On the Wall at North Studio, Pam Grier Holds Court
On the exterior wall at North Studio, somewhere in the blocks where the neighborhood folds into itself and the foot traffic moves at its own unhurried pace, a portrait of Pam…
By Casey Wong, Neighborhoods · May 31, 2026
The piece is by ZK, who works under the handle zk.ink on Instagram, and the subject is Grier as Coffy, the 1973 blaxploitation protagonist who became, over the decades, something closer to an icon than a character. The Queen Bee tag is right there in the original post, and it fits: the portrait carries that energy, the kind of stillness that reads as authority rather than pose.
What ZK has done here is mostly about craft. The linework is precise in a way that mural-scale portraits rarely sustain — the kind of fidelity that holds up both from across the street and from close enough to see the individual strokes. Color saturation is high but controlled, pulling Grier forward from whatever surface it's on without tipping into the oversaturated flatness that kills a lot of outdoor work in direct light.