Talk:Chor Boogie

A. Proposed new lead

Current lead

Chor Boogie (born Jason Lamar Hailey) is an American spray paint artist based in Oceanside, California. Chor Boogie is recognized for having achieved a groundbreaking level of technical and emotional virtuosity in the medium of spray paint. He approaches his use of color as a form of therapy and visual medicine, and has been dubbed “the color shaman” by comrades and fans. He was first nurtured by the world of street art and is primarily a self-taught artist.

Proposed replacement lead

Chor Boogie (born 1979 as Jason Lamar Hailey) is an American aerosol fine artist and muralist known for large-scale spray-paint works he calls Modern Hieroglyphics. His practice integrates vivid “color therapy”, what he calls “AeroSoul Intelligence”, and a form of spiritual archaeology that draws on African diasporic and iboga traditions. Based in Oceanside, California, he is primarily self-taught and emerged from West Coast street-art and Hip Hop writing culture. His work has been shown in museum contexts including the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, Punto Urban Art Museum in Massachusetts, STRAAT Museum in Amsterdam, and installations on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., and he has been described in press and interviews as a “color shaman” for the emotional and spiritual focus of his spray-paint technique.

(Inline citations suggested from: Museum and gallery biographies, STRAAT Museum artist page, Sonoma Index-Tribune NEA article, Street Art NYC on Love Child, DoubleBlind / Chacruna / MAPS, and The Hip Hop Museum article on my work.)

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B. Proposed additions to “Biography” and “Works and style”

I’m not asking to delete the existing biography – just to **add a few sourced sentences** that reflect major museum/exhibition milestones and my later spiritual work. Here are concrete “change X to Y” suggestions:

1. Add a short career-highlights paragraph after the existing early-life paragraph in Biography

Proposed new paragraph

As his career developed, Boogie’s work entered museum and institutional contexts. He participated in the group exhibition Viva la Revolución: A Dialogue with the Urban Landscape at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, and his murals have been included in touring and outdoor museum projects in Australia and the United States.^[1] His work has been featured at the Street Art Today / STRAAT Museum in Amsterdam, where his large-scale mural Within is part of the collection, and at Punto Urban Art Museum in Salem, Massachusetts, where his mural Love Child is a permanent piece in the neighborhood-wide outdoor museum.^[2] Boogie has also created corporate and public commissions such as a lobby installation at 5 Bryant Park in New York City, widely photographed in Times Square, and murals for companies including Google and other tech and entertainment firms.^[3]

(The exact citations can be built from: STRAAT Museum page, Street Art NYC article on Love Child, UntappedCities / Wall Street Journal / New York Post coverage of the 5 Bryant Park lobby mural, and the museum/curatorial bios linked below.)

2. Add a brief note about NEA grant and Smithsonian/National Mall installation

I suggest adding this one sentence near the existing discussion of major projects:

In 2012 his spray-paint work was featured in an installation on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., and in 2018 he served as lead artist on a National Endowment for the Arts–supported mentorship project with Sonoma Valley Museum of Art, working with underserved youth on large-scale mural practices.^[4]

(If editors prefer, the Smithsonian / National Mall installation can be explicitly named as “Innocence” using the resume + any available local coverage.)

3. Add a short “Spiritual work and iboga” paragraph, reflecting Missoko Bwiti / Dissoumba context

There is already a paragraph in the article about my spiritual transformation and iboga. I suggest replacing that existing paragraph with something that closely tracks what is in independent sources (Chacruna, MAPS, etc.) and avoids any unsourced medical or retreat claims.

Current spiritual paragraph (for reference)

Chor Boogie speaks publicly about his spiritual transformation with the sacred iboga medicine and the Bwete tradition in Gabon, Africa, the homeland of his ancestors. He studies the traditional ways of the Bwiti and applies them to contemporary Western urban culture and his creative process, beginning with his Love Visions series in 2014. Chor's first iboga inspired painting, The Love Dance is featured on the book cover to HEART MEDICINE, a true love story written by his wife, Elizabeth Bast, that details their radical healing journey.

Proposed replacement paragraph

Beginning in the mid-2010s, Boogie’s work became closely tied to his experiences with iboga, a West-Central African sacred plant medicine. In interviews and essays for Chacruna, DoubleBlind, and the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS), he describes undergoing a personal healing process with iboga that led him to study and later be recognized within the Missoko Bwiti iboga tradition in Gabon, which he also refers to in his own writing as a Dissoumba/Bwete forest lineage.^[5] He has written that he seeks to bridge this ancestral spiritual practice with contemporary urban art and African diasporic experience, and his iboga-inspired series Love Visions and works such as The Love Dance have been discussed in that context.^[6]

This uses only what is already in independent sources and avoids any mention of specific retreat deaths or allegations.

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C. Sources (all public URLs, no share.google links)

Below is a non-exhaustive list of sources that support the changes above. I am including them here so neutral editors can build proper <ref> citations without running into the spam blacklist:

• The Hip Hop Museum (THHM) profile & 2024 feature on my work and the PHASE2LIVESFOREVER exhibition (Bronx, NY).
• STRAAT Museum (Amsterdam) – artist page and write-up on the Within mural.
• Street Art NYC – “Chor Boogie Paints Expressive New Mural, LOVE CHILD, in Salem, MA” (Punto Urban Art Museum).
• Sonoma Index-Tribune – “Sonoma Valley Museum receives NEA grant for spray-paint artist Chor Boogie.”
• Mesa Press / SD Mesa College – coverage of my Love Visions / Black History Month exhibition and biography (Oceanside background, Beijing Olympics mural, etc.).
• MCLA / Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles or related museum bios listing Viva la Revolución and other museum shows.
• Untapped Cities / Wall Street Journal / New York Post – coverage of lobby murals at 5 Bryant Park (Times Square).
• Chacruna Institute – “Healing the Soul with Spray Paint and Iboga with Chor Boogie.”
• MAPS Bulletin – “Returning to the Roots of Iboga: Artist Chor Boogie Becomes an Artist of the Missoko Bwiti Tradition.”
• DoubleBlind – “From Jay-Z to Iboga: How this Celebrity Painter Found his (True) Calling.”
• Artist CV / UPDATED RESUME at chorboogie.com (used only for non-controversial exhibition details like show titles, locations and dates).

I understand that some of these are interviews or self-authored essays and that editors will give more weight to independent journalistic/museum sources. My goal here is just to offer a clean, policy-aligned way to:

• keep defamatory / undue material about my alleged connection to a death **out** of the article in line with WP:BLP, and
• update the article so it reflects my long-term museum-level practice and documented role in iboga-related art and spirituality.

Many thanks in advance for any help improving the article. MODERNHIERO (talk) 07:32, 15 November 2025 (UTC) MODERNHIERO (talk) 07:32, 15 November 2025 (UTC)

Not done for now: Please include formatted citations in the request. Likeanechointheforest (talk) 16:12, 16 November 2025 (UTC)

My initial reaction to this edit request that it is (a) extensive and (b) not in the spirit of a Wikipedia article (which seeks to summarise key points neutrally about the subject, primarily based on independent reliable coverage). We're not in the business here of producing promotional online CVs.

The lead section should be a brief summary of the sourced information in the body of the article.

Museum and gallery write-ups are rarely unbiased or independent of the artists they present. We wouldn't want to see a long list of exhibitions/events based solely on the promotional material of the hosts of the exhibitions/events. But if any exhibitions were picked up by journalists or third party news outlets/publications, there would be a stronger case to list them/describe them.

Finally, some of this edit request is already being addressed elsewhere on this Talk page. Might I suggest you deal with each point one at a time, rather than needlessly repeat things in various places. Sionk (talk) 17:42, 3 March 2026 (UTC)