Explore the magic mind behind the 'Black Lives Do Matter' art installation: Greyson Davis

He's a man of many names, not to mention games.

As a visual artist, he goes by HP Fangs, which is short for Happy Fangs. His rapper name, if you will, for his past and future life as a hip-hop musician, is Haji P, short for Haji Pajamas.

His students call him Mr. Greyson, kind of like his personal Facebook page, which is "Regular Greyson."

For boring and vaguely legal reasons we'll call him Greyson Davis. But whichever name you know him by, he's a Wilmington artist like none other whose eye-catching work runs the gamut from playful to profound.

"Me and my therapist are working through all of my names," Haji P said with a laugh during an interview in the classroom where he works teaching art to middle-school girls at Girls Leadership Academy of Wilmington, or GLOW, where he's been employed since 2016.

"Middle-schoolers are still down to be weird," Davis said, which is why he prefers teaching students of that age.

He looks like the coolest teacher you ever had — long braids, black ball cap with "Santa Cruz" in Gothic lettering, a form-fitting black T-shirt with his own illustrations and the slogan "make art" — and Davis is always down to get a little weird, as evidenced by some of his work on the classroom walls, like one of a bright pink brain emitting a noxious green cloud that spells out the words, "Brain fart!"

It's the kind of irreverent sentiment that endears him to his students, whose work Davis promotes on his social media channels and encourages during regular meetings of a school-wide art club.

"Anything I do I try to make them a part of it," he said.

Keep smiling

If you live in Wilmington, you've probably seen the work of HP Fangs whether you know it or not.

If you've driven down North Third Street in downtown Wilmington where it turns into the Martin Luther King Jr. Parkway, you've seen Davis' large-scale installation spelling out the words" Black Lives Do Matter" in giant letters decorated by everything from the visages of Black luminaries to the work of iconic Wilmington artist Minnie Evans to his own trademark logo, turning up as a gap-toothed grin punctuating an exclamation mark.

The Wilmington City Council recently approved the installation, which first went up in 2020, to stand for another year.

The HP Fangs hallmark is an illustration of a toothy, cartoonish grin that shows up in many forms, from little stickers for local ice cream shop Boombalatti's to a recent billboard asking people to "smile," just to cite two examples.

The visual is an HP Fangs original, but there's something so comfortable and familiar about it that it feels like it's always been part of your consciousness, whether it's a smiling rainbow heart or just that grin, sometimes capped with a gold tooth, coming out of and obliterating the darkness.

Troubled times

Before he became a teacher and an artist, Haji P — the name was inspired by the character Hadji from the old Johnny Quest cartoons — was best-known in Wilmington as a hip-hop artist, performing with such groups as Brown Co. and Rec League. He also released an excellent solo album, "Neighborhood Kid," back in 2010.

Related reading: Haji P returns to Wilmington with new album

But back to art for a second: Davis currently has a piece in the "State of the Art/Art of the State" exhibit at the Cameron Art Museum, where he's a teaching artist. He also recently had an exhibit of his '80s-inspired illustrations at the second Princess Street location of the Memory Lane comic book shop, which has been featuring Davis' work on its walls for years.

A huge comic book fan, as well as a devotee of '80s and '90s pop culture — "I don't do anything besides read comics and watch cartoons," Davis said, "I'm like a 12-year-old" — Memory Lane is where you can find him most every Wednesday when new comic books are released. Memory Lane, he said, is also "one of the reasons HP Fangs is a thing."

In addition to caricatures of '80s favs like Alf, Calvin & Hobbes and Pac-Man, Davis makes plenty of original work as well.

Some of it is for Davis' daughter, a "beautiful monster" who's 6, and whose picture Davis keeps hanging above his desk. He started drawing and writing for her not long after she was born, and he still makes coloring books for her, mostly pictures of "dumb animals being goofballs."

Doubling down on his creativity, Davis said, helped him get through a major rough patch by providing him a new path forward.

Within a year in the middle of last decade, he said, a split with his ex-fiancee led to a custody battle over their daughter. Then, the father he never really knew reached out to him, dredging up all sorts of emotions made even more complicated by the fact that Davis' father was extremely ill (he ultimately recovered).

Also around that time, Davis, who is Black, was the victim of what he calls "a racially motivated attack" in Leland.

It was a lot for Davis, who'd been dealing with depression since moving from Hawaii to Fayetteville as a teenager, to handle all at once. A suicide attempt landed him in the hospital, where he was forced to take a long, hard look at his mental health.

It was difficult at the time, but "I'm so glad I went," he said.

He wasn't supposed to have any sharp objects, but a hospital employee snuck him in a pencil set. He began making cartoons of the staff, little "comical blurbs of whatever our relationship was."

"That's when drawing really started to be it for me," he said. "I was like, 'This is going to be my anchor.'"

'It's just a butt'

For many years, even after graduating from the University of North Carolina Wilmington with a degree in Communications in the early 2000s, music was Haji P's main focus. Still, he'd always done art to some degree, and now he reconnected with the artists who first inspired him, including Keith Haring, Charles Schulz and Jim Henson. ("I can probably quote the entire 'Muppet Movie' from start to finish.")

The music he made in the 2000s and 2010s was often goofy and fun while simultaneously speaking to more serious topics, an aesthetic that often, but not always, shows up in his art.

Not long after he started posting pictures of his work on Instagram about six years ago, Davis got a couple of offers to illustrate children's books. One, "But Daddy, I Don't Like That," by Terrence Lovett, about a kid who didn't want to eat his veggies, proved moderately successful. It also inspired him to change his Instagram handle to HP Fangs from its original and less family-friendly name, Butt Biters, a name he chose because "it made me laugh."

Sometimes, though, a butt just needs to be a butt, even if he's showing his work to the curator of a nationally known museum. When he submitted a painting to the CAM's "State of the Art/Art of the State" exhibit, Haji P found himself in front of Dr. Maia Nuku of The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, one of three curators of the show.

North Carolina artists conquer the Cameron Art Museum: 776 pieces flood the space

When deciding which work he wanted to submit — each artist got just one — he thought, "This might be the only opportunity I ever have to have my work in a museum. What if I just draw a butt?"

And so, Davis submitted a painting of a cartoonish derriere passing a big green cloud of gas. It made him laugh, so he drew it. Nuku loved it, and even posed smiling for a picture next to Davis with the work.

"She asked me, 'Is this some kind of comment on COVID-19?' Nah, it's just a butt. Then she was like, 'Oh, thank God.'"

Then, she said "the illest thing that anyone's ever said about my work. She goes, '22 lines.' She had counted my strokes. 'You did more with those 22 lines than most people could.' I was so hyped up."

If there is often a light-heartedness to Davis' work, he said, it's partly because "I have to remind myself to smile."

He worries, though, about crossing the line from positive to Pollyanna.

"I wonder where that line is," he said. "I get where it can be wild irritating" when someone is relentlessly, mindless positive.

Perhaps one reason Davis' work comes across as carefree and cool rather than cheesy is because it's ultimately rooted in a darkness he's always fighting against. His work is at once serious and not, which he says is a "complete manifestation of being bipolar."

Then there's the work that could be considered Davis' magnum opus to date, the "Black Lives Do Matter" installation. Located on city-owned property, the installation was approved by the Wilmington City Council in 2020 after encountering a fair amount of opposition. Originally intended as a "Black Lives Matter" installation, the council only approved the project after the word "do" was added, something that drew the ire of BLM activists, who saw it as watering down the message.

Looking back, Davis recalls the whole saga as something of "a yikes event." It still pains him to talk about it to some degree, even though he has largely made peace with it.

"At first, I hated it. I fully understand and agree with why (the activists) were mad," he said. "I felt like a race traitor. I was getting hate mail from both sides" — those who didn't want the installation at all, and those who didn't want it with what they saw as an "extra," diluting word.

Ultimately, Davis said, he decided to do it, mainly because "it felt arrogant not to do," he said. "It still means Black Lives Matter."

More pictures of dumb things

It's not like he hasn't faced racism in his life, like every other Black person. His old hip-hop duo, Brown Co., which he formed with a friend from high school, got its name after they decided to take ownership of a racist taunt they encountered at a party.

Even as he's become known as a visual artist, Haji P still has music in the back of his mind.

"I am craving doing one more album," he said. "I love writing and I still write."

In fact, he's currently working with Wilmington label Fort Lowell Records on releasing new music, although the details aren't quite ready to publicize.

"Haji is super talented," said Fort Lowell's James Tritten. "His music is amazing. I had no idea (he made music) all this time, just knowing him as an illustrator."

Likewise, Tritten said, when he brought up Haji P's artwork to the Wilmington rappers in MindsOne, who did shows with Davis back in the 2000s, they had no idea that he also did visual art.

Moving forward, it could be that Davis does work in both genres. For now, you can see his art adorning new labels from Wilmington's New Anthem Beer Project, and he'll be at Memory Lanwith his work for Free Comic Book Day on May 7.

One of his dreams is to create a student art gallery where kids can sell their work, a spot where he can teach, work, play, learn and help kids.

Davis said he's often asked, "'What's your end goal?' I dunno, draw more pictures of dumb things."

But as a kid who grew up reading the funny papers and admiring the work he saw, "I feel like I want to give 8-year-old me a high five," Davis said. "'We did it!'"

Contact John Staton at 910-343-2343 or John.Staton@StarNewsOnline.com.

This article originally appeared on Wilmington StarNews: Artist HP Fangs, aka Haji P, keeps Wilmington smiling through art