Street mural painted near the state Capitol
“It feels like ... a conscious awakening of the country”
Hundreds gathered early Friday morning between the Colorado Capitol and Denver’s City and County Building to help artist Adri Norris and a team of volunteers paint the words “Black Lives Matter” across Broadway.
Spanning the Civic Center city block, the mural also reads “Remember this time.” Participants kneeled, brushes in hand, as they filled in block letters with shades of black and brown. Others stood rolling coat after coat of bright white paint on the background.
It was another peaceful scene punctuating a two-week period of historic protests in Denver and around the world following the death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police on May 25. But Norris didn’t want her quiet contribution to be misunderstood.
“There’s a very long history of black people existing in white spaces, of whiteness encroaching in on black and brown spaces,” she explained of the design.
After staying up past 2 a.m. the night before to outline, and returning by 6:30 Friday morning to start, Norris said she was exhausted and barely had time to paint. She fielded questions and photo requests from press and the public, while volunteers from Denver Arts & Venues helped direct people who wanted to help.
Aurora resident Joél Contreras brought his sons Francesco, 16, and Lorenzo, 13, to get involved. Contreras had come with his older son downtown for cleanup one morning after early protests, but it was Lorenzo’s first trip during the weekslong movement.
“I thought that this would be a really productive and positive message,” Contreras said. “My oldest son has aspirations of someday being a leader of this country.”
While Contreras grew up in the Bronx and said he has personally been victimized “driving while black,” he is hopeful now that change is afoot.
“This time it feels different. It feels like there’s been a conscious awakening of the country,” he said. “My message to everyone, though, is it can’t just stop with this. The next step is to get out and vote.”
Tariana Navas-Nieves, the director of cultural affairs for Denver Arts & Venues, sees these acts from artists like Norris as inextricably linked to the political and social movements happening around them.
“I think that artists are activists and artists are healers,” Navas-Nieves said. “The arts can soothe our discomfort, but the arts are also meant to create discomfort, to create a space where we can actually look at the tragic history of our country.”
Nearing midday in Denver, the white paint was blinding and the nearly 90-degree heat oppressive as Norris took a break from “interfacing” and decided how to finish her piece.
She and a select few others would walk across the canvas, adding tracks and colors as they went, which some people probably wouldn’t like, she thought.
“I think that that will just really punctuate the thing that I want to say,” she said.
That thing she wants to say is longer than a sound bite. Norris wants to acknowledge her solidarity in art with all forms of protesting, including those deemed violent. She shared this statement:
“We are experiencing anger. I am on a regular basis in a lowlevel state of anger and grief just by being here. And I know that colonialism is everywhere. There’s nowhere else I can go that is not going to be some semblance of here. So I’m going to stay here and try to do my best to change what I can.
“We are now in a state of high
levels of anger and grief, because of the combined forces of COVID and its disproportionate affect on people of color and people who are experiencing poverty or at least living well below the minimum wage or below the middle class. And then on top of that, with all the death that is going on, for some reason the police still cannot stop killing us. For some reason the various forms of racial inequality that were built into the fabric of the system cannot take a break. And so I’m experiencing unprecedented levels for myself of anger and grief on a daily basis. And it’s a lot.
“When people loot, when people riot, when people attempt to protest peacefully, and those peaceful protests are met with anger from those people who do not believe that our voices need to be heard and violence from the people whose job description is to protect and serve, it is not a surprise then that things get destroyed. Because anger and grief has got to come out sometime.
“And so the thing that I’m doing is not a counter to the protests, and it is not a counter to the looting and all of the violence that has been happening over the last 14 or 15 days. This is the other side of the coin. I am working with those people to spread the message my way. They’re doing the message their way. And all of us are being heard.”
While the shortened version of that message — the mural — was coming together quicker than expected on Friday, the city said that Broadway would remain closed off between 13th and 17th until 11:59 p.m., but open to people on foot for those viewing the mural or attending the ongoing racial justice demonstrations.
Denver’s Black Lives Matter mural follows the giant, two-block-long painting of the same words on a street near the White House in Washington, D.C., a project sanctioned by that city’s mayor. Since then, the Washington Post reported, similar street paintings have been undertaken with the blessing of local leaders across the country.