About GaKnew Arts & Media
GaKnew Arts & Media is a visual and performing arts company working across murals, music, youth programming, and creative experiences for organizations and communities. We are OSHA aerial & scissor lift safety certified, general liability insured, and a registered vendor with multiple school districts throughout the greater Los Angeles area. Our work is rooted in three principles:
Craftsmanship - If it's not done well, it's not done yet. Whether we're painting a mural, producing music, or leading a workshop, care for the craft and how it's delivered is fundamental to our work.
Voice - Art communicates, and we're mindful of what it says. Sometimes that means visual storytelling or creating space for others to speak. Other times it's painting a picture with words or helping someone find ways to express themselves. Whatever the medium, there is intention behind the message.
Community - We believe in being hands-on. That can mean working alongside residents on a mural, spending eight weeks creating with young people, helping a group build confidence through art, or opening a conversation through music and writing. Community isn't just reflected in the work; it's something we participate in.
What We Do
Murals & Public Art
Large-scale murals and commissioned artwork for public spaces, businesses, schools, organizations, and communities. Each project balances strong visual execution with consideration for the space, what the artwork should communicate, and the people who will experience it.
Music & Spoken Word
Original Hiphop and spoken word built around writing, recording, production, and live performance. The work draws from observation, lived experience, humor, storytelling, and social commentary while maintaining an emphasis on the craft of making good music.
Build Confidence
Teaching high school art and years of working directly with young people revealed how often fear of making mistakes can prevent people from attempting something unfamiliar. That experience helped shape a simple idea: art provides an opportunity to practice trying, making mistakes, adjusting, and continuing forward. The idea developed into Confidence Through Art, an eight-week youth enrichment program, and Confidence Day, a one-day creative team-building experience.
Develop Voices
Decades of writing Hiphop and spoken word led to an approach to creative writing built around intentional communication: Who are you speaking to? What are you trying to say? How do you want it to land? That approach became Voice: Discovery, a one-day creative writing workshop, and Voice: Development, an eight-week writing clinic. Participants explore how rhythm, structure, rhyme, word choice, storytelling, clarity, complexity, and other creative decisions affect how an idea is communicated.
The Artist Behind the Work
GaKnew Arts & Media LLC was founded by Lanny Wilson, known artistically as GaKnew Roxwel. His path to the arts hasn't existed separately from the rest of his life.
Raised by a single mother in South Central Los Angeles, Wilson grew up an only child and latchkey kid learning to navigate his community largely on his own. He discovered a passion for drawing at an early age, using art both as a creative outlet and an escape. Those experiences would eventually inform a career spent working with young people and families, creating art, raising a family, and exploring how stories and ideas can move people.
For more than 15 years, Wilson worked with families through the Children's Law Center of California, where his work contributed to efforts toward more culturally respectful and community-centered casework practices. His decades of working directly with young people also include experience as a high school art teacher and parenting educator.
As GaKnew Roxwel, he is a national poetry slam champion who has appeared on HBO's Def Poetry, a Hiphop artist and author whose work explores life through storytelling, observation, humor, and reflection. As a visual artist, his murals and illustrations display that same interest in people and storytelling.
One Artist. Different Languages.
Painting, music, poetry, teaching, and conversation may look like different disciplines, but they come from the same place.
A mural can tell a story across a wall. A song can place someone inside an experience. A workshop can give someone tools to tell their own story. A conversation can uncover an idea neither person had before it started.
GaKnew Arts & Media exists to create space for all of those possibilities.