Faith47: Running Through the Unnamed, New Jersey, USA
Faith 47’s New Jersey mural Running Through the Unnamed was painted on an abandoned steam plant, where the South African artist created a white poppy with her son, Keya Tama, during rain-soaked days hosted by The Wooden Walls Project. The work continues Faith47’s long engagement with spiritual symbolism, nature, tenderness and overlooked architecture, transforming a disused industrial surface into a quiet prayer for peace, love and family.
Faith47 and Keya Tama in New Jersey
The mural carries a deeply personal atmosphere because it was made by Faith 47 in the presence of her son, Keya Tama, whose own practice moves through murals, painting, illustration, textiles and collaborative public works. Faith47 described the experience as rainy days spent painting a white poppy together, writing that days with her son are “days in the sun no matter the weather,” a line that gives the work its emotional centre: inner light, unconditional love and the kind of care that continues even when the world feels heavy.
The meaning behind Running Through the Unnamed
In Running Through the Unnamed, the white poppy becomes more than a flower. It reads as a small offering against violence, a symbol of remembrance without spectacle, and a fragile form of resistance placed against the hard skin of an abandoned steam plant. Faith 47’s words around the work, “small prayers for peace, for love, for family,” position the mural not as decoration, but as an act of devotion, where the language of public art becomes intimate, almost whispered.
A white poppy on an abandoned steam plant
Faith 47 has always understood the emotional charge of neglected spaces, allowing weathered walls, ruins and forgotten structures to become part of the work rather than simply background to it. Here, the abandoned steam plant gives the white poppy its tension, placing softness against industry, care against decay, and spiritual stillness against the residue of labour, heat and machinery. The mural does not overwrite the building’s past; it lets the surface remain wounded, while offering one pale, luminous sign of peace within it.
Hosted by The Wooden Walls Project
Running Through the Unnamed was hosted by The Wooden Walls Project, the New Jersey public art initiative founded in 2015 by Jenn Hampton, which has helped bring murals and site-specific works into the cultural landscape of the state, especially around Asbury Park’s evolving public art scene. In this context, Faith 47’s mural belongs to a wider conversation around how public art can shift the emotional register of overlooked places, giving abandoned architecture a new kind of visibility without stripping it of memory.
Faith 47 New Jersey and the white poppy as a symbol of peace
Across Faith 47’s wider practice, animals, hands, flowers, shrines, figures and weathered surfaces often become symbols of spiritual endurance, ecological grief and human vulnerability. Running Through the Unnamed sits naturally within this language, but with a softer pulse. The white poppy does not announce itself with force. It appears almost as a breath on the wall, carrying Faith47’s repeated invocation: “May all beings be in Peace. Peace. Peace. Peace.”
It is this ability to make neglected architecture feel spiritually awake that gives Faith47’s work its enduring force.
Enquire about available artworks by Faith 47
Faith 47’s Running Through the Unnamed sits within a wider practice shaped by symbolism, nature, spirituality and the human condition, qualities that continue to make her work deeply resonant for collectors of contemporary street art and urban contemporary culture. At GraffitiStreet, we work with collectors seeking meaningful editions, originals and secondary-market works by leading international artists whose practice moves between the street, the studio and the museum wall.
To discuss available artworks, private sourcing or collecting with GraffitiStreet, please get in touch with the gallery, or view available works by Faith 47 online.
Image copyright Faith 47