized and graphic style with various taglines such as, “When we vote, we win.” This quote by Kamala Harris is featured in several of the murals. Each mural was custom designed for the specific neighborhood and city.

ICU Art manages teams of artists around the country who paint in their local communities for a wide range of fine art and commercial projects. ICU Art seeks to bring high quality and uplifting public art to the communities in which they paint.