A New Public Art Arises From Floyd Protests

The furor over the death of George Floyd is changing how many people think about such issues as policing and criminal justice. Add to that list another evolving discussion — public art.

Main Street in Winston-Salem was closed Saturday as local residents made their voices heard. The road has been closed before in these recent tumultuous weeks, along with countless others across the country, as protesters have taken to the streets demanding justice.

But this time, it was by invitation.

City officials asked 16 artists to come downtown to cover the space in front of the city hall with a message of “End Racism Now.”

Andrea Revelle painted the capital “N.” She drew a man and a woman on each of the letter's tall vertical lines. There's a unifying feature in the diagonal line that connects them.

“And in the middle, there's an embryo in the shape of Africa, which is also like a womb-like home,” she says.

Revelle's image is part of a dynamic range of depictions in the mural. Others used different genres to express themselves and different techniques, including spray paint. But they all have something in common: it's all public art — a collaborative civic work meant to be seen and shared by all people.

And it's not just here. Greensboro is also looking for artists for a street mural project inspired by what other cities have done.

Betsy Towns is an artist and art historian at UNC School of the Arts. She says it can often take years before a project comes to fruition. So she's been surprised to see how quickly the latest street art projects have come together.

"And so typically, public art tends to take place over a lot of bureaucracy, lots of jumping through hoops, and that in this case, road closures, artist hires, permissions were all put in place very, very rapidly," she says. "So I think I do see public art responding to the times."

Towns says in the past, it has often been funded by wealthy people or groups who have used art to promote their own viewpoints.

"The conversations I hear in public art and civic art, more and more and more, is that we can no longer hear only from the people in power, that if it is truly a civic art, if it is truly a democracy, if it is truly public art, then we need much broader voices," she says. 

While street art is enjoying a sudden surge, another form is facing its own reckoning. Monuments that have memorialized the Confederacy or leaders who owned slaves have been vandalized, and some cities are saying their time is up. This week the city council of Salisbury voted to move its Confederate memorial known as “Fame” away from its prominent intersection overlooking downtown.

Owens Daniels is a Winston-Salem photographer and visual artist who has documented the protests in the city. He grew up in Richmond. He remembers as a child watching the city's Tobacco Parade, which included a group of marchers in full Ku Klux Klan regalia.

He says that would now be considered unacceptable, and Richmond is trying to decide now if a memorial to Robert E. Lee is acceptable. So Daniels notes the spontaneous artwork that covers the fences near the White House and sees hope.

"And it's my dream come true where art comes out of the gallery and back into the community and it affects change, which is politics," he says. 

Daniels says the recent protests would have less power if it weren't for the artwork they have inspired.

"Art is just humanity's way of saying I'm here, I feel, I exist," he says. "If you took that away, then it's an academic exercise. People would march around. People would shout slogans and then people would go home."

At the Winston-Salem street mural project, Phillip Osborne is painting a hashtag in the street used for tagging Black Lives Matter posts on social media. It features a brick wall with a silhouette of one person lifting another.

He says his message is a simple one:

“Just unity man, how everybody can come together collectively as a whole to complete a wonderful task and just be part of history, man. I love this." 

The location of the street mural is significant. On a corner just two blocks away, a Confederate monument towered over the intersection for more than a century before city officials made the controversial decision to take it down last year. When asked if things are changing, Osborne pauses.

“Slowly but surely. I'll just leave it at that. Slowly but surely,” he says.

For artists like Osborne, it's a matter of waiting to see if their art is a moment, or a movement.