Miss Chelove

(traffic whooshing) (people chatting) - Each mural site has its own characteristics.

When I first visit a site, you get to assess everything.

The lighting, the space, the quality of the wall.

There's this communication that happens between yourself and the space.

You feel a lot of anxiety at times because there's this little voice inside of you that questions whether you can do it.

Even after all of these years, you kind of turn into a beginner.

Well for this piece at Dua, I felt a lot of pressure actually because in Washington DC we haven't had a lot of major Indonesian-owned businesses for a very long time, and I derive a lot of inspiration from my Javanese heritage.

How do we express that culture and American culture in a very authentic way?

(upbeat music) My name is Sitha Sadeline and my graffiti name from many years ago is Chelove.

(upbeat music) To me the artwork belongs in the street because it's energetic and it's just as involved in the conversation that everyone's having with fashion, culture, music, identity, politics.

These messages belong in the street.

It's important to balance that out with some questions about humanity, about yourself, about where you're going, about how you're feeling, and I think public art really helps to echo these sort of questions and experiences and just provides a great place to play.

I was raised in the suburbs of Washington DC in Hyattsville, Maryland and spent most of my younger years in DC hanging out.

I'm half Indonesian and half Western European with a few splashes of Polynesia, India and some Creek Indian.

(upbeat music) We were raised with our mom and she's Javanese from Indonesia, specifically from Java and it's a very spiritual, mystical place.

She had this thirst for knowledge and for travel.

She was very excited about the world and she wanted to find a way to study abroad.

So in 1964, she came to Hawaii for an orientation for the Fulbright scholarship that she received.

She was actually incredibly creative, incredibly spirited, great with rhythm and music.

She played for the Gamelan Troop with the Indonesian embassy.

She was a poet, a writer, just an all around sort of renaissance woman.

But she also was working constantly to support the family as a single mom.

(gentle music) (gentle music) (gentle music) (gentle music) I was the, you know, youngest of four kids so you grow up a lot quicker.

I started becoming really curious about, you know, the punks that we would see in Georgetown and, you know the store Commander Salamander and Smash and other stores.

It would sell vinyl.

There would be music, there would be flyers for shows.

And you know, just getting into that culture and understanding that there was this whole universe.

(upbeat music) Growing up, this sort of ethnically ambiguous other person, I think folks like that find a lot of comfort in belonging and finding a tribe and finding a crew.

That was a gateway.

And I started to get deeper into reggae music and then further into dance hall.

From there, morphed into underground electronic dance music in all of its forms.

I was DJing at places like State of the Union down on U Street with those clubs and Kafa House and the culture of underground hip hop music in DC, very, very strong.

So going through those threads and sort of evolving with the city and evolving with these cultures and with the years, that still influences my artwork greatly.

(jazzy music) I remember the first time I saw, you know, a piece a graffiti piece or a mural, I was so excited cause it was artwork that someone painted large scale on a building, and the sheer size of it was extremely exciting to me.

I couldn't get it out of my mind.

I found other people that were doing graffiti in the area and started hanging out with them.

We would have these gatherings, everyone, you know sketching together in black books.

And then from there we would go and paint.

So it would be anywhere.

Anywhere you could find you would paint.

One of those places was the red line on the DC subway system.

I think the reason why that line was so popular is because it has a lot of overground tracks and there aren't a lot of tunnels.

Also going through a lot of industrial areas where there were warehouses and you know, places where there weren't a lot of people.

And the Hall of Fame, which is another tunnel system in by L'Enfant Plaza in DC.

If you wanted to learn about graffiti you went there and you trained, you know, you just kept at it until you got better.

There weren't a lot of other women doing graffiti at that time.

But, you know, honestly, growing up, it's been that situation a lot for me.

The excitement about this art form was so great that it made you fearless.

There was no thought about who's gonna see this afterwards.

It was very sort of private.

I just wanted to use this spray can.

I wanted to use this tool.

That training that I had visually, I think it's still in my artwork in the energy of a line.

When you think about a tag, so much effort is placed on understanding these forms and the flow of these letters together.

So I think that's something that's really important for me in my work.

I can find those threads back to graffiti in every piece that I make.

You know what would look good?

That should be in the front.

- Yeah.

- Well, for this piece at Dua Coffee, which means two in Bahasa Indonesia, was actually opened by two colleagues of my mom, former colleagues of my mom's.

I'm going to represent for Indonesia as much as I can.

Us being separated from our culture and from our land.

My mom, she still was able to fold that into her life in big ways, and it's really important for me to learn so much more about my culture.

That's the path I'm on now.

Of think I should make these match that online color.

So it's more beautiful.

On December 11th, in 2005, my mom was driving to the Voice of America where she had worked for over 20 years.

Just about five minutes away from the house a drunk driver ran through a red light and T-boned her.

It's definitely a life shattering moment once you lose your last parent.

It's like there's no umbrella, there's nothing above me.

It's just me now, you know?

So this sort of nakedness that you feel.

You feel so many different things.

My mother is no longer here for me to lean on for a reflection of my culture.

I can't ask her all the important questions about what things mean.

What was her experience like?

So a lot of this is me reaching out and searching for those roots that were severed through that loss.

When she was still alive, she would tell stories of growing up in Java and having this really hard relationship with her mother and you know, she would steal mangoes and climb up this cambogia tree, very popular tree in Indonesia.

She would run up there and she would be eating the mangoes and like dropping the peels down and her mother would find her and, "Come down from there."

But I would take scenes from these stories when we were growing up and make her little paintings and things.

I was always connected to her stories, her experience and thinking about this place that we never saw.

I went in 1995 and the rest of my siblings went when we took her ashes.

There are things that you don't understand about your parent, why they do things and everything just makes sense when you go back home.

My family had rented this bus to go to like our ancestral homeland, and we were sitting in the back and I was just looking out at all my family.

I've never felt or seen that before.

They look like my mom.

They look like me in ways, you know it was just this incredible sense of belonging.

My mother's name was Sre Satterly Kunz but her nickname is Enny, E-N-N-Y.. - So this Batik pattern that I put inside this piece is called the Batik Para and it symbolizes the kris or sword, also called the tongue of fire.

The flowers in her headdress are the plumeria or cambogia as they're called in Indonesia.

They were a flower that my mother really enjoyed and she spent a lot of time in Hawaii and those flowers are very plentiful there.

I think she really loved those because they reminded her of home.

Even where she's buried in the family plot in Kudus in Java.

We've got those trees everywhere in the graveyard and the flowers are just falling all over the grave sites, so it's pretty meaningful for us.

She loved them so much.

We got the flowers etched onto the plaque that goes onto the headstone along with a quote.

"If you don't try, you'll never know."

That was something that was meaningful for us just in thinking about her coming from Java to America and just being so bold in her explorations in life.

My mother and her four children, she would always say together we make one fist.

Were were very unified and strong that way and the petals for the flower, they're five.

So it's also meaningful in that way.

I always put her name in the piece so here I have her in the headdress, in the tassel.

I hope that when people see my artwork they connect with the power of strong, resilient women and I hope they connect with the power of the indigenous.

Those are two really important aspects of my work that I really try to highlight and celebrate.

(Javanese music)