About the Artist
Roberto Seminario was born in Lima, Peru, where his artistic journey began on the streets of Pueblo-Libre at age seventeen. At first, skateboarding was his main passion—a way to be outside, sharing time with neighbors and friends. But constant injuries forced him to find another outlet, and so began his adventure in graffiti.
What started as wild-style lettering evolved over the years into the realism graffiti that defines SEF.01 today. His subjects are almost always children, rendered with photorealistic precision—portraits that carry a clear and deliberate message about innocence and purity. "My mother teaches autistic children in Peru," SEF explains, "so I am especially excited about work that means something to her. Kids need to be inspired to dream."
That mission has taken him to walls across twenty-four countries. In 2024, he won first place in Miami-Dade County Public Schools' "Art for the Fight of Childhood Cancer" mural contest, creating a tribute to Emmanuel, a student who battled cancer until late 2023. He has donated over one hundred hours to @aWALLmuralprojects, painting murals for school children across South Florida. He designed a t-shirt for ABC7's Feed SoCal campaign, and his work graces the Bushwick Collective in Brooklyn.
Now based in Burbank, California, SEF continues his global mission—leaving marks of innocence and inspiration wherever walls will have him.
About the Mural
The wall pays tribute to Yayoi Kusama, the Japanese artist born in 1929 who would become known worldwide as the "Queen of Polka Dots." But SEF doesn't paint the ninety-five-year-old icon—he paints her as a child, capturing the moment before she became a legend.
A young Japanese girl with copper-red hair and an otherworldly gaze stares directly at the viewer. Her skin carries an ethereal bluish pallor, with streaks of coral and cyan painted down her face like tears or tribal markings. She wears a burnt orange blouse covered in polka dots—some white, some rendered as dark scribbled circles. Behind her, the entire wall becomes a sheet of yellow legal pad paper, complete with horizontal lines and scattered, childlike dots that look hastily drawn by a young hand.
The word "DOTS" appears in graffiti-style lettering at her collar, the letters forming the structure of her clothing.
Kusama began experiencing vivid hallucinations around age ten—flashes of light and dense fields of dots that would engulf her surroundings. She called this process "self-obliteration." Her mother was physically abusive and would tear up her drawings, but young Yayoi made more. By painting Kusama as a child surrounded by her compulsive marks, SEF captures that origin moment—before the Infinity Rooms, before the Venice Biennale, before she conquered New York. This is the girl who couldn't stop drawing dots, rendered by an artist who believes children need to be inspired to dream.
About the Sponsor: Herc Rentals
Herc Rentals is a premier, full-service equipment rental company with over sixty years of experience and approximately 9,900 employees across more than 610 locations in the United States and Canada. Originally a subsidiary of The Hertz Corporation, the company was spun off in 2016 and renamed Herc Rentals.
From construction lifts and earthmoving machinery to power generators and climate control systems, Herc provides the heavy equipment that makes large-scale projects possible. Their fleet represents billions of dollars in ongoing investment — over $1 billion in 2023 alone.
For O-Town Walls, Herc Rentals donated the use of aerial lifts at cost — the essential equipment that allows muralists to reach heights of twenty, thirty, even fifty feet. Without lifts, there are no murals. It's that simple. They lifted the artists so the artists could lift the neighborhood.