Street artist Danielle Mastrion is planning to paint a Biggie Smalls mural on the Key Foods supermarket at St. James Place and Fulton Street in Clinton Hill, the block where Biggie grew up.
The mural is being shepherded by Leroy McCarthy, the man behind the stalled attempts to rename St. James between Fulton and Cambridge Place “Christopher Wallace Way.” If the street name doesn’t come through, a mural on the block is the next best thing. The mural will join many other Biggie tributes, like Owen Dippie’s mural at Franklin and Dekalb in Bed-Stuy and the “Comandante Biggie” portrait at South Portland and Fulton in Fort Greene.
Mastrion stresses that this is not just another Biggie mural, though. It’ll be more about the neighborhood where he came from and how he was once a regular Brooklyn kid. “This is about his roots and not the rap icon that he became,” she told DNAinfo. “It [may] be of him as a child sitting on the steps of his brownstone, like any other kid in the neighborhood.” He may not be directly depicted at all, instead showing up as a shadow or just via his vivid lyrics about Brooklyn street life.
(Photo: Wally Gobetz)
