Tacoma artist: ‘I can’t stop because I never know when everything might go away’
Each fall, thousands upon thousands of monarch butterflies migrate to Mexico and back from the United States in search of warmer weather, according to the US Forest Service.
Indifferent to international policy, monarch butterflies fly in and out of the region without concern for highly contentious borderlines, but the trip doesn’t come without perils for the brightly colored insects.
Monarchs only live an average of 5 weeks, while their 3,000 mile journey takes two months, the US Forest Service says. Generations die and are born during their campaign to and from northern Mexico.
Striking orange, black and white monarch butterflies fly freely inside the works of Gerardo Peña or Periko The Artist, a burgeoning muralist and painter living in Tacoma.
They flutter boldly within his murals, paintings, and prints to reflect his own childhood migration story into the U.S. and the continual grip it’s had over him and thousands of migrants.
His art has gained worldwide attention, with more than 200,000 followers across all social media platforms. Fans of his work are mostly from the U.S. but stretch to Australia, Italy and Norway, Peña says.
Peña is an undocumented immigrant. He was born in Queretaro, Mexico and migrated to the U.S. at 4 years old with his parents and two brothers.
After living for 26 years in the United States, he is still not a citizen.
He can’t vote, can’t receive benefits and can’t leave the country if he wants to come back in. Peña’s currently living in the U.S. under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals policy, enacted in 2012.
“That’s why people call the U.S. a golden cage,” Peña said. “People come here and follow this American dream, but they just work themselves to death.”
Peña is a full-time, self-employed artist. He spends his days and nights working from his Tacoma apartment/studio or out on-site at mural locations around Puget Sound.
Posting videos of his prints, murals and sculptures online has led to a print-selling business for Peña. He prints out, packages and mails his paintings to his social media followers.
“Sometimes you do very well,” Peña said. “Sometimes there are slow moments … but for the most part, this is the most financially stable I’ve ever been.”
‘I’m so used to disorder’
Peña describes his life as a cluster of uncertain circumstances. From his childhood into his adult life, the feeling of insecurity follows him.
He’s lived in Puget Sound almost his entire life, but without citizenship, it’s hard for him to call it home.
Moving boxes were a common sight in Peña’s childhood. He shuttled through six different elementary schools, three middle schools and two high schools. His parents continually got let go after their documentation status was revealed.
“My status in this country is still uncertain; when I was in school, I didn’t know how long I’d be there,” Peña said.
As a child, Peña sketched constantly. He did it to blot out the difficult feelings he had at a young age.
“I’ve tried to get away from it, but art has always been my escape,” Peña said. “It’s something that was always there but I didn’t take it seriously.”
After high school, between the ages of 20-24, Peña quit creating.
In search of financial stability, he worked 2-3 jobs for years. He worked in sales, marketing, and labor-heavy jobs. Art wasn’t a part of his life.
“It was the fear of being in poverty my whole life, I’d never want to put myself through that,” Peña said. “But when I worked other jobs, I struggled just as much.”
He picked the pencil back up in his mid-twenties to make some money on the side. After getting into a car crash that made his labor-intensive cleaning job undoable, Peña shifted.
He had had enough and turned his side hustle of painting and sketching into a full-time job, though selling your own art is almost never a stable career.
“I’m so used to disorder,” Peña said. “It’s become my comfort zone now. When things are too stable, I feel suffocated … it feels like something is going to blow up,”
He started by accelerating his art sales and working on public projects funded by organizations like Tacoma Spaceworks and the Tacoma Arts Commission.
It took Peña two years, and in 2019, he made enough money from art to fully support himself.
“Art is one of the most unstable and uncertain careers you can do,” Peña said. “It just feels like I can’t stop because I never know when everything might go away.”
He attributes his success, in part, to his social media presence. He went “viral” in the spring of 2021, receiving more than 5 million views for revealing a mural off East McKinley Avenue in Tacoma.
“I spent months learning how social media works to promote my art,” Peña said.
Shifting the meaning of vandalism
Peña received media attention in 2022 after his viral mural was vandalized. He thinks the media outlets represented him inaccurately.
The mural depicts children’s faces of multiple ethnicities, with monarch butterflies between the two. Peña completed it in March of 2020 and was commissioned to paint it by the Tacoma Arts Commission.
An older man who suffers from dementia defaced Peña’s mural on Mckinley, according to Peña. He wasn’t surprised by the vandalism, and expected it to happen, contrary to reports at the time.
“When I got interviewed, I feel like they twisted my tone and words,” Peña said. “For me, the story was how everybody came together to fix it.”
After the media coverage, Peña received donations from strangers and organizations to repaint the mural.
A mentor of Peña’s is Diane Hansen, a glass sculptor and public artist in Tacoma. She met Peña in 2017 through a public art training program in Tacoma’s east side.
She has more than 30 years of experience in public art, with exhibitions and public collections going back to the 1990s.
Hansen spends most of her time in her studio, and says she almost never leaves.
“He drew me out of my cave to go take a look at his work, which is unheard of,” Hansen said.
“I saw this painting and said ‘I need to come over to your studio and see this painting in real life.’”
In the summer of 2020, Peña created a self-portrait mural called The Monarch Butterfly, funded by Spaceworks Tacoma for Sound Transit near 722 Commerce Street.
The mural depicts Peña looking up with black and white skull makeup on, surrounded by fluttering monarch butterflies contrasted by a deep red background.
While the city was locked down for the coronavirus, someone having a mental breakdown sprayed over his mural with yellow paint, according to Peña. He wasn’t irritated or driven to fix it.
Instead, he embraced vandalization and turned it into his own unique style.
A large amount of Gerardo’s art now reflects this spray paint style. The spray covers over the latex paint, giving it a bold aesthetic.
“His work stands on its own and bringing that perspective is something we need right now,” said Rebecca Solverson, the public art program manager for the City of Tacoma who’s worked with Peña before.
Peña plans to do more community-based work in the near future. He wants Latino culture to be celebrated and known around Tacoma and Puget Sound.
His most recent mural is of the late Mexican singer, Chalino Sãnchez on the side of the restaurant, Birrieria Apatzingan, in Kent.
The legendary narcocorrido singer is depicted among a kaleidoscope of monarch butterflies, flying together en route to what they hope to be a better life.
This story was originally published August 22, 2023 at 5:00 AM.
