Portrait of an Artist, Portrait of a Fighter

More

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.

Comments are closed.