CINCINNATI — Joshua Stout spent a good portion of the 1990s hanging around Northgate Mall. Now he’s returning home to leave his mark on the space and the community.
Stout is a full-time muralist. His latest commission is a 30-foot piece on a wall outside a now-vacant department store inside the Colerain Township shopping center.
Joshua Stout.
Part of the reason Stout wanted the job was because he grew up in that area. Like many 90s kids, he spent a lot of time “terrorizing” the mall in his youth, and he feels this project brings it “full circle.”
“I used to haunt this mall when I was 12 to 15 years old, so it’s kind of a homecoming for me,” he said. “I used to be a mallrat up here and now I get the spraypaint the walls and the pay me for it, which is pretty cool.”
The piece features a bear taking on a hippo in a playful wrestling match. Each character is decked out in colorful 90s-era wrestling attire. He started Friday and said it took about 30 hours to complete.
“My brother and I growing up were huge wrestling fans and this sort of pays homage to that era. So you have a bear and a hippo dressed up as Bret ‘the Hitman’ Hart and the Ultimate Warrior. It’s just fun,” he said.
The characters used are common in Stout’s work. His first mural, back in 2018, was “Dancing Hippos“ at Eighth and Main streets in downtown Cincinnati. Stout said that was the first time he had ever picked up a can of spraypint.
“My work usually isn’t that deep but I’m kind of hoping the bear wins this mural matchup so I don’t end up painting only ballerina hippos for the rest of my career,” he said jokingly.
While Stout makes playful jabs about his piece, he takes his work very seriously. He’s worked on more than 30 pieces all over great Cincinnati.
He’s been a featured artist at BLINK in 2017 and 2019. And before that, he built sculptures, animatronics and environments for Warner Bros., Universal and Disney.
“So for me, every project I do is to add a pop of color or art where somebody is not expecting it. The design work that I do I make sure it’s bright, and colorful and fun,” he said.
Stout likes to use nostalgic figures and themes to help people remember back to when they were kid and things weren’t so serious all the time.
“I want my work to be inclusive and enjoyed by everyone,” he said. “I know murals can be an avenue for policial art but I want my work to be a moment of brevity. I want people to stumble ascross my work and enjoy it.”
Growing up in the Colerain Township, Stout said there wasn’t a lot of public art for him to learn from or be inspired by. He’s hoping that his piece will start a trend that changes that.
“There’s not a public art here. With all my murals and with this one, I want to go into a place that doesn’t have a lot of public art and so if a kids sees it, they can think, ‘Oh, I could make something like that. I could make art for a living.’ Maybe this will be the start of something cool for Colerain.”
While he now lives in Ludlow, Ky., Stout’s fondness for the mall and the area remains as strong as ever. He said wants to help play a role in its continued revitalization. Northgate Mall currently has 58 stores, a food court and a movie theater.
“I definitely want people to take their picture with it — that’s a huge compliment. But my goal is to help drive foot traffic and business to this mall and this area. So I hope people stop to take a picture, tell their friends and then they come take a picture and maybe buy something, too,” he said. “The hope is to help revitalize something that was so important to me growing up.”
