Jules Muck, known as Muckrock, started writing graffiti as a teenager in Europe and England in the ’90s. Back in NYC, she worked under Lady Pink for many years and painted highways and rooftops with BTC. Her first interview came in 1999, conducted by ZEPHYR for While You Were Sleeping magazine. SMITH took her into the NYC subway tunnels and freight yards, where she was taught the history of graffiti by some of the scene’s great early legends.

Muck’s work has been featured in numerous books, including Broken Windows and Burning New York by Karla and Jim Murray, Graffiti Women by Nicholas Ganz, Cey Adams’ The Art and Design of Hip Hop and Alan Ket’s The Wide World of Graffiti. She has participated in major collaborative projects like the Wooster Collective’s 11 Spring St., Hanksy’s Surplus Candy, and was one of the first women to paint at the 106th and Park Hall of Fame in NYC. She also created an installation with the Guerrilla Girls in the lobby of the Bronx Museum of Art.

Her murals have appeared in TV shows and films, including Under the Dome, Mr. Mercedes, and IT. In 2019, at the request of a group of neighbors in Indianapolis’ Broad Ripple area, Jules began a series of floral murals on garage doors. Broad Ripple Flower Alley has since grown to span multiple blocks and has become a destination for photo shoots and gatherings. She has painted large-scale murals for Miami’s Art Basel and frequently travels to New York, New Orleans, Texas, and beyond, but her Venice Beach home and studio remain her favorite place to be. It is by far the most mucked place in the world.

Her handle, Muckrock, is an ode to graffiti’s hip-hop roots, but it has also come to represent her obsession with music. She has painted over five memorial murals for Motörhead’s Lemmy, including one at the Rainbow Room and a 40-foot Mt. Lemmy at Dave Grohl’s LA recording studio. The Pixies’ Classic Masher video features a stop-motion Muck mouth, and her work has found its way onto Engelbert Humperdinck’s Bel Air house. Everlast and Ministry’s Al Jourgensen are among her collectors.

Muck’s humanitarian efforts extend far beyond her murals, using art as a tool for activism and social change. She has painted in Syrian refugee camps, bringing color and hope to displaced communities, and worked with Miami’s Juvenile Detention Center to create pieces that offer messages of resilience and transformation to incarcerated youth. She has produced several large-scale Bernie Sanders murals, using her art to amplify messages of political activism, and has contributed to disaster relief efforts, shelters, and underserved schools. In 2020, she established Muck Recovery, a nonprofit recovery space in Venice Beach that hosts twelve-step meetings and fosters solidarity through art.

She travels the globe for mural work and, along the way, peppers surrounding cities and countrysides with graffiti and street art pop-ups. The Muck Map documents the locations of almost all of Muck’s work, past and present. Though opportunities for illegal painting are becoming rarer, as more and more people invite her to paint their walls, vehicles, and anything else that will sit still long enough, she’s still known for tagging humping bunnies on RVs and bringing life to anything with wheels.

Jules Muck acquired a building in Venice where she once slept outside as a traveling artist, now transformed into a vibrant art studio. The studio is open every weekend for visitors to see firsthand where canvas pieces are created. Muck is also an amateur tattoo artist and has been for over a decade. If you want to get mucked, we can make that happen.