By Claire Taylor

Street art and graffiti are often overlooked in everyday life, but when it comes to protests spray paint, murals, chants and posters unite artists and activists. This past summer in hundreds of cities across the U.S, including New York, Richmond, Portland and Seattle, protests occurred in search of racial justice after George Floyd, an unarmed black man, was killed by police last May. The Black Lives Matter movement, BLM, has involved protests, vigils, and community events which all call for an end to police brutality. Upon streets, walls, barriers, and plywood, artists have utilized every medium to produce rich, vibrant murals, portraits, and graffiti to spread awareness about systemic racism and insight systemic change.

Bold and bright, the art of the Black Lives Matter protests demands to be recognized and admired. Up close portraits of black men and women killed by police leave one saddened by the loss of life yet infatuated by the detail and beauty of the artwork. Murals and graffiti portray fists in the air and phrases such as “I can’t breathe,” “hands up don’t shoot” and “no justice no peace!” which have been repeated for years as calls to action for racial justice.

There is an intense personal yet public nature of the BLM movement as the hurt, anger, and impatience as a result of racism and police brutality is so close to millions of Americans and recently these intense emotions became publicized through the summer’s protests.

Murals are a unique and defining art form related to BLM. Devin Cathcart's short documentary explores how a BLM mural project in Cleveland, Ohio brought together local artists and community members. On Capitol Hill in Seattle, sixteen black artists worked together to create a similarly massive street mural. In both, each letter is unique in its style of bright designs related to African culture and black power. In New York City and Washington D.C, permanent murals have been painted on streets to celebrate BLM. The city mayors agreed to the effort and partook in the process of making the murals to encourage solidarity with the growing movement. Street murals in major cities are inarguably metaphorical as the community effort behind it and the vibrancy of the finished project takes up immense space; turning heads and permitting no one to look away from the fact that black lives matter.

Some of the awe that comes with analyzing BLM protest art is how it has bloomed without permission. Graffiti and some street murals are technically “illegal.” The Portland, Oregon-based artist Emma Berger painted portraits of black men and women who lost their lives as a result of police brutality on the wood of a boarded-up Apple Store. She chose to create portraits that memorialized Elijah McClain, Breonna Taylor, Rayshard Brooks and Kendra James because she knew that most people would feel wrong taking down such portraits and so this would draw attention to the movement. In Richmond, the founder of Few and Far, a group of women dedicated to social justice, arranged for barriers around the statue of the Confederate general Robert E. Lee to be painted with BLM messages. Seattle’s Capitol Hill Organized Protest similarly publicized goals of racial justice by painting barriers, walls, and plywood. The creation of the street mural in Cleveland, like many other cities, was the sole effort of local community members who took social justice matters upon themselves. Public art made illegally, moreover, truly presents a voice of its own. The foreground of photos of BLM protests filled with meaningful art provides irreplaceable context as to why mass protests happened in the summer of 2020.

In all of its art forms, the Black Lives Matter movement has inspired Americans to consider how racial injustice and inequality still intensely plagues the U.S in more ways than one. For instance, a 2019 study concluded that only 1.2% of all works in major U.S art museums were made by black artists. This daunting statistic reminds us of the importance of looking at the art that is in museums today as only a mere fraction of all the art that is constantly being created and displayed locally, whether in protest or in peace.