On a sunny Friday afternoon, I was at my local Starbucks working on my Concrete Canvas article from the last issue of our magazine, when this random guy saw some of Shepard Fairey’s work on my computer screen. He came up to me and started asking questions about my pictures. Little did I know, this random guy I met was actually deeply connected to the roots of hip hop culture in the Bay Area and was actually making a stop from LAX before heading to the Art in the Streets exhibition at MOCA. Weeks later, I was given the chance to sit down and learn more about him. We met up with him at a piece he recently finished at a car shop in Downtown Los Angeles. Born and raised in San Jose, California, Patrick Mermel aka Sno found art as an outlet to express himself through difficult times at a young age. He wasn’t always surrounded by spray cans and b-boys. It all began when he was in the 5th 23
grade; simply with hand-me-down rolls of butcher paper and colored markers accompanied by the lights from his bedroom windows. Prior to being exposed to the hip hop culture, at a very young age, these poster sized papers were Sno’s first approach to publicly distributing his art which was just enough for lunch money. It wasn’t until the late 70’s and early 80’s when Sno saw the local cholos breaking, popping, and locking. Though, what really captivated him took place on the east coast. It was the footage of trains being bombed in New York that mesmerized him the most; something about being able to express yourself in art for the public to see reeled him in. In 1983 Sno threw up his first piece underneath a bridge in San Jose aka ‘The City of the Bridges’ in broad daylight. His work took off from there. How was hip hop prevalent to the culture up in the Bay when you were growing up?
The Bay is a giant melting pot of all cultures coming together and I believe that hip hop built itself upon this and found a way to unite everyone. Hip hop was able to take all the cultures from middle class White kids, wealthy Black kids, to Asians, the ghetto and everyone else and bring them together through graffiti and breaking without any problems. Even when gang banging and tag banging came about, hip hop still helped overcome some barriers and tied the cultures together and I believe that this all started back in the Zulu days around the 50’s and 60’s. They took Zulu’s tribal fighting techniques back in Africa and created breaking and also created graffiti which I think has grown as large in the hip hop movement as the other three elements have. Graffiti has definitely contributed just the same. I recall you mentioned you used to break with Poe One, how did you