George Floyd’s death inspires protest art
SIMI STONE was feeling restless and helpless and just plain ‘going crazy’.
The tragedies ‘ hit me so hard – three people killed’, she says. Ahmaud Arbery in Georgia. Breonna Taylor in Kentucky. Then George Floyd in Minnesota.
“I couldn’t do anything for a while,” says Stone, the musical and visual artist born Simantha Sernaker, from her home in Woodstock, NY But Stone’s boyfriend urged her with four words: ‘Protest on the canvas’.
Stone broke out the pastels she had long set aside and was inspired to render a portrait of Floyd, who died last month beneath the knee of a Minneapolis police officer.
As she drew, all of her feelings ‘came gushing out’ into the artwork, she says, ‘with an initial burst of creativity from a real place’.
In doing so, she joined thousands of people who have created powerful art in response to Floyd’s death and the recent Black Lives Matter demonstrations to protest police violence. From street murals near the White House to editorial comics created near where Floyd died, artists are delivering political messages through often stark imagery.
Stone chose bright tints that make Floyd look luminous.
“I was haunted by what had happened to him, so I wanted to draw him in beautiful colors instead of in black chalk,” she says.
“I needed to have another way of seeing him for me to feel OK.”
Stone, a founding member of the Afro-punk movement, posted the portrait she calls ‘the George’ on Instagram and soon saw it attract a flurry of likes, including from a member of her band, the New Pornographers, and fellow musicians such as Neko Case and Lumineers bassist Byron Isaacs.
She also added the tag # GeorgeFloydPortraitProject, a social media effort started by Baltimore portraitist and designer AJ Alper.
An artist gets to respond as a witness to history, Stone says, noting she is also moved by the larger social movement.
“I’m feeling a strange sense of relief that the systemic racism is being acknowledged,” says Stone, 40, who grew up in Woodstock, the daughter of a Jamaican-born father and a Jewish mother from New York and Florida.
“Being a brown girl and growing up knowing these things” about racism, she says, “you take it as the status quo.” This time, she believes the protests and heightened awareness are ‘going to change policies’.
Between the response to police violence and the pandemic, she says, “our whole society shifted in front of our eyes.”
Like Stone, the Washingtonbased artist Trap Bob, 28, says she is creating work that is both personal and political.
The Black Lives Matter protests “tackle a centuries-old issue that I personally have dealt with my entire life,” she says.
“On top of that, we are already in unprecedented times due to the pandemic and quarantine, which leaves us reflecting and questioning everything.
People also now have the time to fight back and are fed up in many ways about where we are as a society.”
Trap Bob, whose real name is Tenbeete Solomon, likes making activist art, including posters for the Women’s March in 2017.
Prompted by the current protests, she created a ‘Fight the Power’ mural at Pizza storefront – a few blocks from the yellow ‘Black Lives Matter’ street slogan authorized by DC Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D) – that features a proud, pink-haired woman.
“I’m all about bold, eyecatching designs that inspire and bring light to my audience,” she says, “especially in darker times.” — The Washington Post