Ras Malik, renowned city muralist

THERE WAS something about the mural on Chestnut Street in West Philadelphia that rubbed some people the wrong way.

It was beautifully done, to be sure, depicting a boy of about 12 with a basketball against a mosaic of city scenes, storefronts, buildings, the Market-Frankford El. But something wasn't right, something failed to capture the ingredient that the young people of West Philadelphia needed more than anything else in their lives - hope.

It was the basketball.

"It did not speak to us," a neighbor said at the time. "All it said was this is as far as you can go."

After the Cobbs Creek Neighborhood Advisory Council got in touch with the city's Mural Arts Program in 2002, the muralist, Ras Malik, saw the neighbors' point. He remounted four stories of scaffolding, made the boy older, dressed him in cap and gown and substituted a diploma for the basketball. He also added a female graduate to the picture.

"That says a lot about him," said Jane Golden, director of the Mural Arts Program. "He was not only a gifted painter, he was someone who had a tremendous capacity for understanding and representing a community."

Ras Malik, who was one of the city's most renowned muralists and whose dramatic depictions of city scenes and its people are seen all over town, died July 31 after a lengthy illness. He was 72 and lived in Norris Square.

Born Henry Grady Reid Harris in Henderson, N.C., Ras came from a one-room schoolhouse and hard labor in the tobacco fields to Philadelphia, where his natural artistic talent bloomed.

"He was a wonderful person," Golden said. "He had an incredible spirit. He was gentle and kind and extremely talented. He was a very giving person."

Ras once said, "It's a great feeling to do something that can change a neighborhood."

He was born to Henry Harris and the former Blanche Gill. He had to drop out of school to work full time in the tobacco fields with his family.

It didn't take him long to realize that sharecropping, which required the black farmers to share their profits with white landlords, was not for him.

At age 18, he moved to Philadelphia. He worked various jobs and started a commercial-art course before he was drafted into the Army.

He served as a medic in the States and in Korea. When his superior officers recognized his artistic talent, he was assigned to paint signs and later did anatomical illustrations for a medical facility.

When he was discharged, he used the GI Bill to study at the Philadelphia College of Art (PCA), now the University of the Arts.

He took a job as a corrections officer at Holmesburg Prison in 1961 and stayed until 1974.

He once told an interviewer: "It was an extremely hard place to work. I can still smell it - the most horrendous odor in the jails. I can still hear that profanity."

But during his senior year at PCA, the warden asked him to teach art to prisoners. He found it satisfying to help bring out the creativity in people locked away and forgotten. He later formed the Bastille Art League with some of his former inmate students.

He had a sign-painting business for about 15 years, did book illustrations and other artwork before he met Jane Golden in the early '90s. She hired him to teach in the city's Anti-Graffiti Network, and he later began to do murals.

In 1994, he worked with artist William Freeman on his first mural, a series of sports figures on the columns beneath a PennDOT overpass at Ridge Avenue and Ferry Road in East Falls.

His second mural was "Forest Green," a landscape in mostly Puerto Rican Norris Square. He moved to the neighborhood and joined the Norris Square Civic Association. He taught art to neighborhood children after school.

He painted several more murals in the neighborhood with Latino themes.

One of his most dramatic paintings is the mural "Compassion," at 55th and Regent streets, West Philadelphia. It shows divine hands reaching down from the sky and pouring blessings on the blighted neighborhood.

After the mural was completed, neighbors began to improve the area with a flower garden and other beautification, fulfilling Ras' hopes that his art could transform a neighborhood. Besides his murals, Ras was frequently commissioned to do other paintings. He was a student of yoga and Buddhism, and enjoyed African dancing and drumming.

He is survived by two daughters, Denise A. Henderson and Michele Y. Harris; a son, Wayne Harris; two brothers, Andrew and Willard; a sister, Lillian Day, and three grandchildren.

Services: Memorial service at 5 p.m. Aug. 10 at the SGI-USA Philadelphia Community Center, 2000 Hamilton St. Friends may call at noon tomorrow at the Julian V. Hawkins Funeral Home, 5306 Haverford Ave. *