When visual artist Yusuf Lateef creates, it is never a singular effort.

The 38-year-old Old West End resident takes along on his artistic ride those he says have paved the way for him to do what is firmly fixed in his psyche.

“I know that I am part of a larger community. To talk about things I’ve been able to do, I have to include everybody else who helped me do that,” he said.

“I’m walking in the groove which they created.”

Lateef unravels the list of names in tales of his journey as a painter and muralist. Now the creator of more than 15 public murals in Toledo and a co-founder of Radiant City Arts, a thriving educational outreach company that engages youth through music, video production, visual art and poetry, Lateef’s work is emblematic of young, black, and gifted communities seeking an expressive outlet.

His checklist includes his parents, The Rev. William and Corene Davis of Toledo, who were instrumental in teaching him as a young child the importance of involvement.

It includes the late Ernie Jones, a former Scott High School art teacher whose paintings, thickly laden with oil paints, triggered in Lateef the belief that he could make a career from art. It involves other prolific black artists in Toledo who came before him but were profoundly influential: Marvin Vines, LeMaxie Glover, Wil Clay. The late Patrice Davis, a local artist and friend who taught a program that helped Lateef get his start years earlier: Young Artists At Work. Jerry Gray and Lorna Gonsalves, who lured him back into the world of art when he took a years-long hiatus. His wife, Rachel Richardson, the director of Art Corner Toledo, and an anchor of support.

“Yusuf is a perceptive and talented artist whose murals are striking and filled with meaning,” said Gonsalves, 63, a professor at the University of Toledo and Bowling Green State University, and the creator of the Creative Peaceful Resistance Program.

Born Jeremy Davis in Skokie, Ill., Lateef spent some of his childhood in Columbus, before his father, a retired Methodist minister, was relocated to Braden United Methodist Church in Toledo, when Lateef was 8.

He doodled and drew his way through childhood in between church youth programs, and community, and athletic classes that his parents encouraged for him and his older brother, Imani Lateef.

He is a 1995 graduate of Whitmer High School, where he took art classes. He was heavily involved — both in high school and after — in Young Artists At Work (YAAW) through the Arts Commission, a six-week, art education apprenticeship program for high-school age kids.

He met Ernie Jones while participating in the National Youth Sports Program, a camp offering kids both sports instruction and educational programs.

“[Jones] would bring in his paintings to the program and he would just discuss and talk about his work. And they were these really thick paintings he would paint with a palette knife,” Lateef said. “It was just so intense and just so expressive, the work. And that really just opened up for me the possibility [of making art a career].”

He enrolled in the fine arts program at the Columbus College of Art and Design and started working on the fundamentals — design elements, color concepts, figure drawing, perspective.

He spent a semester doing an internship in New York City, transporting his paint to unconventional canvases: doors he found on the street, pieces of wood. His artwork coursed through his studio space to hallways, to other students’ unused space. It couldn’t be quashed.

Until it was. With about a semester left before getting a degree, Lateef left school to follow the movement of Warith Deen Mohammed, a progressive African-American Muslim leader and former national leader of the Nation of Islam credited with moving away from a race-based theology and championing the transformation of a mainstream Islamic movement. Lateef converted and returned to Toledo to help build a Muslim community, changing his name from Jeremy Davis to Yusuf Lateef, or “servant of the most gracious.”

He followed the movement for about six years, making a living doing trades work, and regretting only the stress felt by family members over his decision to leave school.

“That was how intensely I felt … about that type of lifestyle. And I always go back to that idea of community,” he said. “We are all in some kind of community body of sorts. Whether it’s small — it could be you as an individual. It could be that small. But it’s community if you look at it. In order to move you have to have some kind of common agreement.”

While at the Collingwood Arts Center, Lateef met several artists and social activists, including Gray and Gonsalves.

Gray, a painter and former owner of Bozarts Art and Music Gallery downtown before moving to North Carolina, encouraged Lateef to get back into the studio, and started showing Lateef’s paintings in local shows.

Gonsalves described her first impression of Lateef as a young talent “passionately committed to art and racial justice.” His first mural was spurred by her invitation to work with North Toledo youth affected by violent rioting and protests to a neo-Nazi march in North Toledo in 2005.

“[The youth wanted to talk about] how they wanted their community to be looked at, looked upon,” Lateef said. “At that point it was all negative. ‘Look at those people, they’re rioting, they’re burning their buildings down.’ … That was not the reality of it; there were really thoughtful kids and neighbors.

“A lot of the things they would talk about was changing the … perception. They wanted to express the diverse history of the neighborhood and they wanted to see themselves reflected in a more positive light.”

Artistically, Lateef was back. He returned to school, acquiring his bachelor’s of fine art from CCAD in 2014. He is currently enrolled in BGSU’s master’s of fine arts program.

In 2013, he founded Radiant City Arts with Akili Jackson and Benjamin Cohen, where they conduct workshops with kids in detention facilities, local school districts, and through arts education programs, to develop leadership skills and self empowerment.

Most recently, they worked with Toledo Public Schools students and the Toledo Museum of Art on a program incorporating dance-offs, beat battles, poetry slams, and visual art to celebrate the diversity of hip-hop culture, a program connected to The Rise of Sneaker Culture exhibit at the museum.

Lateef uses his artistic background to get youths talking, and ultimately, creating.

“I think [the youth] are inspired by not only his artistic skills but his excitement. He is focused on lifting up certain issues in the community through his artwork,” his father said.

His murals embody self-expression. A community’s shared vision. Resistance to injustices. Vehicles to destroy stereotypes. An impetus to change. They include that first mural with Gonsalves that was installed at the intersection of Stickney Avenue and East Oakland Street; and “Martin for All,” a visual tribute to the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., that was dedicated last year at the corner of Delaware Avenue and Collingwood Boulevard during The Toledo Fair Housing Center’s 40th anniversary.

There’s also a 10-panel mural on Parisian Cleaners at Detroit Avenue and Post Street that shows the Old West End through the neighborhoods’ youth.

A current project involves the installation sometime this summer of a mural on a building on North Detroit Avenue, a hands-on effort with Art Corner Toledo and the Old West End Neighborhood Initiative.

“He’s done some really beautiful, thought-provoking work,” Gray said. “He’s definitely a person who leads by example, whether he’s working with the youth at YAAW or with people who just hear about him or see [his work] locally. He definitely loves kids and puts that foot forward.”

Corene Davis said her son’s art is reflective of the African-American community’s vision.

“All artists have a style, and I can definitely see him in the work that he does,” said his mother. 

“The art not only brings out the creativity, but it has to tell our story and what’s important to us.”

Contact Roberta Gedert at: rgedert@theblade.com or 419-724-6075 or on Twitter @RoGedert.

First Published February 21, 2016, 5:00 a.m.