Explore Ramels's work: | IG: rameljwallace
[Watch the full interview below]
For Ramel Wallace, being an artist has never been about choosing one medium and sticking to it. His creative practice moves between music, poetry, storytelling, community building, hosting, and creating spaces for other artists.
He describes artistry as an “articulation of your life”, a way of taking your experiences, environment, and perspective and turning them into something that can be shared with others. That philosophy has shaped the way Ramel has built his creative life. From discovering poetry in high school, to opening The Church in Barrio Logan, hosting CreativeMornings, making music, and creating The Holyfield, his work has consistently centered around one thing: creating space for stories to be told and people to connect.
In our conversation, Ramel talks about play, manifestation, finding your people, letting go of perfectionism, and why the practice of being an artist is sometimes more important than the final result.
When did your creative journey begin?
RW: I don't know. Maybe birth. That was so creative for my mom and my father to put together. Immaculate Conception.
But I guess I'm not the typical artist, but in the status quo of becoming an artist, because I feel like I've always been an artist and everybody's an artist. It's just coming to that realization. And I think it's because of how I think of artistry. It's just an articulation of your life.
You articulate it into maybe a poem. You articulate it into a sculpture. You articulate your situation and your environment into something that people can look at or observe or attain for a certain amount of time. So there's so many twists and turns.
Maybe in high school, I took a short writing class and that introduced me into saying my poems to people in person. I ended up having to do it in front of my entire audience in high school. There was a performance and they had me come and do one of the poems that I wrote in the short writing class. And I did the poem and people really loved it. And I knew that it was important to share the information and the feelings that I had.
Being an artist is so much more than just having one medium that you select that you do full time. And I'm a weird artist. I'm a weird artist because I'll jump from everything. That's why now I consider myself a storyteller.
I feel like I can sit in someone's life or business, digest it, and then make a story out of whatever they just told me. Or I might just platform them on CreativeMornings and have them tell their story and be like, “Oh, okay, that's a great story. People need to hear this.”
Just like people needed to hear my story. Where can I put them? Who can I connect them to? So that story lives within creative communities because it speaks to this entire umbrella, right? People just haven't heard the story.
So I try to make these connections just to kind of have the internet live outside of the internet, do the internet in person. And be like, “Oh, let's make the network work like this.” And kind of seeing that entire space as the canvas of creativity.
This is San Diego, and people haven't necessarily painted this picture that I see from living in the South Bay, living in Barrio, seeing some of the best artists. Some of the best artists, you know what they do? It's a text message on my phone. They got a regular day job, but they're sending me songs, or they're sending me graphic designs, or they're sending me an email and I'm like, “Yo, this is life changing. It's crazy.” And sometimes they just need that.
That's the motivation to be acknowledged and to be remembered in some sort of way. And so I see that as important. That is part of my path. My artistry and to be creative is to tell other people about the creatives that I run into and make that into a beautiful story.
For those who don't know, what is CreativeMornings?
RW: It's a breakfast lecture series. So imagine a TED Talk, but specifically to inspire creatives or to be about a creative and the path that they are on, the journeys that they've been through to get to where they are.
It started with this woman named Tina in New York. Tina Roth is her name. In 2008 she started it, and it's just a breakfast lecture series at 8 in the morning. There's free coffee, free donuts, and it's the last Friday of every month.
Then it started to pop up in all these other cities. So, what, 2026 now? There's about 240 plus chapters around the world. San Diego has the eighth biggest chapter. We're the eighth biggest city in the US, so I feel like the eights are important.
I've been hosting for either five or six years, and it's been in San Diego for 10 years. It's just proven to be a space where networking can happen in an authentic way, where you build relationships with people that have come back every single time.
People have called it church for creativity. People called it AA for creatives. I think that's a funny one. I'm like, “Oh, I like that. It's a little offensive, a little bit.”
How did you first discover CreativeMornings?
RW: The free donuts. I kept coming for the free food. I tell people I'd be joking, but it's true. I know where all the free food is. I was walking downtown one day and I saw this gigantic line. So I got in the line. It looked like it was not a bad line. Everybody was happy. I got in line and then I came into the building. It was off of 17th Street. And when I got in there, everybody was talking. There was free coffee, free donuts.
And since then, I think that was 2015, I just started to show up to these events. One of the events, I took a photo of myself and I said, “I'm going to speak at this event in the future.” And then I just kept on my own creative path.
I ended up opening up this space down in Barrio Logan called The Church. So people that know about The Church remember The Church. It was this space where art was my religion. And so many people related to this philosophy where they looked at their notepad more than they had anything else, and it's something that they were dedicated to day in and day out, almost like a religion.
So we opened up that spot in 2017, and people just started to know me in the creative community. So I went from rapping, poetry, to having a space where people could do that. We gave people free rent for the first year. We got free rent ourselves to help develop the space. We brought in Beatbox Records. I was running the studio, The Holyfield. We had a gallery space. We had a store that was there.
The homie Jr. and all his homies from Mira Mesa came out there and we started building up that space. And at the same time, I was still going to CreativeMornings.
So when I was coming there, I had something really cool to show people. And I started to get known more and more in the creative space where, like, “Oh, not only is he an artist, but he can introduce me to this entire community of artists.”
How did you end up becoming a host for CreativeMornings?
RW: At the same time, I started working at this place called BAM, a PR and marketing firm. So I was at this interesting intersection. As Nate was about to leave CreativeMornings, Nate ended up knowing my boss, Beck. And so I knew that he was about to leave before anybody else.
We started to build that relationship, and I was at the interesting intersection of knowing the tech and the PR and the communications realm, having opened up a space, which a lot of creatives have not done, and then also being tapped into the creative world. And so that intersection made me stand out.
Then I started to build the relationship with Nate. And as that transition happened, plus me always showing up to CreativeMornings, that just had me standing out as the perfect candidate. And it just happened. I want to say naturally, but it's like I'm always positioning myself for the coincidence to happen. I encourage people to position yourself for the coincidence to happen.
You said you were intentionally positioning yourself for that opportunity. What do you mean by that?
RW:Yeah, I did. It was intentional, but I was playing. It's good to play. You have to be able to play in order to live.
A lot of times we have to play something in order to actually perform it in real life. And so the whole, I love manifestation, but I think there's something that's very tangible about the practice because you have to be intentional about what you want to manifest.
Is it something that you truly want? Is it something that's on your path? Is there an ego attached to the thing that you're trying to grab? Because if there is, you might end up getting things that you don't want or reaching for things that you're never going to get because it was not part of your path.
I also deeply saw that as part of my path and I saw the trajectory of what I was doing, the actions that I was going to take and the voids that I saw missing in CreativeMornings. It was mostly a white space. I wasn't seeing the voices that I was seeing in the hip-hop community or in Barrio. And I knew that I had something to bring to that area.
I knew that there was a voice that wasn't being spoken there and that I could bring to that, not just through my voice, but through all the people that I knew.
You went from being an artist to opening up a space. What did that transition teach you?
RW: Oh, man. Talking to developers. Most artists don't talk to people like that. I was thrown into that situation just by happenstance. And so I had to learn to articulate the value of being from a space because I have connections to Barrio down to like the '60s. My great grandma moved there from Pensacola, Florida. So it's articulating this value that someone might have the money, they might have this and that, but they might not have the story that's connected to an area. And so finding that story within myself and positioning myself, for anybody, that's important.
Find your connection and that narrative capital or that social value that you have in whatever situation, that subject matter expertise that you have. That's a value no one can put a number on.
It's almost like fine art. They throw a banana on the wall, it's a billion dollars. That expertise has no price. So it's infinite.
So I could step into a space like CreativeMornings and say, “Oh, well, I have an infinite value that's here and I can bring it here. I have an infinite value at the workspace that I work at. I have an infinite value in these creative communities.” And positioning myself where that infinite value can really thrive and grow.
Can you tell me a little bit about the early days of making music and what drew you to that medium?
RW: Oh, my radio broke. And then I would just start to make my own music in the car. Then I showed my girlfriend at the time, and then she told other people. You know how girlfriends act like their boyfriends are better than they are. She told all these people and so I just had to do it. And then I was good and I ran into this guy named Leon. He goes by Bam. He has a clothing brand called Heron Hughes. And so we just started making music. We got on the phone and it was just sparks. It was just like minds.
And we started this group called Brother Nature. We were out there at all the dive bars, at everything, rocking shows, and that was preparation for performing on any stage. The hip-hop, that's a huge manifestation place where I sit and I think and I meditate with myself or with, say, Leon or with that group of people that are going to be making the music.
That's a complete portal, completely spiritual space as well. People call it music, but it's just like, it's like Interstellar when you're in there making music.
Especially that part where you're just listening to a beat, you're listening to a loop of rhythms and frequencies and you're bobbing your head and it's just quiet sometimes for hours. You're in a meditative flow state. And you're transcending words that sometimes it doesn't even feel like it comes from you. It comes from this future self or this Sankofa where it's like past, present, future as well. And you're writing these things down.
So, yeah, I use a lot of the music as a manifestation of myself, trying to articulate the environments that I've been through, that my ancestors have been through, that my future sisters have been through, and putting it through music so that other people can be put onto game of my experiences and my lineage's experiences.
I'll probably put out an album every two years. I try to stay as consistent as possible just to have that practice of the manifestation and to make room for more of it. But I probably have about eight albums out right now. It's fun.
Tell me a little bit about The Holyfield. What's your vision for it?
RW: I want to help people tell better stories. I feel like people can tell better stories for their businesses, for their lives, for their careers, and through spaces and helping places like CreativeMornings or even BAM.
I want to use The Holyfield in order to do that. And I use this space as The Holyfield. People use the backyard. So we've had this place, this organization called the Park Takeover. Every first Sunday of the month, they use the backyard. They're very focused on the homeschool community. And they have an artist come out and teach the youth how to do this artistry. So they'll have a painter come out. Last week they had a painter and he had the kids put all these affirmations on the canvas and then they painted over it, and then they got these water balloons and threw them at the canvas and it revealed part of their affirmations.
Every month they have a different artist that comes and teaches the youth and it's about 20, 30 kids every time. It's like my version of, there's this rapper named Lar Russell and he does hip-hop shows in his backyard. But I'm like, you know what? My version would be opening up my backyard just for, like, if anybody wants to collaborate. Because artists need space.
A lot of people love the idea of creating something for their community, but they don't know how to get started. What would you tell them?
RW: I call it, like, find your 8,000. Be on a mission to find your 8,000. If I'm doing the math right, if you're one in a million and there's 8 billion people in the world, then there's 8,000 of you. There's 8,000 of your people.
So acknowledge that they're there. They're somewhere.
You know, we have a tendency as humans to feel so alone, but you have to come to the realization that your people are there. Now you're on a mission to find them.
The mission has begun. The button pop, you know, you press the button, now the mission is on. Where are my 8,000?
It's like a Pokémon challenge or something. And I think that starts the journey of the fact that they're there. How can I go and find them? It might be a CreativeMornings, it might be a creative exchange, it might be a meetup. There's so many places to meet people online. I've used social media in a way that helps me meet people in person.
I'll meet them online and I'll invite them to something that's in person and I'll open up that resource sharing, because that's so transformative when you share information with people instead of withhold.
I'll say, “Look, if there's anything cool, invite me to it.” And then now they're sharing information with me and then I'm sharing information with them.
What's your secret to creative productivity? How do you stay so productive?
RW: People always bring up Adderall. And I've never had it before. I was like, “No, I don't want to do it.” I said, “I don't want to be too productive.” I think that's a trick. I think there's a trick to not wanting to be too productive.
I also don't want perfectionism to what I do. And I oddly think that that's an encouragement. When people see me up there, they're like, “Oh, he's just a regular dude up there.” I'm definitely not perfect at what I do. I might be enthusiastic and have fun and play with those situations, but I think I see a lot of the situations as play.
And it'll just get done. You just have to go and start the mission, really.
And I might be very loose with my artistry. It might not be what I imagined it to be in the first place. And so getting rid of that expectation is part of the practice of artistry because it's a practice of release and not perfection because perfection doesn't exist.
Say you release something. Maybe I know some artists, sometimes it's me, working on something for like 10 years, and then the juice ain't worth the squeeze to be such a perfectionist.
The juice is never worth the squeeze. And the practice is worth the squeeze.
How do you deal with people who don't like your work?
RW: I think I like more when people don't like it. Because then there's this, if they're open to it, there's this conversation of, “Oh, what's there that you didn't like? And this is why I did this.”
But that's part of the practice. It's a practice of having no fear. When you really get into the artistry, even if someone has an issue with it, there's still not a, you have this, “I'm not doubting myself, but I'm like, let me see what you think of this.”
Some people will love it. Some people are going to hate it. Those 8,000 are going to love it.
You just got to find them. Eight thousand gonna love it. They go like, “OH MY GOD, OH MY GOD.” But there's a lot of people in the world, so there'll probably be a lot of people that end up not liking it. And it just gives you that opportunity to see why.
When did you decide to pursue art or creativity as a career?
RW: I don't know. Maybe I guess it was a big step when I said, “I'm going to open up a space.” And that's a kind of an interesting story. When we did that, that was completely jumping in.
At one point we opened up The Church right up there on Low Rider Lane, and the four people that were inside of The Church working there, we all lived upstairs. I moved in with my mentor Frank Luna and then I was living with JR. We all lived there. So we basically said we're just going to be dedicated to this until it works. And sometimes you just have to jump in all the way.
You might not have to jump in all the way for the rest of your life because life changes. But that was a big moment where I said, you know, I can do this and kind of see what happens. The whole theme was, that was the theme at that point. But I think opening up a space was a path where it was like, “Oh, I can make this a possible thing. People can be receptive to it.”
And in that moment, I was invited to the Grammys through Delta Airlines. They had this program with Ryan Lewis, Macklemore's producer. So I'm running The Church down there. I get invited to this process. I fill out the application. I go through the journey. I do the interview and everything. And I'm just real in the interview. I'm talking about my life and my experiences and my family. They invite me out to the Grammys. I fly in the air with Ryan Lewis and the whole theme is that flying is not just, you don't just fly. You never know who you're going to sit next to.
And so we just had a conversation. I showed him my music. He loved my music. And that was like a recognition that was outside of myself, I guess, that it was like, “Oh, wow. This can be recognized.”
People recognize this as something that could influence people, that could be in alignment with Delta Airlines and the Grammys. Like, this is big. This is really big. And then I'll say this one. I made an album with my favorite rapper. His name is Blue. And that was a magical moment because once I did that, I said to myself, “Oh, I could just do anything. I could touch the sky.”
What is a question you wish people asked you more often, and how would you answer it?
RW: Where can I get free food at? I'd be like, “Yo, thank you. I've been waiting. I've been waiting.” I'd be like, “Yo, first go to The Church. The Church always is giving pizza. You just got to listen. CreativeMornings, donuts. Go to some city planning meeting or something. They'll probably have free food.”
I got a list. All those Reader events that I said I would pick up the Reader and go to, they have free food.
Whenever people want you to listen to something, there's usually free food.
But MLMs, multi-level marketers, they don't usually have food. I would tell them, get better food, because I went to those meetings and I was very disappointed.
Key Insights
Art is an articulation of your life
For Ramel, being an artist isn't defined by a particular medium. It is about taking your experiences, environment, feelings, and perspective and articulating them into something that other people can experience. That might be a poem, a song, a conversation, a space, or a story about another person.
His definition opens up the idea of what an artist can be. You don't necessarily need to choose one medium and stay there. Your medium can change as your life changes. The important thing is finding ways to express what you're experiencing.
Create opportunities before they exist
One of the strongest themes in Ramel's story is his ability to create the spaces he wishes existed. He didn't simply participate in creative communities. He opened a space. He didn't just attend CreativeMornings. He positioned himself to eventually become its host.
And with The Holyfield, he's creating another space where artists can collaborate and young people can experience creativity. There is a difference between waiting for an opportunity and creating the conditions for one to appear. As Ramel puts it, he likes to “position yourself for the coincidence to happen.”
Find your 8,000
Perhaps the most memorable idea from the interview is Ramel's concept of finding your 8,000. The idea is simple: if there are billions of people in the world, there are still thousands of people who are going to understand what you do, connect with your work, or share your interests.
You don't need everyone to like what you make. You need to find your people. That shift can completely change how you think about building a creative career. Instead of trying to appeal to everyone, you can focus on building genuine relationships with the people who actually connect with your work.
Play is part of the practice
Ramel's approach to play is more serious than it initially sounds. For him, play creates a space where you can experiment without being completely attached to the outcome. It allows you to try something before you know exactly how it will turn out.
That becomes especially important when he talks about perfectionism. If you're waiting for everything to be perfect before you release it, you may never release anything at all.
“The juice is never worth the squeeze. And the practice is worth the squeeze.” The practice is what keeps you moving.
Your story and perspective have value
Ramel talks about what he calls “narrative capital” and the social value that comes from your personal connection to a place, community, or subject. His connection to Barrio Logan is not something that can simply be replicated by someone who has money or resources. He has a story connected to that place. That experience becomes a form of creative and professional value.
For artists, this is an important reminder: your background, perspective, relationships, and lived experience aren't separate from your creative practice. They can be part of what makes your contribution impossible to replicate.
The practice is bigger than the final product
Perhaps the biggest lesson from Ramel's philosophy is that creativity isn't necessarily about producing the perfect finished thing. It's about practicing. Making the song. Hosting the event. Opening the space. Sending the message. Meeting the person. Sharing the resource. Starting the project.
Sometimes the result will be incredible. Sometimes people won't like it. Sometimes it won't look anything like what you imagined. But that's okay.
The point is to keep playing, keep practicing, and keep finding your people. As Ramel says, “Some people will love it, some people are going to hate it. Those 8,000 are going to love it. You just got to find them.”
📢 Check Out the Full Interview
Watch the full interview with Ramel below or youtube @ainahcommunity
Explore Ramels's work: | IG: rameljwallace
