With paint-speckled pants and sneakers, the TYS crew – or at least its Bay Area representatives – assemble in front of their instantly-iconic mural of Oscar Grant on 17th street.

The crew looks exactly how you’d expect a socially-conscious art collective with a graffiti background to appear: casually, yet functionally dressed in jeans, shorts and T-shirts, the latter decorated with Che Guevara screen prints, an abstract graf design, an Aztec calendar and lettering reading “Trust Your Struggle” – the long-form version of the TYS acronym.

As a photo shoot and interview commence, passers-by come out and say whassups; hands emerge from cars passing through and wave. The crew takes it all in nonchalantly, gratified yet unfazed.

The mural, painted on plywood shoots erected on the wall of Youth Radio a few days prior to the announcement of the Johannes Mehserle verdict, depicts an angelic-looking rendition of a photo of Grant. Larger than life in death, Grant’s cheery smile seems in contrast to his status as a martyr and victim of police brutality; it evokes not pain, but love. Already, the painting has become a rallying cry for a burgeoning activist movement – a symbol of the need for justice, a reminder of humanity’s creed.

In a short time, the mural has become an integral part of the fabric of Oakland. It’s been broadcast all over the world by media and bloggers alike, as well as being the latest example of Oakland indigenous graffiti art taking on a social justice bent.

But then, that’s what TYS do.

Founded in 2003 by Scott LaRockwell, Robert “Tres” Trujillo and Ben “Borish” Rojas, the multicultural collective, whose nine members reside in Brooklyn, New York, Los Angeles, Oakland and San Francisco, see themselves not just as artists, but as storytellers. Their collaborations with nonprofits, community organizers and social justice orgs have taken them to Colombia, Cuba and Guatemala, as well as gallery shows in New York and San Francisco and commissioned work at Richmond’s RYSE and Berkeley’s La Peña.
 
Before painting a mural, explains crewmember Erin Yoshi over the phone from L.A., the crew will spend time researching the topic, making sure they are grounded in the themes they will be representing artistically – before even beginning a sketch. Being visual translators of other people’s histories and stories, she says, comes with a big responsibility.

“We really had to work on educating ourselves around each issue.”

The Oakland Oscar Grant mural, Yoshi says, wasn’t the first they’ve done around the issue of police violence.

“A lot of policemen seem to have the ability to not get prosecuted for these really heinous crimes,” she notes.

According to Yoshi, the story behind the mural goes like this: “I was in the Bay doing an art show. Youth Radio called us and said, ‘we don’t have any money but we have a wall. Are you interested?’”

To paint the mural, Yoshi admits, she “totally ditched my gallery show.” Instead, she says, “I went and painted with Miguel Perez and Scott La Rockwell.” The piece was done in a single day.

Yoshi says she doesn’t regret the decision.

“We had no idea what was gonna happen when we did it,” she said. “While we were painting, the press started to come. People would stop and yell out their window, ‘that’s what I’m talking about.’ Towards the end of the night, people brought items to put in front of it, like an altar. I think it really showed the support of Oakland and the East Bay for Oscar Grant.”

Public art, she says, is an “uncensored” media.

“When you’re painting on the street you can paint however you want. It’s really taking back the power of having a visual voice for the community.”

Back in Oakland, the four TYS members present take turns explaining what “trust your struggle” means to each of them.

To La Rockwell, a graphic designer and photographer who’s also been a tour manager for Del tha Funkee Homosapien, “it’s a belief in the struggle that you’re going through. When you have nothing else, you have the adversity that you have to overcome and the understandings and the games that will come out of that. Everything in life is a struggle.”

Bounce – originally from CoCo County’s Pittsburgh and currently a Brooklyn resident – says the concept is a play on words, removing the Christian and capitalist connotations from “In God We Trust” and replacing them with “something that everyone can relate to, that people can believe in their own force.”

Tres, an Oaklander who’s “lived all across the East Bay,” says “Trust your struggle just means being proud of yourself, being present and being able to deal with it in your own way. Whatever you feel is right in your gut is the way to go about it; not so much how society puts on you about how you should deal with it.”

The struggle, he adds, could refer to many things, from single parenthood to family members dealing with addiction, to earning a GED. To Tres, it’s about “knowing what’s right for you, sticking to it and uniting with other people that feel the same way.”

Borish, a San Franciscan who joined the crew in 2006, says the term “means do what you love and what you need will follow.” He draws inspiration from TYS’ travels around the world, noting, “There’s definitely a universal struggle going on. In all these places we’ve traveled to, there are very similar struggles.”

In other countries, Borish says, “They don’t really have too much, but they’re still making sh-- happen, still having dope-ass art, painting huge murals and, like, they got spray paint from like, ’82.”

Putting up murals, he adds, is “one of the best ways you can tell a story to all kind of people, not just people in galleries, but regular people walking down the street. That was what we wanted to do, tell stories to everybody.”

Indeed, the Oscar Grant mural does in fact tell a story through pictures. According to Tres, the mural is symbolic of the struggle “for people of color in the Bay Area to get hip and wake up to the fact that the things which are happening to us are not just accidental … they’re not coincidental … they’re not just isolated issues.”