The Picasso of Positivity

J

J.M. Knudsen would rather ask forgiveness than permission. So last year, when the larger-than-life street artist (he’s 6-foot-6 with an equally oversized persona) saw an invitingly blank, pristine white wall on the side of a former school building in midtown Sacramento, he went into stealth Banksy mode under the cover of night and in just a couple of hours painted it with his signature message of positivity, the words “YOU ARE GREAT” spanning the full width of the exterior wall, in a tattoo-like font of his own invention.

The building’s occupant, the E. Claire Raley Studios for the Performing Arts (“Clara” for short), wasn’t sure what to think. Clara’s executive director Megan Wygant took a beat to figure out how to respond. Nothing like this had ever happened before at the arts hub that houses spaces for groups like the Sacramento Ballet and Capital Stage. “It was a surprise,” Wygant says. “But we are really good at rolling with what comes.”

In that spirit, Clara took a small step: following Knudsen on Instagram. Ping!  The social media response soon began to snowball as the mural became an instant selfie-driven destination, garnering both Knudsen and the organization appreciation and attention. “Clara is getting more exposure just from people tagging that mural,” Wygant says, adding: “We had been trying to figure out what mural we were going to put there. I really respect what he’s doing in Sacramento, and we’re honored he wanted to play this game with us.”

When I meet up with Johnathan Michel Knudsen—J.M. professionally, Johnny to friends, and the K in his last name (pronounced Kuh-NOOD-sin) isn’t silent because nothing about him is—on the corner of 6th and Q streets on a rainy day in February, he is equally amused to tell the story from the other side. “I’m just going to give them this gift,” he says of his thought process. “I mean technically, it’s vandalism. [But I thought], ‘If they don’t like it, I’ll paint over it.’ ”

J.M. Knudsen in front of midtown’s Clara building, which he adorned with his signature tagline—just one of many guerrilla-style Easter eggs scattered throughout the city (Photo by House of Kanute)

Dozens of iterations of the “You Are Great” message are repeated in various media all across Sacramento, painted on freeway overpasses, incorporated into murals, emblazoned on the back of a delivery van, written on signs that he chains to lampposts. He is, by all accounts, the most prolific public artist in Sacramento, and once you clock his work, you will begin to notice it everywhere. But the one at Clara, he says, is by far the largest in Sacramento, rivaled only by one on a billboard above Sunset Boulevard in L.A. and another in Barcelona.

He takes off a black rubber bracelet printed in white with the same cheery slogan and gifts it to me. He reckons that he has handed out 30,000 bracelets over the years, in Sacramento and also across New York and Europe, where he has created 20-some commissioned murals in Barcelona, Paris, Portugal and London. The point? “People having a bad day are going to see it,” he says simply.

The retro-spirited “Up with People”-esque message draws a double take coming out of this lanky, towering tattooed figure with a gold grill on his lower teeth that spells out C-H-A-O-S. Knudsen, 43, is wearing a wool overcoat with a faux fur collar layered over a hoodie, paint-splattered Prada loafers, and a silk scarf knotted dashingly around his neck. The close-cropped, curly hair peeking out from under his knit cap is bleached a pale yellow and his eyes are ringed with black kohl, a nod to his mother’s Egyptian heritage. (Dad is of Danish descent.) His signature flourish is a waxed curlicue moustache, and yes, he strokes it with his fingertips exactly like a cartoon villain getting ready to tie a damsel to some train tracks—but there’s kindness in his eyes as he does so instead of dastardliness. He looks, in short, like a punk rock Sherlock Holmes by way of Captain Jack Sparrow with a maniacal dash of Salvador Dali. But deep down in his soft, gooey middle is the soul of Mr. Rogers, and his spirit animal, well, that would have to be Big Bird.

“I want to create the reality in which I want to live,” he says. “I want to have a more artistic and a more positive life. Positivity, creativity, growth, these are the things that are going to elevate us.”

The “You Are Great” meme, which he often abbreviates to YAG, originated in 2013, when Knudsen scrawled the phrase on a scrap of paper and left it on the condiment counter in Old Soul Co.’s midtown coffee roastery. “The next day they’d taped it to the counter,” he says. “That catapulted me into using it all the time. It has an effect.”

In 2017, to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Summer of Love as it unfolded in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury neighborhood, Knudsen was tapped to paint a mural of Jimi Hendrix on the side of the famed “red house” where, according to local lore, the guitarist lived in the ’60s. At the time, Knudsen had only painted a handful of murals, but a tech exec who happened to reside in the landmark building saw his paintings at a Haight-Ashbury art gallery and became his champion, helping him land the plum commission when she learned he did murals too.

Just down the street from the red house was a famous mural by Banksy, the British guerilla muralist legendary for art-bombing public structures, and even more legendary for never divulging his true identity (the original by Banksy had been cut out of the wall to be shown in galleries, but fans had faithfully recreated it). It seems obvious that Banksy would be one of Knudsen’s acknowledged guiding lights, but he also cites Picasso, Dali, Basquiat and the escape artist Harry Houdini as inspirations. The design for the mural had been approved, but at the last minute, Knudsen went rogue and included an unauthorized “You Are Great” as a bold supertitle. “You know what? Jimi would have wanted me to,” he says. So, undoubtedly, would Banksy.

In March of 2021, Knudsen heard about New York’s program to beautify the hastily constructed outdoor dining structures erected all over the city during the Covid-19 pandemic, so he hopped on a plane and soon found himself painting a pair of murals in Hell’s Kitchen, just outside of Times Square, for Mom’s Kitchen & Bar. Meant to be temporary, one is still there today.

The Jimi Hendrix portrait, however, is not. It had to go during much-needed building renovations. But Knudsen’s attitude is easy come, easy go. His vision is bigger than any single work. He proved that this past December, when he himself blacked out one of his most popular and iconic midtown murals, a framed riff on the Mona Lisa  on the side of the erstwhile Trade Coffee & Coworking near 23rd and K streets in midtown, as the business closed its doors after unsuccessfully negotiating a new lease. The building’s owner, The Trade’s landlord, happened to be one of the few Sacramentans who failed to appreciate the cheeky mural. Not wanting to leave the artwork in unfriendly hands, Knudsen turned it into an art happening, rolling black over the mural during the business’ closing party, in front of an audience, and leaving just the gilded frame visible.

Knudsen’s relationship with The Trade had been a long one. Owners Matt and Amanda Kennedy initially hired Knudsen in 2017 to curate rotating monthly art shows in the café. But soon after, they approached him to paint a mural they originally envisioned as Mona Lisa simply holding a coffee cup. “My wife and I had an idea for the design, and then Johnny just came back with this amazing spin on it,” Matt says. Knudsen initially ran out of time to complete the piece before leaving on a long-planned trip to Portugal, so he painted a progress bar with the word “loading…”—it’s a common meme he throws up on a work he plans to return to. When he came back, he decided he liked the concept of an unfinished Mona Lisa (“Like you’re never really ‘fixed,’ you’re always evolving.”) so he painted a heavily pixilated face where her famously enigmatic smile should be—he did, however, tattoo a likeness of her face on his chest, just one part of an ongoing tapestry-cum-personal history.

For The Trade Coffee & Coworking, Knudsen chose to render Mona Lisa’s inscrutable smile as a pixilated blur and paint a “loading” progress bar on a coffee cup, referring to the fact that everybody is always in the process of becoming. (Photo by House of Kanute)

After Knudsen completed the mural, the Kennedys used the connections from the co-working space to help him network. “Usually people who have art in their genes don’t have business in there,” Matt says. “So in the early days with Johnny, we were trying to feed him and give him leads.”

Knudsen proved to have an entrepreneurial knack, and that led directly to him flourishing not just as a street artist, but as a staggeringly prolific commissioned muralist. Over the past decade, he has painted nearly 100 local murals, in addition to installing approximately 200 guerrilla art pieces.

Knudsen grew up in Seattle, with a mother who was a paralegal and runway model, and a maritime attorney father. The bohemian-minded family, which also includes two sisters, threw art-world parties where the wine and conversation flowed. In 1994, when he was 12, his mother moved to Sacramento for a job, with Johnny and his younger sister in tow, while his dad and older sister stayed behind. After graduating from Highlands High School in North Highlands, Knudsen enrolled at Sacramento State, where he began dabbling in fashion design and photography while earning a graphic design degree, eventually going on to create an apparel line he called American Gypsy in 2011, thrifting and repurposing clothing items he decorates with slogans and appliques. He was an early adopter of Instagram as a sales platform, and people around the world were snapping up his one-off items as soon as he posted them—over the years, he has sold over 1,000 uniquely handcrafted items and has kept the clothing line going, through various hiatuses, to this day.

During and after his time in college, he also held down a 9-5 job working in a bank. It was to be his one and only straight day job. (A stint designing graphical printed wall coverings for local company Stikwood certainly counts as creative work.) In an Instagram post last November, he’s standing in the Sacramento Historic City Cemetery holding a painting that’s a blown-up, Publishers Clearing House-sized dollar bill with the word “SLAVE” written over it in red ink. In the post, he looks back on his days working as a wage slave, then breaking free to become a full-time artist over a decade ago. “I don’t even know what it’s like to be told what to do by another person, it’s been so long,” he writes. “But it wasn’t easy, this transition is for the resilient and brave, ambitious, thick skinned. We are all slaves to currency, but I keep my shackle loose.”

Today, Knudsen earns his living creating. In addition to the guerilla art splattered all over town, he has quietly amassed a body of commercial work without, somehow, compromising his artistic integrity or values. He’s done murals for barbershops, law firms, tattoo parlors, restaurants and real estate companies. He’s lived in the same Victorian apartment in midtown for 14 years and says his landlord is very “understanding” when he has a starving artist moment, and works with him to catch up.

When The Trade closed, the Knudsen energy force had to go somewhere, and it quickly landed at his friend Abraxis “Abe” Spera’s Dwellpoint artist studios. Spera’s area of expertise lies on the business side of the arts industry. He executive directed the music and art festival TBD Fest and had a consultant role in 2016’s Art Hotel—where artists temporarily took over a former downtown hotel building prior to its demolition, creating a mesmerizing immersive exhibit—and subsequently served as business manager for 2017’s ArtStreet, in which artists mobbed an abandoned warehouse and alley slated to be developed later as part of The Mill at Broadway residential complex.

Spera founded Dwellpoint in 2018, in a sprawling warehouse on Q Street. Dwellpoint started life as a multipurpose art facility with studios for artists and makers, and storage for event props and sets. The pandemic had turned the largely open-plan studio spaces in the second-floor loft into a ghost town, while the business chugged along with the addition of a print shop that produces everything from T-shirts to exhibition banners.

Then along came Knudsen. “I first met Johnny just out and about,” Spera says. “You know, he’s not shy. We’d get together to play chess and talk about ideas. We inspire each other and kind of riff off one another, so it’s been a great camaraderie and friendship.”

So when one door closed, another opened. “It was a great opportunity to have him come be a part of Dwellpoint,” Spera says of welcoming Knudsen into the fold after The Trade shuttered. “He has great energy, initiative and positivity. And of course, loads of talent.”

As the artist’s reputation has grown, so has the number of “You Are Great” murals around the world, as shown here in (clockwise from top left) London, Venice Beach, New York and Barcelona. (Photos by House of Kanute)

Knudsen’s big idea is to not just revive the artists’ studio spaces, but to create a space for collaboration, socializing and events. He calls it “The Portal,” which he plans to officially open with an event on June 29. A few months earlier, stepping from the street into the sprawling space, a rough-hewn cavern with Bohemian loft vibes, he leads me on a sweeping tour, upstairs and down. There will be artist spaces here, a photo studio there, outdoor concerts and happenings on the erstwhile loading dock.

“I need to be the Warhol and build The Factory,” he says, referring to the Pop Art leader’s famed creative and social hub.

To free up more time to be the maestro, Knudsen plans to transform his mural-painting business from a one-man show into more of a collaborative atelier, with other artists working under him to execute his vision. But unlike Warhol, who was more of an arbiter than an inspiration, Knudsen has a strong community activist streak, and wants to mentor and uplift rather than just throwing the coolest art parties in town.

“I need to get the artists in here who are relevant and passionate, to create the future of art, a new era for art in the city,” he says, eyes shining with an appealing and infectious fervor. “Let’s create some wild art!”

And that’s not all he has in mind. Knudsen lopes rangily from one corner of the raw space in Dwellpoint to another, sketching out his ideas with sweeping gestures. He wants to start an art magazine called Art Plague, for one, but there’s more. A lot more.

“One of my main end goals is to have a new museum called Sacramento Modern Art Museum, or SMArt Museum. It’s going to be all local artists. And you’re going to see a little kids’ art academy pop up. You’re going to see structures being built in Sacramento for art,” he declares. “And I’m young, so it’s gonna happen.”

This many ambitions firing out of one person in such rapid succession, you might think it would all start to sound a bit manic. I’m getting psychically overwhelmed myself just hearing about it all, and can’t imagine how one person could execute on so many projects and concepts. The firehose blast of ideas is so forceful, it could make you wonder if this space cowboy might just be, as they say, all hat and no cattle. Then, mid-idea stream, Knudsen pauses to scoop up a copy of a little book he handwrote and published, called ~ God—it’s on Amazon if you’re interested. Flipping through, it’s filled with one-liner jokes, one per two-page spread, in the voice of God:

It’s clever, but that’s not what struck me about it. A joke book in the voice of God is exactly the kind of “hey wouldn’t it be cool to…” idea any stimulated creative mind might have in the moment, but never get around to executing, yet here it is. Looking at the book, I realize that as daunting and exhaustive as Knudsen’s sprawling ambitions sound, the evidence of his prodigious ability to follow through is all around me, in the book, in the one-of-a-kind American Gypsy clothing line, in pictures on the walls of happenings he produced, in a decorated steamer trunk he uses to collect donated art from other artists, then put out on the street as an ongoing project called Sacramento Free Art Drop. Knudsen is all about executing.

Take his epic annual art shows, at the Crest Theatre and Empress Tavern since 2022. He successfully charges admission—this in a world where it can be hard for many artists to get their friends to show up for free without promising alcohol—and every year, they get bigger and better.

His friend Elliot Prestwich, director of operations at the Crest, met Knudsen at The Trade, and as Spero did, they bonded over a chessboard. “We hit it off—two peas in a pod,” says Prestwich, who admired Knudsen’s drive. “He always seemed to be 10 steps ahead of what’s going on in Sacramento.”

For his annual art show at the Crest, Knudsen invites other artists and musicians to show their work and perform, and orchestrates clever surprises, one example of which Prestwich remembers fondly. For the inaugural event in 2022, Knudsen brought a tattoo artist in, along with a lineup of original art pieces that he designed. “People could sit down at [a tattoo station] inside the theater and get an original tattoo,” Prestwich says. “It was unexpected. It wasn’t announced. If you were invited to the show, you could get it. And it kind of created this sense of exclusivity. He’s always doing little things like that, such as little pieces of merch that are exclusive. It reminds me a lot of Andy Warhol and how he would release things. It was a party and the who’s who was there, but it was impactful and it affected the community. And there was a message.”

Simply because the Crest is a theater, Knudsen began creating a short film titled In My Mind: Illusions of a King  for last November’s iteration. He didn’t finish in time—maybe now, he says, he will hold a one-night-only showing for it, either on its own or as part of a film festival this summer. But as a party stunt, he did quietly hang work by his then 3-year-old daughter, Vera, alongside his own and other participating artists’, without noting her age. “To watch the critics talk about her art, a 3-year-old, as if she was an established artist was really, really fun,” Prestwich says.

Knudsen is a devoted parent, amicably sharing co-parenthood with Vera’s mom, a fashion designer, and he speaks of his daughter in glowing terms, in person and online. On Vera’s fourth birthday this past December, he posted a breathtakingly edgy pic on Instagram of the two of them in matching burglar-style balaclavas topped with colorful crowns, holding a cake and balloons and looking like a badass family of art outlaws. The accompanying words, however, are about as grounded and sincere as parental love gets: “This unexpected delight came in December 23, 2020, and I’ve heard many people throughout my life say children have stopped their dreams, but in my case it amplified them and made me a stronger person. … I’m much wiser than I was before her, more understanding, more caring, and more determined to make the impossible, possible.”

“In space, things are infinite and limitless,” Knudsen says of depicting Martin Luther King Jr. in a space helmet for his mural outside the Peace Market at 18th and O streets.

After our tour of Dwellpoint, Knudsen and I reconvene on the corner of 22nd and K streets, under the watchful gaze of his painted wood rendition of one of those Kit-Cat clocks with the moving eyes, except this one has no numbers or hands, just the word “NOW” where they should be. A reminder, courtesy of J.M. Knudsen, to be present in the moment. “Hi, Johnny!” a woman across the street cries with a cheerful wave. He breaks into a sunny smile and waves back.

In a narrow alley-like slot between two buildings, he shows me one of his very first murals, a traditional portrait of the Virgin of Guadalupe on the side of a barbershop. Around the corner, an Edward Scissorhands piece decorates the back of RKS Salon. Strolling, we pass others at the rate of several per block. Behind the Mexican restaurant Tres Hermanas near 24th and K, there’s a 60-foot-long mural commemorating renowned indigenous Rarámuri runner María Lorena Ramirez’s 2021 participation in Sacramento’s annual California International Marathon. There’s also an earlier mural of a parrot drinking a margarita on the side of the building, and Knudsen fondly remembers stretching that commission out as he was eating enchiladas and drinking margaritas for free while working on it.

“Hi, Johnny!” a man walking down the alley calls out. Rounding the block onto K Street, we pass a pair of angel wings he created, the kind you stand in front of for a pic, instantly recognizable from Instagram. While we’re exploring, at least five or six people greet Johnny warmly, and I note that he’s like the mayor of midtown, a highly visible, and in this case, popular public figure.

Two side-by-side paintings, Pyramids of Color and Soul of Sacramento, wrap around 240 feet of a façade on the corner of 21st and J streets, meeting with a color-blocked portrait of John Lennon.

At the intersection of 21st and J is his largest group of works in the city, a pair of stunningly colorful, side-by-side, second-story paintings that wrap around the corner—an abstract pyramidal pattern evolving into a sphinxlike lion painted on floating sheets of perforated metal (the kind of “decorative” façade panels popular in the ’60s), both influenced by his Egyptian lineage. He also painted a portrait of John Lennon and a mural of a dragon on the back of the building, as well as murals inside two of its businesses, more evidence of his prodigious knack for networking. It seems that should you so much as meet Knudsen, you’re at high risk of hiring him to paint a mural.

Finally we come to the blacked-out Mona Lisa, and Knudsen motions me in close to show me something secret. Using his finger-nail, he flakes a tiny bit of black paint off. Well before the big blackout event, he’d put on a few layers of clearcoat, so the Mona Lisa is still there, ready for her close-up, should fate take a different turn someday. An optimist like Knudsen never gives up, and never says never. Not long after that, an invitation to The Portal’s first happening lands in my inbox: a “speakeasy jazz night” in celebration of the Persian New Year, for which Knudsen has, of course, created new art to debut. It sells out quickly.

A few days later, I’m waiting to make a left turn off Watt Avenue onto Folsom Boulevard, and I happen to glance over my left shoulder. There, on the premises of a law firm, is a mural with the now-familiar phrase, the same one I can also see on the rubber wristband I haven’t taken off. The ubiquitous sentiment has started to sink in. I still don’t know if I’m great, or if everyone in Sacramento is great. But you know what is great? That Johnny Knudsen thinks so.