Special News Series: Rising Up For Justice! – Black Lives Matter movement street art, murals see a surge

Introduction To This Series:

This post is one installment in an ongoing news series: a “living history” of the current national and international uprising for justice.

Today’s movement descends directly from the many earlier civil rights struggles against repeated injustices and race-based violence, including the killing of unarmed Black people. The posts in this series serve as a timeline of the uprising that began on May 26, 2020, the day after a Minneapolis police officer killed an unarmed Black man, George Floyd, by kneeling on his neck. The viral video of Floyd’s torturous suffocation brought unprecedented national awareness to the ongoing demand to truly make Black Lives Matter in this country.

The posts in this series focus on stories of the particular killings that have spurred the current uprising and on the protests taking place around the USA and across the globe. Sadly, thousands of people have lost their lives to systemic racial, gender, sexuality, judicial, and economic injustice. The few whose names are listed here represent the countless others lost before and since. Likewise, we can report but a few of the countless demonstrations for justice now taking place in our major cities, small towns, and suburbs.

Black Lives Matter movement street art, murals see a surge in Chicago post-George Floyd

More have popped up since the killing in Minneapolis of the Black man by a white cop. One artist says the aim is ‘using this as a time for change and doing that through art.’

By Clare Proctor, Chicago Sun Times

August 7, 2020

Two months after Chicago and the nation erupted in protest of George Floyd’s killing by a white police officer in Minneapolis, a growing number of signs of the Black Lives Matter movement can be found around Chicago in the form of murals and street art.

Some memorialize the movement on wooden boards outside closed stores. Others pay tribute more prominently, through expansive murals.

In Wicker Park, near the CTA Blue Line L tracks, there’s a mural of a young Black man holding a sign reading “I AM A MAN.” The painting, completed in late June, recreates a 1968 photo from a memorial for the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. in Memphis. The slogan is from a two-month strike by sanitation workers in Memphis to demand proper treatment. King spent his final days with the striking workers before his assassination.

“We’re having all of these heightened conversations about civil rights and humanitarian rights causes all over the world at the moment,” says artist Darius Dennis, who headed the project. “It’s an opportunity to paint really big paintings — and maybe these are the things that should have been included in history books.”

“I AM A MAN” was done by Dennis, 36, Robin Alcantara, 28, Ephraim Gebre, 21, and Jared Diaz, 25. The artists work together at a billboard company in Brooklyn.

Diaz, who lives in Queens and describes himself as a “Brown man,” says that even a glance at the news or social media reminds him of social inequality and of threats to people of color. He says the Wicker Park mural challenges people to own their role in fighting injustice.

“It feels very empowering and healing,” Diaz says. “To be able to replace some of that space with energy that says, ‘It doesn’t matter because we’re going to do something better,’ that’s healing.” 

The artists envision a four-part “I AM” series of paintings to “bring cultural equity back to neighborhoods that need it,” according to Dennis, a Chicago native who now divides his time between Lake View and New York. He says they’re looking at Humboldt Park for one of the future murals in the series….

Recent protests also have inspired shorter-term street art across the city. As business owners put up wooden boards to protect their stores from looting and vandalism in the unrest that followed Floyd’s death, the boards became artists’ canvases.

On the walls of what used to be Leon’s Bar-B-Q at 79th Street and Cornell Avenue is a “Black and Brown Unity” mural, calling for peace and cooperation between Black and Latino communities, according to Rahmaan Statik, 39, a South Loop street artist who worked on the project.

Read the full article here.