Within/Without

Paint-by-numbers. So simple, right? We have all seen them and probably painted them in childhood. 1 equals yellow, 2 equals purple, 3 equals pink. If you are like me and easily embrace the inflated sense of artistic acumen that comes with completing a paint-by-number, you may think Within/Without is a quick, formulaic building tattoo. Draw the shapes, choose the colors, match the numbers.

But if you hop on a boom lift, ride to the top, and look closely, just as local painter and muralist Kyle Steed did back in 2020 when the three-story wall was a blank canvas, you will see pencil marks under the paint. You will see adjustments, considerations, and ultimately a complex and completely freehanded expression of community, brought to life by a bespoke color palette inspired by Oak Cliff itself.

If you walk around Oak Cliff, talk to its folks, eat its food, feel its fervor, and return to this mural – not glancing its way as you drive by, but stopping to analyze its nuances of shape and color – you will more readily appreciate this piece for what it is – a technicolor Tetris board of the Oak Cliff community. “I loved playing Tetris as a kid. It felt really satisfying,” Steed says. “I wanted to wrap that in a figurative, more human representation where you see hands, and feet, and recognizable parts of the body.”

To Steed, our lives’ tapestries are woven from the people that pass through our days, whether we meet over a single cup of coffee or through a decades-long relationship. No experience is disposable. Steed titled the mural Within/Without to epitomize the love that flows both within us and without us, passing from person to person, weaving a life well-lived.

The mural also carries an alternate message. As colorful as this neighborhood is, like any other community, it has its share of troubles. For Oak Cliff, side effects of its ongoing developmental boom and resultant gentrification include increasing property taxes, unbalanced political representation, and discrimination. It has become at best, difficult, or at worst, impossible, for low-income and generational Oak Cliff residents to maintain their roots. Small generational homes have yielded to new developments, and once open lots used for after-school shenanigans are fenced off and partitioned. This is also Oak Cliff, for better or worse.

Steed’s mural celebrates the vibrancy of brightly painted panaderías and multi-generational homes, colorful gowns displayed in its many quinceañera shops, façade murals depicting pop culture icons and historical idols peppered throughout the neighborhood, and front yards drenched in tropical and Texas-native flowers. The mural gently reminds us through its recognizably human elements that it is the neighbors that make the neighborhood. As Steed says in his artist’s statement, “The many hands and eyes represented here are mere symbols, signs, that by working together and by awareness and respect of one another can we make change.”

Within/Without is a freehand mural that celebrates diversity, humanity, and beauty, but it simultaneously reminds us that we can lose them should we fail to embrace them. Good luck finding that paint-by-number at your local Wal Mart!