Originally this 16-foot wall was used as an outdoor racquetball court for the community to come together and be active. But over time the city noticed that it wasn’t being used as much. Once the decision was made three artists and myself took on the challenge to design a mural that would bring the community together and support the BLM movement.
The Black Lives Matter mural in Utica New York is a large public art piece in response to the murder of George Floyd. Five black artists including myself alongside a black art director build this mural from the ground up to spread the message in our small city. This mural was about a month-long project taking roughly 24 hours of painting to finish. The mural was finished on July 14th, 2020 and we had a press conference a few days later to show the public.
In our initial meeting, we brought ideas for a quilt design. Usually, with a quilt, there is a mix of different designs old and new that brings it all together to make something beautiful. We wanted to get the feeling of African patterns in the mural and a portion that brings the community together.
Once we had a direction to get started we prepared the wall to start painting. With the help of our project manager and his helpful uncle, we banged out two coats of grey primer. The next day we went in to start the background of yellow and the addition of a few shades of green to give it some texture.
We created a grid on the wall for this idea of a stamp to contain all of the smaller paintings we wanted to contribute to the idea of a black community. The shape is a representation of the neighborhood in that the mural is located in “Cornhill” which gives it that connection to the community. The stamp was made from foam and with a small amount of paint on each press we had our containing shape.
I was in charge of the border, this part of the mural was my child. I was really into geometric-style art and this was my interpretation of the African patterns we discussed in our initial meeting.
With a few hours spent mapping out and painting the border, the three other artists started on their paintings in the containing shapes. Each artist brought their own style to the table and you can really tell who did what during the process which made it special. The bottom two rows were planned out for our press release day, to invite the individuals in the surrounding community to come and add their own work to the mural.
It was the best day ever to see all the people come together and add to the wall. That was the biggest part of this project, we could have said we wanted to do it all ourselves and then it would just be a mural done by some artist supporting a cause. But once you add the idea of people in the community coming up to the wall with a paintbrush it brings it to another level of creativity.
