Alonso Transforms Wynwood's Walls Into Queer Resistance

Carlos Alonso's hands are permanently stained with titanium white and cadmium yellow. He doesn't apologize for it. On a Tuesday afternoon in Wynwood, he stands before a freshly primed brick wall on a side street most tourists never find, sketching the outline of a figure with spray paint and a carpenter's pencil. The figure is androgynous, muscular, defiant. It has a crown of thorns made from barbed wire. Behind him, three finished murals stretch across the block—each one a middle finger to the idea that queer art in Miami should be decorative, palatable, or designed to sell condos. "People come here expecting rainbows," Alonso says, stepping back to assess his lines. "They want their phones to look nice in the photo. They want to feel good about themselves for liking gay art. I'm not interested in that." Alonso, 34, grew up in Wynwood before it became the Instagram destination it is today. His mother was a nurse, his father worked in construction. He learned to paint on the sides of buildings because that's what you did when you were a broke queer kid in Miami in the early 2000s, when this neighborhood was abandoned enough that nobody cared what you put on a wall. He painted at night, mostly. He painted figures—sometimes faceless, sometimes screaming. He painted for other queer kids who needed to know they weren't alone. By 2019, Wynwood had transformed entirely. Art galleries opened. Boutiques followed. Rents tripled. The street art that had once been the voice of the dispossessed became a commodity, a backdrop for branding. Murals were commissioned by real estate developers. They were designed to be Instagrammable. They were, in a word, safe. Alonso stopped painting for two years. "I was angry," he says simply. "I still am. But I realized the anger was the point. If I stopped, they won. If I stopped, the neighborhood becomes completely theirs." In 2021, he started again. But this time, he painted with a thesis. He began a series he calls "Reclamation," a body of work that deliberately contradicts the glossy, depoliticized street art that now dominates the neighborhood. His subjects are queer bodies rendered in stark, almost violent color—not the soft pastels of mainstream LGBTQ aesthetics, but harsh oranges, deep purples, bruised reds. His figures are often shown in states of transformation or resistance. One mural depicts a trans woman mid-transition, her body splitting into two forms. Another shows a drag queen with her makeup running, tears visible, but her expression unbroken. A third features two men embracing while a wall of institutional gray looms behind them. Where national outlets like The Advocate have covered queer street art as a feel-good story of urban revitalization and creative expression, the real story in Miami is about displacement, about whose culture gets commodified and whose gets erased. Alonso's work refuses the narrative of progress. It insists on the narrative of loss. "The city wants to tell you that gentrification is inevitable," Alonso explains, moving to adjust a stencil on the wall. "That neighborhoods change, that's just how it goes. But neighborhoods don't change by accident. They change because people with money decide to move in, and people without money get pushed out. My work is just pointing at that." He has been commissioned exactly zero times by the city or by developers. Every mural is either unauthorized or executed through relationships with building owners who are themselves resistant to gentrification. One landlord, an older Cuban man whose building sits on a corner where three streets converge, has given Alonso an entire wall—twenty feet wide, fifteen feet tall—with no restrictions. That wall has changed five times in three years. Each iteration is more radical than the last. Alonso's work has started to get attention beyond Miami. A gallery in Los Angeles reached out about representation. A design magazine wanted to feature him. He turned both down. "If I leave Miami, I become a Miami artist," he says. "Exotic. Historical. Past tense. I'm not done here. I'm not going anywhere." What makes his work matter, though, isn't that it's radical in the abstract. It matters because it's specific. It matters because he's painting on the streets where queer kids still walk, where they still need to see themselves rendered not as inspiration porn or diversity metrics, but as complex, angry, beautiful, flawed human beings. It matters because he's refusing the role that queer artists are often assigned in cities like Miami—the role of making gentrification look good, of making displacement look like progress. On the wall he's working on now, the figure is almost complete. It's a self-portrait, Alonso admits. It's him, or a version of him. The barbed-wire crown. The defiant stance. The way the figure seems to be pushing back against something invisible but unmistakable. "That's the one that stays," he says. "That's the one I'm not going to paint over." For now, anyway. In Alonso's practice, permanence is a luxury. Everything he makes is temporary, subject to being buffed, covered, or removed. But that's the point. The work exists in resistance to the idea of ownership, to the idea that any of us—the city, the real estate market, the algorithms—can own a queer body, a queer story, a queer place. The work exists to say no. And in Miami, where that word has never come easily, Alonso keeps saying it, wall after wall, spray can after spray can, until someone has to listen.