About

The anonymous yarn graffiti artist and painter Kern Myrtle creates large scale works made of crocheted acrylic yarn, spray paint - or both. Their work has been shown in Germany, New York, Italy, Canada, and Mexico City, among many other places. 

Kern’s yarn-based street art began in 2019 when they started crocheting small abstract sculptures (that some say resemble jellyfish) and leaving them to be found on the streets of Miami. According to Kern, "when you find something cool on the street, you get that little hit of joy. I want people to feel that when they find my art."

Strongly influenced by the graffiti culture in Miami, Kern soon began to experiment with writing their name in crocheted yarn on the street. They have created large street installations during Miami Art Week beginning with “This is for You” in December 2020 and “Why Not?” in 2021. "Why Not?” included large crocheted words along with contributions by more than 20 other artists from the US and UK.

Kern began to merge yarn and spray paint, painting walls that included both elements. In 

their mural for the Few and Far Women and Friends Miami Art Week production (December 2021), they used both paint and yarn to create a wall of yarn graffiti, gluing their yarn letters directly to a gate they painted and stenciled with their own crocheted doilies. 

Since then, Kern has experimented with spray painting a giant design based on their own crochet on walls. The resulting work is both recognizable as crochet and as an abstract organic  design. 

In August 2023, Kern created a room-sized 4-D neon yarn black light installation for a show at Miami Art Society. "When You Say Yes (This is What Happens) incorporated hanging crocheted pieces, a painted mural executed by Rage Johnson - Murals & Such, ambient music (sonic strands of generative modular synthesis) by Zacklur, and scents selected to enhance the experience. 

For Woolinale, the first international yarn bombing exhibition in Germany (April 2023), Kern created a ten-foot wide work on construction tarp. First they spray painted a straight letter graffiti piece of their name. Then, over the course of several months, they crocheted and stitched yarn to the tarp. "Graffiti writers and yarn artists both seem to respond to this piece. I worked hard to get the graffiti right and to applique the yarn with just as much care," said Kern of the piece. The process took three months. "The title should have been 'This took forever'."

The textile arts have long been considered women’s work, and in electing to work with yarn, Kern infuses their work with gender quandaries. Who can work with yarn? Does art on the street created with yarn have the same value as art created with a brush or a spray can? What happens when sprayed acrylic paint and stranded acrylic yarn are combined?

Like many street artists, Kern Myrtle chooses to remain anonymous, but regardless of Kern's identity, this work emerges to take an unlikely place as a traditionally female-created art form in the mostly male-dominated world of graffiti and street art.