Retna keeps standing in Wynwood, but looking a bit worn out
Location: WYNWOOD Arts Complex
Artist: Retna
Address: 250 NW 23rd Street, Miami
Mural creation date: Around the end of November of 2011
By May 2020, the RETNA on Wynwood Lofts is showing its age. Paint has come away in patches, and smaller marks compete for space along the bottom. The white lettering still commands the building. It is one of those walls by which you recognize a stretch of Wynwood, even if you have never stopped to work out what it says.
Painted in late 2011, the Tribute Wall belongs to the Primary Flight chapter of the neighborhood’s history. Primary Flight had been organizing murals since 2007, bringing artists onto walls across Wynwood. The district developed through these separate relationships and commissions, with different people deciding who would paint which building. Calling everything “Wynwood Walls” erases quite a lot of that work.
RETNA was already a familiar presence in Miami. He had painted for the Margulies Collection in 2009 and would cover Louis Vuitton’s temporary Design District store in 2012. His lettering moved between those settings without becoming anonymous. You recognized the hand before you knew who had commissioned it.
On NW 23rd Street, the building gives him an enormous, largely uninterrupted surface. The lettering fills it in close rows, with a density that makes the gaps and long vertical strokes particularly pronounced. From farther down the street, it reads almost as a patterned façade. Get closer and the individual marks begin to separate.
There is something fitting about a wall of writing becoming a neighborhood landmark while remaining unreadable to most of the people passing it. RETNA’s interest in ancient scripts began with the structure of the letters, their shapes and arrangement. That visual recognition is enough to establish a relationship with the work long before anyone offers a translation.
The missing paint is harder to overlook in the newer photograph. It cuts through the lettering unevenly, leaving some passages intact and others broken. The older image on this page and the photograph from May 2, 2020 deserve to stay together. Between them, they document a familiar Wynwood mural becoming an older one.
