Juanta Wolfe paces back and forth
in the octagon, staring
down his opponent. His lips pull up toward his nose, accentuating the 28-year-old’s
thinnish mustache. It produces an expression somewhere between derision and
intimidation. At 6’2 and 153 lbs. he is wiry but muscular; not the most
intimidating figure in mixed martial arts, but not the least. The bravado on
his face is either real or skillfully constructed. Though Wolfe is initially
aggressive, luck turns against him by the middle of round one, his head
pummeled by a series of blows. A minute into the second round Wolfe taps out
after being subdued in a painful-looking chokehold. He hurls his mouthpiece to
the ground and stalks off.
That Juanta Wolfe is nothing like
the Juanta Wolfe you meet in a café. There you see a warm smile, expressive
face and great wit. Wolfe’s life is a dichotomy: a physical world of violence
and an intellectual world of ideas and art; and a youth lived in poverty and an
adulthood rubbing elbows with the elite of Wichita, Kansas. Wolfe straddles
these different worlds in his own unique way.
In fact, Wolfe is not a Wolfe. The
story of why is indicative of his unorthodox outlook.
“It’s my wife’s grandma’s last
name. All her daughters got married off. She didn’t have a son, so it’s kind of
like the name was going to get lost, so we took it,” Wolfe says.
A boy named Juanta Saunders grew up
in South Central Wichita, an area best known for drugs, crime and prostitution.
“You can’t leave a freakin’ rake
outside without it getting stolen. … Overall it is kind of rough. I remember
walking to school and seeing spent needles,” Wolfe said.
A mélange of different ethnic
groups, income levels and generations, his neighborhood gave Wolfe a unique
perspective on the innate value of a person’s life. Juggalos, skateboarders,
and gangbangers all came over to hang out at Wolfe’s house. The ever-present
homeless population, proud older residents with well-kept lawns, methheads, families,
intact and broken apart; you could meet them all at the Mexican grocery down
the street. Wolfe learned not to judge his neighbors by their poverty.
“…The decisions your parents made
carry on. You have to dig yourself out of a hole when you come from there; as
opposed to starting on flat land,” Wolfe said.
His mom worked as
a kitchen manager in various restaurants around town, while his dad spent
Wolfe’s childhood working at the Farmland meat processing plant. With multiple children,
finances were always tight. However, Wolfe’s parents always made a point to sacrifice
so they could have a go-kart or a trampoline.
“Some people
would describe this as ‘hood rich,’” Wolfe said through a chuckle.
His father exuded
brute strength and was known for his ability to knock out a man in one punch.
His mother was whip-smart with a talent for creating art. Wolfe found that he inherited
traits from both.
“I LOVE to
fight people. I was getting into street fights once every three months. … I’ve
been stabbed in a street fight. And it wasn’t that bad. I just got really dizzy
when I lost blood, but it didn’t hurt,” Wolfe said.
Having a white
mother and a black father automatically made Wolfe someone who understood how
to live in two different worlds. When he hung out with his white cousins in
Haysville, a suburb of Wichita, he was the black kid. But not always.
“It always seemed
like to the other race, you are the other race. … When I played biddy ball I
remember one of the only plays we went over was ‘take it in and if you can’t
lay it up, pass it to the white guy.’ And I was looking around, and like, ‘holy
shit, I’m the white guy,’” Wolfe said.
Meeting Meghan,
the woman who would become his wife, opened Wolfe up to new possibilities. He
had graduated from high school, but eventually gave up on engineering school at
a local college. For many years he had dabbled in art, but never completing
anything. His art experience consisted of high school classes and an arrest for
tagging train cars in the railyard.
But Meghan
implored Juanta to stretch himself. A local event called Avenue Art Days sought
submissions for mural painting. She insisted he enter.
“I said, ‘People
don’t want my shit.’ She said, ‘What if you stepped outside of your little box
and challenged yourself a little bit?’ That’s pretty much what I’ve been doing
since. I give her complete credit for whatever I’ve done artistically. Being an
artist was not a goal of mine when I was 20 and 21. I was trying to fill my
pockets instead of my soul,” Wolfe said.
For that first
Avenue Art Days mural work, he and the rest of the artists found themselves
rained out. But Wolfe sat in his car and would work every time the rain let up.
Soon, while nearly every other artist’s work lay incomplete, Wolfe had finished.
“I benefited from
that because I showed work ethic. That’s something both my parents taught me,”
Wolfe said.
He met Janelle King, the owner of The Workroom,
a shop that sells locally made items. She helped connect him to the larger art
community. He volunteered to work with Armando Minjarez, the project director of
the Horizones Project, whose most famous piece is an enormous mural on a grain
elevator on the north side of town. Soon, Wolfe was taking commissions to paint
murals and other artwork across Wichita, including at Norton’s Brewing Company,
Busy Builders Learning Center, and the home of local business owner Jason Cox.
As Wolfe dove
into the arts scene, he began to mingle with the arts community and their
benefactors. Whether at a swanky event at MarkArts or the Ulrich Art Museum, or
at a casual event on Commerce Street, Wolfe could be found amongst the creative
class, the artists and wealthy benefactors.
“I feel like I’m
a pretty approachable person and that helps out a lot to get ingrained in the
art culture; because I’m not very stereotypical I guess,” Wolfe said.
Wolfe sees the
art community in Wichita as a vibrant force that works from the ground up, with
normal, everyday people doing much of the hard work of making art a bigger part
of Wichita’s culture. Though he sees the walls of separation between the more
traditional art galleries and the upstarts beginning to break down, at least in
his own mind, Juanta’s childhood as a poor kid from South Central Wichita
follows him to fancier venues.
“I understand
that there’s a whole spectrum of quality and taste, but when I’m in places like
that, even though I can appreciate fine art, I don’t feel like the other people
around me can see that because of how I’m dressed or how I act,” Wolfe said.
Wolfe describes
his own work as, “Putting colors in random places, starting to use that same
aspect to make shapes and faces. I take all this chaos and put it in a nice
tight frame.”
Imagining his own
work appearing in a traditional gallery amuses Wolfe.
“I don’t think my
art will ever be in a gallery. Maybe in 50 years when they find it in the
post-apocalyptic rubble of Wichita,” Wolfe says, laughing.
Wolfe sees
younger benefactors as having a different viewpoint from their parents and grandparent’s
generation.
“Some people take
their wealth and want to stack it up. …The people that are replacing them want to
build their legacy through experience,” Wolfe says.
With the help of
his wife and the Wichita Ju-Jitsu Club, Wolfe has dispensed with violence
outside of the controlled world of martial arts. According to Wolfe:
A fighter likes to hurt people and doesn’t mind getting hurt. A martial artist is more like a painter. They practice a technique over and over and want to break down and understand it. … I hate macho people now. That’s one of the reasons I want to be so good at fighting. Because I want to come out to the [mixed martial arts] cage in a pink robe and show these people that whatever that culture was is outdated and is going to be replaced whether they like it or not. And let’s replace it with something better and more inclusive.