"A Lot of Art Will Come Out of This": Artists Respond to the Protests in Ferguson

Artists respond to the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson by creating art in support of the community.

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Complex Original

Image via Complex Original

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Things are still pretty f***ed up in Ferguson, Mo. right now. The police presence was still heavy last night, but officers were "incredibly lax" when speaking with the press and protestors. Supporters from neighboring towns and cities have been following the events in the media, and many have found ways to contribute to the movement that is growing on the streets, including members of the St. Louis arts community.

"Being onsite, you see a lot of people you know in the community," painter Cbabi Bayoc told Art in America. "We may not be producing anything now, because we've been so consumed by what is going on. But a lot of art is going to come out of this." Dail Chambers, co-founder of the Yeyo Arts Collective in St. Louis says that a number of artists have been participating in the protests and that members of the community have contributed squares to a quilt project inspired by the unfortunate events of the past couple weeks.

The St. Louis Regional Arts Commission held a public discussion about the shooting of Michael Brown, there are talks of future Ferguson-related art exhibitions, and T-shirts and flyers are everywhere in the suburb. Others have used photography as a tool to tell the story of what is happening on the ground. One of the most shared images is the photograph taken by St. Louis Post-Dispatch photographer Robert Cohen, of a man throwing a flaming tear gas canister into the air. According to Mashable, the iconic photo has become a symbol in Ferguson and on the Internet, even though the subject of the image (aka "Da Man With the Chips") says that he was only throwing the canister away from children, not at the police.

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"Many people in the arts community are coming forward for justice for Michael Brown," said Philip Slein, owner of fine art gallery in St. Louis. He also echoed what Cbabi Bayoc ​said about how the events will inspire the arts community to action: "We are going to see art come out of this."

Meanwhile in Philadelphia, an artist named Keith Wallace staged a performance in front of Robert Indiana's iconic LOVE sculpture this past weekend that not everyone cared to acknowledge. According to Artnet, Wallace wore a "bloody" shirt with fake bullet holes and lay on the ground in front of the sculpture for over an hour while his friends stood nearby with a sign that read "Call Us By Our Names" and passed out flyers (seen here) with a statement about the artist, the performance, and advice on what to do if stopped by the police.

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Wallace told the press that there were both positive and negative reactions in the park that day. "There was a Latina woman with two young boys," he told Philadelphia Magazine. "She held her boys’ hands and said to them, ‘I want you to see this. This is important. Never be afraid to tell the truth.'" Others cared more about getting their photo taken with the sculpture than Wallace's message and stepped in front of and over him, with one man saying to his friends, "What’s the big deal? He’s already dead."

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"Honestly, some of the things that were said were so ugly," Wallace told Think Progress. "I’ve dealt with these kinds of issues before, and you hear about it all the time, but when it’s right in front of your face, it takes on a whole new reality. In trying to open other people’s eyes, my eyes were open, I had this complete revelation about this world we live in."

[via Art in America]

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