The impromptu images of a protest movement
Black Lives Matter murals on boarded-up businesses are art of ‘social change’
Some are portraits — of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, Stevie Wonder and Angela Davis.
Some are names — Tamir, Trayvon, Stephon, Ahmaud and Oscar.
Some are statements — “Chicanas for black lives,” “black girls deserve better,” “Oakland is still proud.”
Some are heart-stopping scenes — the instantly memorable sight from the first night of demonstrations in downtown Oakland of rider Brianna Noble on horseback, surrounded by black silhouettes, smoke and flames.
With businesses throughout downtown Oakland boarding up their windows and doors, either to cover up glass that was smashed in the chaotic early days of protests against police brutality or in hopes of preventing future destruction, local artists are turning those sheets of plywood into impromptu canvases.
The result is that the area has seen an explosion of new murals inspired by the Black Lives Matter movement over the past week and a half, providing a colorful and creative backdrop to daily protests against police brutality.
“We’re connecting and we’re using our art as a force of social change,” said a woman who asked to be identified by her artist name, Shishi, as she began work on a piece reading “they
tried 2 bury us, they did not know we were seeds” on a sheet of plywood covering the windows of a new apartment building. “We’re saying enough is enough.”
The countless wood panels are being filled by seemingly just as many artists. Many are responding to calls for painters that have gone out online; some are being commissioned by the merchants whose businesses put up the plywood.
Jonathan Delong started asking around on social media for artists to come paint last week after his friend’s business had a window smashed. Nearly 200 showed up over the next two days, and since then Delong has worked to loosely coordinate artists and donations of paint.
The intricate murals often sit alongside other spray-painted graffiti, much of it more hastily scrawled, some of it profane slogans against the police. Volunteers with buckets and rags have fanned out around downtown to scrub the graffiti away in recent days, but Delong said he thinks of the murals as a complement to the raw emotion expressed in that vandalism.
“Those messages are largely not understood by the people who need to hear them in the world because it’s difficult to understand and it looks scary,” Delong said. “It’s important to honor those emotions and those intentions.”
Cooptinw Ort?
At the Chase Bank at Broadway and 14th Street, the entrance doors have been replaced by a piece depicting raised black and brown fists and the message “We got us.” On the ground, people have left candles and flowers next to framed photos of black icons and people killed by police.
The murals at the bank are among the boldest downtown, visible at an intersection that has been the epicenter of protests in the EastBay.
But some acknowledged a worry that having them adorn a major financial institution risked letting the art be co-opted for another purpose: protecting a major corporation.
People pulled the blank plywood sheets off that Chase branch’s windows so they could smash the glass on the night of May 29; it’s not a stretch to imagine that if there is more destruction in the future, people will be less likely to do the same with the portrait of George Floyd that now covers its windows.
Sage Loring, the director of the Oakland art nonprofit Dragon School, which coordinated two major downtown murals, said that’s why his organization has
worked with small-business owners who have asked for artwork on their buildings, rather than painting panels on the homes of big businesses.
“They’re fine — they can pay for their damages,” Loring said of Chase and other corporations. “We’re trying to help the small community member that is on a razor’s edge right now.”
It’s not clear how long the murals will stay on display, or whether they will be preserved when the plywood eventually comes down. By Sunday, the “We got us” mural and memorial had been covered with fresh blank sheets of wood, and Shishi’s piece had been painted over.
Several artists described the murals as a way for them to contribute what they can to the Black Lives Matter movement.
“It felt like a really good way for me to support what was going on when I couldn’t be at the protest,” said Cassandra Orion of Oakland, as she took a break from painting her multiday mural project along Franklin Street. Orion lives with an older relative at higher risk from the coronavirus. When it’s done, Orion’s piece will depict a tiger and a black panther adorned by flowers, a dove between them, above George Floyd’s name.
The imagery at the edge of Oakland’s Chinatown is inspired from 1960s posters proclaiming Asian American solidarity with the black power movement.
“This is a really authentic response to what is going on,” Orion said. “I really like the symbolism of tearing it down and building it back up with something better.”