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For years, Miguel and Carlos Cevallos made a living by painting posters for neighborhood nightclubs, taco trucks and restaurants in Queens, painting in the business’s basement or on their desks, and attracting customers with their words.
Now, hip Brooklyn ice cream shops and Manhattan’s retro diners wait their turn to experience the brothers’ iconic signs. They are in demand in San Francisco music stores, national restaurant chains, bars in Belgium and bakeries in South Korea.
It doesn’t matter if the brothers are over 80 or if two of them were born in Ecuador and grew up in Colombia and speak English. They greet their new clients and paint all day in the Manhattan apartment they’ve shared for nearly 20 years.
“Destiny is like that. Sometimes one finds success in life,” Carlos Cevallos said recently, sipping tea in an empty Manhattan diner where the brothers, dressed as usual in suits and ties, shared muffins.
Bebeto Matthews-AP Photo
Recent commissions have come from a bagel shop in Manhattan’s Little Italy neighborhood, a newsstand in Manhattan’s West Village, an Oregon-based restaurant chain and a Los Angeles pop-up veggie burger shop. NYCgo, the city’s official guide for tourists and New Yorkers, recently asked the brothers to paint Queens’ iconic Unisphere, a giant metal globe built for the 1964 World’s Fair.
“They have a special touch, very nice and colorful,” said Marina Cortes, manager of West Village diner La Bonbonniere. Brethren’s “All Day Breakfast!” A sign will be displayed on the restaurant’s balcony.
Bebeto Matthews-AP Photo
A poster the brothers drew for Van Leeuwen Ice Cream reads: “Life without any good is bad.” “Daily Special. Pick any two sandwiches and split them both!” reads another they made for Regina’s Grocery on Manhattan’s Lower East Side.
Made with acrylic paint, the Cevallos brothers’ playful, childlike posters have large letters and nostalgia. Miguel does the drawings and Carlos the colors, together they make about six posters a week.
The brothers submit five to 20 questions each week for their work.
The family moved from Ecuador to Colombia to follow an uncle who was a Catholic priest and worked in Bogotá. Carlos, Miguel and their older brother Victor, who had been drawing since childhood, opened an art studio and poster shop in Bogota’s Chapinero neighborhood.
Victor moved to New York in 1969 and Carlos joined in 1974. They worked in a studio in Times Square for years until rent increases forced them to move to Queens.
In the year In the 1980s he painted posters advertising a show at a Queens club called La Esmeralda.
“They pay very little per poster. It was very sad,” said Carlos, whose posters featured artists such as Mexican singer Armando Manzanero and Chilean Lucho Gatica.
Miguel, on the other hand, took care of their mother until she died at the age of 101. In 2005, he moved to New York to join his siblings. Victor, a mentor to his younger brothers, died in 2012.
Eventually, Aviram Cohen, who builds and installs audiovisual art in museums, saw the Brotherhood’s posters in Queens and followed up to ask for a new yoga studio for his wife. In the year In 2018, he opened his Instagram account @cevallos_bros, a lifeline for the brothers after being hit by the coronavirus pandemic.
“I did it because I admired their work, and I realized that once we met them, it would all go away. “Most businesses throw away posters,” said Cohen, 42. I really felt that different types of people and subcultures could enjoy their art,” he said.
He was right. The account now has over 25,000 followers and has become an archive of their work as well as a source of orders.
“I love their story,” said Happy David, who manages the Instagram accounts of La Bonbonniere and Casa magazines, where the Manhattan news outlet also covers the brothers’ work. It reminds her of signs in her native Philippines.
In the digital world, “a lot of people are going back to craft,” David said. “We want to meet and feel that there are hands that made these.”
When asked if they plan to retire soon, the Cevallos brothers quickly answered, “No.”
Where do they get their energy from?
“We eat healthy,” they replied with a smile.
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