SEASON 4 EPISODE 2: THE ART OF MOISES 
Thu, Dec 11, 2025 8:30PM • 24:27
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
graffiti artist, Moises Frank, Toronto, mural, suicide, grief, mental health, mentorship, art education, emotional energy, identity crisis, community impact, youth support, personal growth, artistic expression
SPEAKERS
James Bunga, Jaden, Mariam Kourabi, Amanda, Nicole Osbourne James, Sekou Osbourne James, News reporter, Jean Tsai, Jaden Whitelaw, Nick Yates, Kristian Cuaresma, Moises Frank, George Quarcoo

Mariam Kourabi  00:04
This is We Met U When...a podcast by journalism students at Toronto Metropolitan University. This is Season four, and I'm your host, Mariam Kourabi. Every year we go back in time, dig up new stories from Toronto's past and track down the people in those stories. This season, we're going back to 2015.

Sekou Osbourne James  00:29
I was just very confused. There was just a lot of photographs, but not a lot of asking people how they feel or what words they want to attach to these photos. It was just like the story was being told for us by shaping the narrative. 

Sara Calnek 00:43
It's a field where a lot of really bad things happen. You know, I've been assaulted and I've been spit on and I've been yelled at and all kinds of stuff thrown at me. I've had my life threatened. 

George Quarcoo  00:54
A lot of journalists that I have encountered were more so interested in my disability and not what I am doing as a person.

Mariam Kourabi  01:07
We want to know what happened after their names were in the news. 

Moises Frank  01:10
This story does take a turn as life does. I don't know if you want to go this route. I don't even know if I should tell you, but I'll tell you, just because it's reality.

Mariam Kourabi  01:24
No one was in a position of power, but many of them felt the power a newsstory can have. 

Nicole Osbourne James  01:31
There was a lot of negativity in the traditional news media. There was a lot of abuse. There was a lot of "Oh, you want to segregate your kids."

Amanda  01:41
It's really frustrating because it can feel very click bait when you like, open an article and you're like, blind person runs a marathon, and you're just like, why?

Mariam Kourabi  01:53
We're exploring the difference a decade makes, and the difference we journalists can make going forward, by first going back to 2015. You're listening to We Met U When Season four.  This is "The Art of Moises".

Kristian Cuaresma  02:18
Before we begin, we want to let you know there is discussion of suicide and grief in this episode. Please take care while listening.

Moises Frank  02:27
I started always thinking like, Yo man. Like, what if I ran into my old self? What if my future self saw my old self? Like, would I be disappointed in like who I am? But then at some point, I was like, bro, this guy, this 13 year old is an idiot, like, you don't know anything like, I guess a part of him was like, man, 13 year old me was so wise. But then I started thinking, I'm like, was he though, or like, was he like, does it like you just didn't see the full picture yet?

Kristian Cuaresma  02:55
That's Moises Frank, a graffiti artist based in Toronto. In graffiti, every artist has a tag that attaches them to their work. Moises's tag is Luvsumone, or Luvs for short, L-u-v-s. His murals can be spotted around the city. There's one I love in Regent Park. I'm a huge basketball fan, and it's an image of former Toronto Raptor, Kawhi Leonard, with a crown on his head, Moises, made it with one of his mentors to commemorate the team's 2019 championship run. We first came across Moises Frank's name in a 2015 news story. He was working on a project with teens, and they were painting a mural in downtown Toronto. But the project ran into some challenges and wound up in the news. 

News reporter  04:04
They believed the owner of this downtown Toronto building was okay with the mural going ahead, but that turned out not to be true. Just days ago, they were told she did not want the artwork on her property.

Kristian Cuaresma  04:18
Moises was less concerned about the mural and more with the young artists losing out on that opportunity. Art has always been important for him since he first started sketching. As a kid growing up in Hamilton, Moises kept his drawings in a book.

Moises Frank  04:35
You're free to call it a black book. So that first black book, it was very precious to me. I feel like I didn't have a lot of things like growing up being on welfare. So it was like having a sketchbook, to me, was like, was very cherished. And like putting a lot of hours into like each page and making it like, this is my best work they'll ever make. And then one day this will be something.

Kristian Cuaresma  04:35
It took some time for him to share his art.

Moises Frank  04:59
The graffiti  from like 10 to like 13, just kind of, like, drawing in my in my books, and I'll start seeing, like, made friends finally. And I was like, Yo, check this out. Like, I do this thing, graffiti or whatever. And then, like, literally, the same night, they're like, Oh, sick, we're gonna go do that tonight. I was like, wait a minute, you guys, you can't go do it tonight. Like, you know, I've been working on this for years. You gotta, like, starting a sketchbook. 

Kristian Cuaresma  05:22
Moises was hesitant, but then...

Moises Frank  05:25
I was like, All right, shit, I'm coming too then. If you're gonna go, we're gonna go. So we were, like, you were like, 13 year old kids, and I, like, we all told each other's parents, we're gonna sleep each other's house. And then we went out that night and made a mess of, like, parts of the city. 

Kristian Cuaresma  05:39
This was Moises's first step into painting on buildings, sharing with such a big audience, anyone walking by would be able to see his work, and it was a bit scary. I mean, painting on buildings without explicit permission is illegal in Hamilton.

Moises Frank  05:58
I think I was always the most nervous. These guys are like, they're ready to go. So they... I was kind of following more so following their lead and exploring.

Kristian Cuaresma  06:06
Moises was clashing with authority, and felt he wasn't getting the support he needed at home. 

Moises Frank  06:12
There was a lot of suspensions before that, like grade six, later, grade five, grade six, grade seven. There was lots of suspensions, and, like, I was in trouble a lot. By the time grade eight came around, the school kicked me out and they're like, You're expelled. Yeah, it's kind of weird to say, but I feel like my parents kind of gave up at some point.

Kristian Cuaresma  06:29
The disconnect he felt with his parents is part of the reason why, as he got older, Moises started mentoring young people. 

Nick Yates  06:37
I met Moises at a festival actually called Franco fest. I'm from Hamilton, so the festival was in Hamilton. And what's funny is, growing up, I always I did graffiti, and so I was always kind of like a graffiti kid. Everybody would always ask me if I knew Moises. Moises Moises. I would always hear his name, and I guess he had moved to Toronto at that point. So I never knew who he was. I just heard this name of the infamous Moises. 

Kristian Cuaresma  07:08
Nick Yates is one of the young artists Moises has mentored.

Nick Yates  07:12
It kind of just grew naturally, like we would hang out and paint. And I think, I think he was kind of inspired by me and and how much I was like a true, traditional graffiti guy, and I was inspired about how he wasn't that. We both kind of just wanted to hang out and be around each other. And then it came to this point where I, you know, it was apparent that Moises had a lot to teach, not really to teach, but to help me learn. Right? Because Moises, his approach isn't really do this or do that, it's why you're doing this or why you're doing that. And so it just made me want to be around him more and really pick his brain about anything, anytime that I could. 

Kristian Cuaresma  07:58
Moises is a mentor who really cares about helping young artists, and he's really generous with his time, even with us. My co-producer, James first met up with Moises while he was working on a new mural. He's a full time artist now, and this gig actually has him working nine to five, Monday to Friday, outside of a GO train station northwest of downtown.

Moises Frank  08:22
You know, 40, 50 feet.

Kristian Cuaresma  08:30
It was too loud for us to record out there.

Moises Frank  08:32
You're going to get so tired of that. It's only been two days here.

James Bunga  08:39
Yeah for sure. And inside a train station, it's not the best place to get clear audio either. So I ended up doing the interview in a janitor's closet, sitting on paint buckets, and that's where Moises told me something I wasn't expecting. 

Moises Frank  08:52
This story does take a turn, as life does. I don't know if you want to go this route. I don't even know if I should tell you, but I'll tell you, just because it's reality.

Kristian Cuaresma  09:05
Since 2015 Moises has been through a lot. He told James that a young person he knew died by suicide, and Moises found out about it from another artist.

Moises Frank  09:20
Just let me know. They're like, hey, this person ended their life. I was like, a big shock, big, a big loss, for sure, definitely feeling that sense of like, this person is lost now or is gone. It does suck, and it does weigh on you. And you're like, I can't ignore that I was in contact with this person, so there was definitely a sense of, like, fuck,  you know, no other way to say it, you know.

James Bunga  09:48
I guess, how did you like cope with those feelings?

Moises Frank  09:52
That's a good question. I don't know. I don't know if I'm, if I'm good at coping with stuff like that, you know, like, that's a good question. I don't know...

Kristian Cuaresma  10:07
We just want to pause here for a minute. I'm not sure any of us feels that we're good at coping with loss. It's heavy, and it's amazing that Moises even shared this with us. Grief is exhausting.

Jean Tsai  10:22
It's something that actually requires a great deal of emotional energy. People have an easier time understanding why physical exertion, things like exercise, you know, standing, moving about, takes energy, but emotional energy actually really requires a lot of us as well.

Kristian Cuaresma  10:43
That's Jean Tsai. She's a registered psychotherapist. She says grief can affect our ability to work, our ability to sleep. It's highly debilitating, and some people just try to push through.

Jean Tsai  10:56
Oftentimes, people have no choice. But that doesn't mean grief is not debilitating.

Kristian Cuaresma  11:02
It's no wonder Moises isn't sure if he's good at coping that kind of loss is overwhelming. Then in 2020, Moises world got really small because of Covid-19. He was in his mid 20s and living in his own place. It was harder to connect with people, especially with the young people he had been mentoring in community centers. And one night...

Moises Frank  11:28
I took all my sketchbooks from when I was a kid. I took all my spray paint, my markers, everything, and I started filling up garbage bags in my tiny ass apartment, and I started filling up garbage bags of all this stuff that was like, so meaningful to me, and I threw them in a garbage. Like, the dumpster behind the building. I threw it all out. I'm telling you, it was an identity crisis. I was going through it. I was like, if I get rid of all this stuff that I think identifies me, who I am, if I don't have this anymore, who am I? So I started questioning, like, Who is the person behind all the art that I make? 

James Bunga  12:04
Moises started to reflect on his role as an artist and an arts educator. He wasn't sure he wanted to keep working with large groups of young people. He started to consider mentoring more one on one. He also started feeling disconnected from previous work he had done around the city. 

Moises Frank  12:21
I just wanted to go and just paint over everything I've made in the city and just paint it black, like, just paint over everything and then start fresh, kind of like, remove myself from the scene. I just started exploring like, dark colors as much as I can. Like, all the spectrum of like, from black to like, super dark red, super dark purples, super dark greens, all these, like things about the darkness that I feel like in a lot of murals, everybody hated. They were like, they just wanted, like, high saturation, high full, colorful things. And I was like, I'm just gonna there's so much beauty in the opposite of that, of like, all the creatures in the world that are like in the shadows.

Kristian Cuaresma  13:01
Remember, Moises is talking to James in the janitor's closet. They're sitting on paint buckets. Moises had already shared so much. And then he tells us, in 2024 another person close to him died by suicide.

Moises Frank  13:17
I had to go home. I was like, I just had a feeling, yeah, I just went home, and I was just like, balling my eyes out, like, cried , like a liter of tears. And I was like, yeah, a lot of confusion, a lot of like, I guess, questioning.

Kristian Cuaresma  13:36
This shock came at a time when Moises was already trying to find himself. It was one of the hardest things he has ever faced in his life. Mental health professional Jean Tsai told us, this kind of loss is very destabilizing.

Jean Tsai  13:54
It's huge and someone on the community at large, it is very, very often experienced as a trauma. It can really affect people's sense of purpose. Can really call a lot of things into question, the shock of it can take a really long time to process. And then when I say it's like trauma, there's a number of defining characteristics that come with an experience that's experienced like trauma. So an event that is highly, highly distressing and potentially threatening, something that's outside of our control, something that we weren't able to predict, I mean, that we can't escape, and so... Though the life that's lost is not our own, the- just the magnitude of how that death came about can really impact our own, very own sense of safety. It's defenitly all encompassing.

Kristian Cuaresma  15:03
Now, we're listening to noises and we're amazed by what he's sharing with us. 

Moises Frank  15:09
When the first time someone close to me died, I was so like, scared that I would never stop thinking about them, because they'd be like every day I spend time thinking about them or cry about it. So I'm very used to that of, like, literally, like, more than a year, where it's like, you think about them every day. But I think that's a good thing. You know, I don't want to forget these people and how they impacted me and how they helped me in so many ways.

Kristian Cuaresma  15:36
Moises didn't realize it during our interviews, but he kind of helped us. We're three guys producing this episode, and we didn't talk much about mental health until now.

Jaden Whitelaw  15:52
I'll go first. I think before this project, it wouldn't be as much as I think I should. Especially coming from like where I grew up in the Caribbean, mental health is barely a subject. And coming up here is when I really, like learned about the importance of it, and I definitely acknowledge it now. But even like in my day to day life like that's not really something that goes through my mind. 

Kristian Cuaresma  16:18
That's my co-producer, Jaden. 

James Bunga  16:20
I feel like it sort of like the amount of thought and conversation around mental health really changes based off of, like, the groups of people I'm with. Like, for instance, like I grew up with like, a very sports heavy background, and in that sort of scene, in that sort of crowd, it's just not something you really talk about. 

Kristian Cuaresma  16:38
That's James.  Yeah, I'm in the same boat as both you. I think growing up, it wasn't, especially with my parents and my dad in particular, mental health wasn't... taking care of your mental health wasn't something that was a big theme in my household, and it was more of just kind of taking it and dealing with it internally, and a lot of the times on your own.  And that's me. We're sitting around talking to each other about mental health.

Jaden  17:10
I think this story has really made me appreciate- our mental health does really matter, and I mean it's something that we have to take care of, especially with what life throws at us. So, yeah.

Kristian Cuaresma  17:21
I personally, I've talked about mental health more in the last few weeks with you guys than I've had, I don't know, over the last couple months year, right?  It's no surprise to Jean Tsai.

Jean Tsai  17:32
I wish it was more common. It is definitely way less common. And so I've been in my field for... since 2011 so that's about 14 years now. And I can say consistently throughout all 14 years, I see far fewer men than women, definitely 10% or less. And I know that's a common experience of my colleagues as well.

Kristian Cuaresma  18:00
The fact that it was Moises that got us talking probably wouldn't surprise Nick.

Nick Yates  18:06
He's like, he's truly, you know, a beautiful soul. He's like, you know, very peaceful and humble and down to earth and like, understanding. And he's just, he's a little bit of a reminder that there's still good. There's still good in this world, you know, whether it be the art world or real life, He's truly a good person. Having Moises as a mentor, we've definitely, we've connected on so many different levels, whether it be just, you know, hanging out in life and like, not necessarily art. Moises was definitely a big part of my growth as a human being. And I'd like to say, probably vice versa too. We've kind of had some really good talks and discussions about life. You know, he was definitely a vital part of me, I guess you could say coming out of my shell, which is, you know, that's a traditional graffiti, you know, macho man, masculine approach to life.

Moises Frank  19:02
It's all love, you know. And it's like, that's why I like Nick too, because he's not scared to like, express himself, to be like, open, to sharing how he feels, and stuff like that. So he's always been very vulnerable, I guess is the word, which doesn't surprise me to hear him say that. He's told me that many times, which is, which is nice, and I feel the same way about him.

Kristian Cuaresma  19:18
These days, when it comes to his art, Moises is very intentional about the projects he accepts.

Moises Frank  19:24
I didn't become an artist just to, like, paint Disney logos or whatever it was, you know what I mean. And so I started saying no to jobs, which was like a powerful step in my career. I started aligning myself with things that made sense for me. Sometimes I do corporate stuff if they're paying really good because, you know, man still got to eat. But I think when I started to figure out what it is that I wanted to make the work became more important.

Kristian Cuaresma  19:52
Moises just finished his biggest piece yet, a 4000 square foot mural outside the Western GO train station. It's the busiest he has ever been.

Moises Frank  20:04
Thank you all for coming, man, this is really a dream come true. I didn't mean to give a speech right now, but if you like it, holding back tears. Not gonna lie, this is a very big accomplishment. So thank you all.

Kristian Cuaresma  20:14
No matter what projects Moises takes on next, he's committed to supporting young people, and he's especially focused on two very young artists.

Moises Frank  20:46
Kaya, my daughter, she's gonna be five in April. She's four now. And Otis is three.  They have a very distinct style already, like, I feel like, with Kaya, she's very like, this is what I'm gonna do. It's very clean. It's very like, this color here, that color here, but Otis has always been just a menace. Otis is like, he'll just, like, take the paper and like, go all over the table and then back onto the thing, onto the floor, just like, everywhere. And at first I was like, oh, like, what are you doing? Like, because I'm like, why are you not painting how Kaya is painting, where it's like, very clean and easy to, like, clean up. But they're both so different.  And, like, I think that is dope, because I feel like I'm seeing their expression of paint already in how they're using it, and their interest in it so differently. You know what I mean? Which, I hope they keep painting but I'm not like, gonna pressure them. You know, I work hard every day to make sure that when they grow up, they'll love me, you know what I mean, but it's their choice. They don't have to love me. And I think in society, there's like, this weird thing where you have to love your siblings, you have to love your parents. And I kind of realized, like, you don't actually, it's actually just the same with any other relationship, like it's a relationship, yes. They created you, and you're here on the planet because of them, but that doesn't mean they can be whoever they are, and like, you have to love them. It's still a relationship. So when I kind of realized that I was like, I'm gonna work every day to, like, make sure that my kids love me, like, you know what I mean.

Kristian Cuaresma  22:16
As for his next art projects, one thing's for sure.

Moises Frank  22:21
I'm gonna be an artist at the end of the day. Yeah, it matters to me. And something that I've come to understand and something that I teach is that it simply matters because I matter, you know. And I tell it to all my youth and my people. Your art matters because you matter. And that's it. If it matters to you, that's enough. You know what I mean, like because you made it, it'll be dope, and it'll matter.

Kristian Cuaresma  22:49
If you or someone you know is struggling, help is available. You can call or text 988 in Canada or the United States. For help around the world, you can use the website findahelpline.com. That's 988 in North America, and findahelpline.com for help around the world.

Mariam Kourabi  23:23
We Met U When… is a production by journalism students at Toronto Metropolitan University. This episode was narrated by Kristian Cuaresma. It was produced by James Bunga, Kristian Cuaresma, and Jaden Whitelaw. Shari Okeke is our executive producer and professor. Steph Colburn, CEO of edit audio, is our story editor. Leo Dias is our senior producer and teaching assistant. Angela Glover is our audio specialist. Our theme music was composed and performed by Eric Kroda. New logo design by Victoria Learn. Web design by Lindsay Hanna and Victoria Learn. And special thanks to the Center for Excellence in Learning and Teaching at TMU for supporting Season four with a Learning and Teaching grant.  I'm your host, Mariam Kourabi, thanks for listening.








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