You may not have knowingly seen Gabriel Eng-Goetz’s artwork. But it has probably seen you.
His viscera-textured eagle surveys departures and arrivals at downtown Durham’s bus station. His foreboding goddess Athena dispassionately scrutinizes the world from a Chapel Hill parking deck. His reddened steelworker at Raleigh Iron Works tells passersby the industrial history of the site.
Eng-Goetz’s work is everywhere. On murals around the Triangle, yes, but also on album art, coffee bags, on the jerseys of the Durham Bulls several times, and, perhaps most iconically, on the Runaway clothing brand that defines its own era of Durham streetwear.
The brand, responsible for the “DURM” trademark, hasn’t been operating since 2019. But once you know what to look for—organic lines, the colors of Durham’s flag, or a silhouetted logo of a boy with a bindle and a rabbit—you won’t be able to walk down Main Street without thinking of Eng-Goetz.
The Durham native is a proud 2004 Jordan High School graduate. He went north for a degree in fine arts, graduating from Syracuse University in 2008, and tried a few other jobs before coming back to Durham and diving into community art in all forms. Professionally, Eng-Goetz came of age as Durham hit its mid-aughts independent arts stride, an era that he jokingly calls the city’s “golden era” referencing the DIY spirit that may be at odds with the cookie-cutter apartments and finance-bro quarter-zips throughout downtown today.
His most recent project, an installation at Hayti’s Stanford L. Warren Library, is a rainbow window treatment that looks like stained glass. Like all of Eng-Goetz’s work, it’s both public and personal.
“The whole design is based on a Fitzgerald brick,” he explains. “The great-uncle of Pauli Murray had a brick factory that was super successful, and he’d imprint all these bricks with this bull’s-eye, concentric-circle design. We can still see a lot of these bricks around town telling the story of Black entrepreneurism back in the era of Black Wall Street in Durham.”
But in the center of the window’s “bricks” he’s replaced the circle with other meaningful symbols. The iconography serves as a mini-tour of Hayti and Durham history as he points out the different centerpieces of each rainbow “brick”: The logo of the Lincoln Community Health Center (“which Stanford L. Warren, who the library is named after, helped get off the ground”), the finial atop the steeple of the Hayti Heritage Center (“which is a Haitian voodoo symbol”), the letter X, for Malcolm X’s civil rights legacy. And at the base of all the bricks, a baobab tree that reaches upward—a nod to library staff members, who wanted the tree displayed as a symbol of African culture.
As we talk, he offhandedly mentions “the muse of community.” It’s an idea that’s easy to identify across all of Eng-Goetz’s work.
“Before I even put pen to paper, I’m going in and talking to the community, talking to staff, talking to residents who are associated with this library, and figuring out what they want,” he says. Ultimately, it’s his job to try to tell the story of a community and how they want to see themselves represented. This approach, he says, has been heavily influenced by his mother, a public health professional at UNC who was a pioneer in community-based participatory research—a method that involves finding solutions with, rather than just for, communities.
Still, in an era when identity is being recognized as an important part of how we interact with the world, it isn’t lost on Eng-Goetz that much of his work is for communities that he’s not a part of. He often prefers it that way.
“I would rather tell the story of somebody else—try and uplift stories that haven’t been heard for whatever reason, and represent others through art,” he says.
As a half-Chinese, half-white kid growing up in Durham, Eng-Goetz says he often struggled to find his “own place.” And while he might have plenty of personal stories to draw upon for a gallery introspective, that’s not where his interest lies.
The Runaway brand didn’t involve such a formal community engagement process as his public work does, but he says the whole brand was about “representing the culturally special things” and “the people we thought made Durham unique.”
“Yeah, [we were] selling clothing, but that was really just a way for us to make money to host art shows and have a space around town—have listening parties, throw concerts and local musicals, showcase local artists,” Eng-Goetz says.
His window project at the Stanford L. Warren Library is something of a homecoming, marking his first public art project in Durham in a few years. After he shuttered Runaway in 2019, he left the Triangle, and the country, for a while, staying in Nicaragua through the pandemic. When he returned, he worked on projects across the state. And while he’s considered moving to an art metropolis like New York City or Los Angeles, he knows he can have a larger impact in his hometown.
At the end of our interview, he hinted that the best is yet to come.
“I do have a project that will bring me back closer to Durham’s community in the near future,” he says with a smile. “I just can’t speak on it yet.”
Reach Reporter Chase Pellegrini de Paur at chase@indyweek.com. Comment on this story at backtalk@indyweek.com.