The Big Picture: Joe Pagac on pressures, privileges of public art

For anyone looking for Joe Pagac in the next couple months, he’ll be painting away at the exterior of a medical center at 5th Street and Alvernon Way. 

“They want to attract people back to the building,” said Pagac, who is spending his mornings working on the mural alongside his wife, Lenka. “They wanted to create something where people know that building as a thing in town.”

Pagac approximates that the mural will be his largest yet, an area of “well over” 9,000 square feet (his old record). But the final product is still up in the air. The first design depicted blue skies, a giant red cardinal and a red hot air balloon flying, and two children on a boat with a big red sail. From there, the cardinal became a hummingbird, the children in the boat a gila monster, and the cloudy sky a Tucson sunset. 

The artist’s murals are a process of painting and repainting, and often of collaboration and compromise with the client. Some have specific and unflinching visions, and others, who just want the Joe Pagac special, give the artist full rein over their pieces. Regardless, there’s a lot of revising and customization. In his last piece, he recalls swapping out one of his desert creatures for a depiction of the client’s late mother, and a generic dog for the client’s own pet. Now he’s working on three murals for the new Desert Drifters Coffee location, which only requested that he “do cool stuff.”

Pagac, a Tucson native and UA alum, has cemented himself as one of the city’s most prominent artists, in a variety of mediums including his murals, canvas work and fabrications. He recalls a conversation he had early on in which he asked his cousin, “How do you get into painting these big public murals?”

His cousin said, “Just paint one and you’re that guy.”

The advice rang true. Now Pagac’s creations are all over Tucson; on buildings, in restaurants and stores, in children’s bedrooms. Driving through the city, one can’t miss a Pagac piece, whether it’s the iconic floating whales of “Sky Islands,” the “Lounging Lizards” of Euclid Avenue, one of the plethora of business signs he’s created, or his recent 150-foot downtown Saguaro — the tallest mural in Arizona. His work has spread to Phoenix, Las Vegas and Washington D.C.

But being “that guy” comes with caveats, the artist explained. 

“The challenge, I think, with being an artist, is once you get known for things, that’s what people call you for,” Pagac said. “They want the whales, they want the sunset colors, because that’s what they saw.”

“There’s this balance of: You always want to be pushing yourself and expanding into new things, and you don’t wanna get pigeonholed too much, but you’re also getting calls because of what people have already seen that you’ve done.”

“There’s this slow push to keep moving that ship into new directions.”

According to the artist, he’s in a “weird space,” creating art that is consumed by the public but often paid for by private parties, whether by donations or companies. Opposed to painting on a canvas that will hang in a gallery, there’s an added pressure in producing public works that will become a part of locals’ daily lives. This pressure has been on the muralist’s mind since he was first starting out, and saw an article in the Tucson Weekly about a sculpture that had been installed in a neighborhood. The residents hated the sculpture so much that they paid to have it ripped out.

“I was like ‘shit, you gotta be careful,’” Pagac said. “You really gotta figure out your audience. It’s a balancing act of trying to keep everybody happy.”

To achieve this balancing act, the muralist has developed ground rules for what he will not paint. For instance, his primary goal is to brighten days, to make passersby feel relaxed and happy. His secondary, subtler goal is helping others appreciate Tucson’s desert nature. The muralist is a nature-lover himself, who uses his free time to go hiking, bikepacking and camping. But though he promotes conservation through his art, he draws the line at depressing imagery.  

One neighborhood requested a mural of the Rillito River, all the way from pre-human history, through historical events, and into a future where “Tucson’s a wasteland and everything’s dead,” Pagac explained, to which he thought: “I think that’s going to bum people out when they’re driving by.” 

When he receives commissions like this, he tries to figure out how to put a positive spin on the message. In this case, he focused the mural on the beauty of the Rillito until now, hoping that beauty would encourage others to protect the river. 

“It’s painting a polar bear having a good time, not a starving polar bear on the last piece of ice,” Pagac said. “People will drive past that and think ‘polar bears are cute, maybe we should save them.’”

Pagac also refuses to paint political murals, with the exception of a Black Lives Matter project that “felt beyond politics,” in which he helped fundraise and found spaces for local black artists to paint. 

Other times, it’s just about oversaturation. Recently, Pagac compromised with a client, hiding a requested killer whale in some cacti at the bottom of a mural, because in the artist’s opinion, there’s too many of his own whales in the sky. Last year, Pagac finally told El Tour de Tucson, which had been calling him for bike murals downtown, that they’d have to find another location for him to paint.

“I also live in Tucson,” Pagac said. “And I, just as a person, don’t want to see so many bike murals downtown. Honestly, there’s too many. I want to see other artists putting stuff up down there, I don’t want it to just be like ‘bike mural downtown.’”

The artist and El Tour ended up settling on a location in South Tucson, right near the finish line of the ride. The piece was funded by El Tour de Tucson and Tucson Medical Center and ended up in the “perfect spot for it.” In general, Pagac is looking to disperse the concentration of murals around Tucson and focus on areas that might not have many yet. He is also eager to see more of other artists’ work represented around town.

“It’s really fun for me just to see how excited the community gets, especially in neighborhoods that don’t have as many murals yet,” Pagac said. I think it’s good if we can have all the artists move around to different parts of the city, at minimum.”

“And at maximum, get more and more artists out there, so we have more diverse art,” Pagac continued. “There’s some artists in town whose work is very different from what most of the stuff going up is right now, and I’d love to see them get more walls, just so there’s more variety.”

When asked to mention a few Tucson artists who inspire him, Pagac names a few from what he describes as a long list. Jessica Gonzales and Ignacio Garcia have been doing “incredible stuff,” the former bringing a vibrant, contemporary style to the city, and the latter being an influential, longtime linchpin in Tucson’s art scene. Peniel Macias and Camila Ibarra are “hitting it pretty big right now,” and Nolan Patterson has a cartoony, psychedelic style that Pagac thinks is “super cool.” 

Pagac has also trained many new artists, whether they are fresh out of school or simply looking to try their hand in the business. Painters will work with him for a while, and afterwards, he sends work their way. 

“I think there’s room for a lot more to do it,” Pagac said. “But it’s one of those things where it’s a hustle. You’re not making a ton of money all the time, you’re out working in the heat, and you’re getting up at 4 a.m. to try to get out there early. It beats you up. At the scale that we work at, it’s more like a construction job, rather than an art job.” 

Few can imagine walking around their city and being surrounded by their own creations. But according to the artist, he’s more proud of playing a three-chord song on guitar, a hobby he “sucks at,” than he is of completing a mural. The latter is just what he does, what he excels at. Pagac sees himself as a guy who’s doing a job, no different than a plumber or an electrician. He enjoys seeing his work, but doesn’t let it go to his head. 

On the contrary: The muralist is constantly gazing at the sides of buildings and thinking about what he could improve upon. For the same reason, he can’t have any of his own work hanging in his house: because he’ll “pick it apart forever.” He attempts to outdo himself with each new mural, and scale up, if his fear of heights permits him to (While working on his state-record breaking “Desert Colossus,” Pagac’s accomplishment was painting that high up “without having a heart attack”).

The artist has even come upon murals from the beginning of his career, when he first left school, and considered apologizing and offering to redo them for free.

“I had mentioned that to a friend and they were like, ‘Dude, these people paid you a hundred bucks to paint a 20 foot by 20 foot mural,’” Pagac said. “They knew what they were paying for and that they were getting a brand-new art student.” 

“They say art and writing are an old man’s game, where hopefully you just keep getting better at it ‘til the day you die, and you keep learning from your mistakes and pushing forward.”

Sometimes, appreciating his own work takes seeing it from another perspective. On social media, Pagac witnesses the lives that his murals take on after he’s done with them. The “Sky Islands” whales are everywhere: On calendars, in music videos, engagement photos, professional pictures. The artist likes to see how others make his murals their own, the unique twists that they add to his work.

Pagac often receives heartwarming emails or sees online posts from locals, to whom his murals brought joy, and who were impacted in one way or another by his art. Not long ago, he saw a post in which a user likened his new 150 foot Downtown Saguaro mural — Arizona’s largest mural — to “A” mountain, in terms of the piece becoming a local landmark.

“I didn’t realize that I was making that big of an icon when I got into it,” Pagac said. 

Of course, the painter has works that are particularly meaningful to him. He’s endeared to “Epic Rides” — a cowboy yee-hawing on a bicycle, followed by a woman whose hair and dress morph into the Sonoran sunset. “Epic Rides” was his first big public piece, his “that guy” mural, which was crowdfunded by over 300 strangers and made him realize the support he had in the community.

The mural is also quintessential, unchecked Pagac, one of his only pieces in Tucson that the artist can say is “purely me.”

“This is what I can do if I’m totally left on my own,” Pagac said.

He also mentions, as a favorite, a newly completed mural that he did for Camp Cooper, an educational program which brings children from the city out to the desert of Tucson. The camp is intended to help foster young people’s relationships with nature, a goal in line with Pagac’s own values. 

“They’re less about the ‘oh, you know, you gotta learn that a gila monster is 18 inches long and lays two to three eggs a year,’ and it’s more just like, ‘Look at this gila monster; that’s fucking cool,’” Pagac said. “So they get the kids just really excited about it.”

For Camp Cooper, Pagac painted a gila monster sitting with a baby quail inside of a circle of rocks, representing one of the program’s exercises to immerse the campers in the desert landscape. 

“That one for me also really embodies that peaceful feeling I get from being out in the desert.” 

I used to live downtown for like 14 years and hit the bars all the time and whatever,” Pagac said. “I’ve now moved out into the desert myself, just to kind of separate a little, and I just love being out here, surrounded by the animals and plants and the quiet. I spend a ton of time just out in my yard enjoying the desert.”