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A well-known Miami graffiti artist is facing criminal charges after police say he snuck into the shuttered Miami Seaquarium and spray-painted an announcer’s booth.
According to a Miami-Dade Sheriff’s Office arrest report, a security guard spotted Adam Vargas (AKA Atomik) — the 45-year-old artist best known for the smiling oranges you see tagged across South Florida — arriving at the park on a bike on Monday. The guard called police, who found Vargas “actively spray-painting the announcer’s booth inside the Golden Dome” of the park, which closed in October 2025 after years of decline and outcry from animal rights groups.
Police say Vargas eventually admitted to entering the park and vandalizing it.
A judge set his bond at $3,000 and ordered him to stay away from the park, according to Local 10.
Vargas did not immediately respond to New Times’ request for comment via text message or Instagram direct message.
Vargas, who rose to prominence in Miami’s emerging graffiti scene in the ’90s, made his name with the grinning orange figure he first painted in 2008 as an homage to the demolished Orange Bowl. The original wore a crown — close enough to Obie, the stadium’s 1989 mascot, that the Orange Bowl Committee sent him a cease-and-desist. Vargas swapped the crown for a stem and added a teardrop and a chipped tooth. Today, the figure can be found as far away as Korea and Thailand.
photo credit @yophojo
Like other graffiti artists, his run-ins with police go back several decades.
In 2003, he joined Miami Style Gods (MSG), the crew that artists Crook and Crome founded in 1992 and built into South Florida’s most prominent graffiti group. Two years later, Vargas and some friends started a second crew called 28, named for Miami-Dade’s police dispatch code for vandalism.
Vargas has said he was first charged with criminal mischief at 15 and estimated in a 2021 interview that he’d been arrested 15 times in Miami-Dade — his longest stretch in the slammer was a week at Metro West Detention Center.
In 2010, he and a friend launched a design agency that advertised hand-painted murals, original illustration, and graphic design. Two years later, he was commissioned to paint the “Welcome to Little Havana” mural on Calle Ocho.
