Michael “2Esae” Baca on the Art of Becoming Yourself
Updated: 20 hours ago
Michael “2Esae” Baca does not talk about becoming an artist as though it were a straight line. For him, the process is closer to getting lost on purpose.
Sitting across from Brian Camacho for the first episode of The Open Palette Podcast, Baca moves easily between graffiti, business, failure, self-belief and legacy. The subjects may sound separate, but throughout the conversation they return to the same question: how does an artist learn to become unmistakably themselves?
Baca grew up in Jamaica, Queens, in a Puerto Rican family and came of age surrounded by the visual language of New York. Early encounters with drawing showed him that art could be more than something admired from a distance. It could become a life. Years later, his advice to younger artists is less about copying the path that worked for him and more about finding one of their own.
Finding Your Own Language
Technique matters, but technical ability without identity can become its own trap. Artists spend years studying other people’s solutions, borrowing visual languages while they learn how to speak. Eventually, admiration has to become authorship.
“You got to get lost to find yourself.”
For Baca, skill and style grow together. The artist keeps practicing while learning to recognize what belongs to them. A familiar subject can be painted a thousand ways. The real shift happens when the question stops being how somebody else would make it and becomes how you see it.
That sense of identity also shaped UR New York. What began as a college brand project around the idea of Urban Reconstruction grew into a broader philosophy of individuality. Baca’s shorthand for it is direct: “Be who you are, don’t be sheep.” The brand became an extension of the same lesson he applies to art. Influence can teach you, but it cannot decide who you become.
The Business of Taking the Chance
Once art becomes a profession, talent is only part of the job. A commissioned mural comes with expectations. A public-art proposal comes with deliverables. A grant application asks an artist to persuade someone to believe in a project before it exists. Creativity remains at the center, but communication, preparation and self-representation begin to matter just as much.
That is where rejection enters the story. Camacho brings up the emotional weight of grants, residencies and commissions, where an artist can spend weeks developing an idea only to hear no. Baca treats rejection less like a verdict and more like the price of participation.
“You have to be in the game to lose and win.”
The point is not to become indifferent to failure. It is to refuse to let fear make the decision for you. Apply for the grant. Answer the RFQ. Pitch the project. The opportunity database can put a door in front of you, but the artist still has to knock.
Baca’s story from the era of Jay-Z’s Magna Carta makes the idea tangible. He saw a cultural moment, imagined transforming a promotional object through his own artwork, documented the process and released it. As Baca recounts it, the work traveled far enough to reach Jay-Z’s circle and led to an invitation to an album release event. What matters most is not the celebrity connection. It is that nobody commissioned the idea. Baca recognized an opening and acted before certainty arrived.
Talent may open a door, but a career asks for more. Artists eventually have to learn the less romantic parts of the profession too: how to communicate, document, negotiate, pitch and represent themselves when nobody else is in the room to do it for them.
What Remains
By the final stretch of the conversation, marketing gives way to something more permanent. Baca talks about documenting the work: the finished photographs, the process, the interviews and the evidence that a creative life happened. At first, that archive serves the career. It feeds portfolios, applications, websites and press. Over time, it becomes memory.
“Sprinkle as much as you can.”
Camacho pushes the thought toward legacy. What will the work represent when the artist is no longer there to explain it? Baca’s response is immediate: “It is your legacy.” Suddenly documentation is no longer about keeping a social feed active. It is about leaving a record of what you believed, what you made and how you moved through the world.
“You are the artist. You are the art. Treat it as such.”
The line pulls the entire conversation together. The artwork is part of the practice, but so are the decisions surrounding it: how an artist treats people, how they carry themselves into professional rooms, whether they take the chance, whether they learn from failure and whether they protect the integrity of what they are building.
Camacho offers a final principle of his own: “That L is a lesson, never a loss.” Not every decision will be right. Not every application will win. Not every experiment will become part of the portfolio. The goal is not a perfect creative career. It is an intentional one.
For a first episode, it is an appropriate place for Open Palette to begin: find your voice, take the risk, learn the business, document the journey and build something worth leaving behind.
The Takeaway
Find your voice. Take the chance. Learn the business. Document the work. Build something worth leaving behind.
Continue Your Creative Journey
Explore Artist Opportunities: Discover current grants, residencies, scholarships, fellowships and public art opportunities curated by Open Palette.
Next in Open Palette Insights: Episode 2, Jenn Veal: Trusting the Process as an Artist.
The Open Palette Podcast | Where art, culture, and community come together through real conversations.
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