In April 2015, Baltimore, Maryland was thrust into the national spotlight when Freddie Gray, a twenty-five-year-old African American resident, lapsed into a coma while in police custody. His death and subsequent funeral triggered a wave of protests in
In April 2015, Baltimore, Maryland was thrust into the national spotlight when Freddie Gray, a twenty-five-year-old African American resident, lapsed into a coma while in police custody. His death and subsequent funeral triggered a wave of protests in the state’s largest city. While these events sparked a period of unrest, Baltimore community members also responded in meaningful and powerful ways through the creation of street art.
One of the first efforts got its start at a candlelight vigil for Gray. Local street artist Justin Nethercut, known as Nether, teamed up with Gray’s friend Brandon Ross to create a commemorative mural near the spot where Gray was arrested in the Sandtown-Winchester neighborhood (Giordano 2015). The mural they created shows Gray, front and center, flanked by historic civil rights leaders Martin Luther King, Jr., Rosa Parks, and Thurgood Marshall on one side and contemporary protestors under the banner of the Black Lives Matter movement on the other (Giordano 2015; Figure 1).
Once completed, Nether noted, it was Ross who mobilized the community and brought Gray’s family and friends to visit. Longtime Baltimore Sun editorial writer and arts columnist Glenn McNatt said neighborhood people came to treat the site like hallowed ground.
Street art, a visual art form created on-site and often without formal approval, works in ways that museum and gallery art cannot. It comes into view without warning, surprising observers with imagery that can be both beautiful and provocative. Unlike a traditional museum experience where one goes expecting to see art and may even know precise pieces and where to find them in the galleries, street art is more likely to catch audiences off guard. Typically, its site is part of its subject and stands as a form of commentary—sometimes subtle, sometimes not—on the political and social climate of its location. The Freddie Gray mural was imbued with messages about racial inequality and conflict. Studied carefully, it, like much other street art, reveals the diverse motivations and power dynamics of Baltimore.
Baltimore’s history makes it especially apt for street art. Inequality, segregation, and poverty were perpetuated through slavery, Jim Crow, redlining, and housing discrimination (Pappoe 2016), leaving the majority of its residents without power or voice. According to an interactive map produced by the Baltimore Office of Promotion and the Arts (BOPA), however, there are at least 165 murals in the city today that raise new voices (Figure 2).
In 1910, Baltimore enacted one of the country’s first segregation ordinances; it was the first city to designate “white” and “black” blocks. Following World II and continuing through today, decades of deindustrialization, housing discrimination, and white middle class migration to the suburbs have left a legacy of segregation, disinvestment, vacancy, and poverty in inner city, low income areas (Friedman 2012; Pappoe 2016). Police violence has frequently occurred along racial lines.
The collective result of these policies is a spatial pattern of occupancy in the city known today as the “black butterfly” and the “white L.” Predominantly African American neighborhoods concentrate in East and West Baltimore forming the wings of the “butterfly,” while mostly White neighborhoods cluster in the middle and then wrap around the harbor in an “L” shape (Brown 2016; Figure 3). Brown (2016) indicates that the “White L” enjoys better transportation options and more favorable relationships with city government. At present, black citizens comprise sixty-three percent of Baltimore’s population and twenty-three percent of city residents live in poverty (United States Census 2015).
Drawing on conversations with six artists and educators, this paper explores how this powerful form of expression is perceived as a catalyst for social change. Street art’s murals are symbolic artifacts in and of themselves. Produced for specific sites, the symbolism of murals gets reinforced by their location. Writing about murals in Belfast, Northern Ireland, Neil Jarman (1998) contextualized street art by stating “A sense of place can always be understood in terms of the content of the paintings…” but to fully engage “demands some wider recognition of placing, of the area beyond the immediate frame or the edge of the wall, which all too often is the limit or boundary... To see them as site-specific requires awareness of the physical and social environment in which the images are produced and with which they interact. Meaning changes as the frame widens.” It is as though one must see the wall and