Donated By: DC Mayor Muriel Bowser . Artist(s): Anonymous ..Year: 2020.
Location: Black Lives Matter Plaza (800 and 900 blocks of 16th streets, NW Immediately north of Lafayette Square Park, which is just north of the White House complex, Washington DC
Visual Description:
Painted in 35 foot high yellow capital letters, the three words “Black LIves Matter” run through two city blocks of 16th street, just north of Lafayette Square Park. Each letter stretches from curb to curb, and conforms to the general style of the phrase “Black Lives Matter” as it has been reproduced in thousands of flags, banners, and posters since 2013. This art work is often spoken of as a ‘mural’ although unlike most murals is not on a wall (“mur” in French) but on the street’s tarmac dark surface.
Historical Background:
The hashtag term #BlackLivesMatter was circulated on social media in 2013, in the wake of the acquittal of George Zimmerman for the killing of the Black young man Trayvon Martin, which galvanized extensive public protest in the United States and worldwide, denouncing the ways in which Black lives seemed systematically in so many contexts, especially associated with law enforcement officer-involved shootings, to be less valued that White lives. The term is deployed widely by the broadbased, decentralized social movement that calls itself BlackLivesMatter, and came into particular focus after the police killing on May 25, 2020 of George Floyd in Minneapolis, which exemplified for millions the horror of unchecked violence against people of color. The term became ubiquitous in widespread protests against anti-Black violence during the spring and summer of 2020, which roughly coincided with the most intense period of Covi-d 19 infections, in which it was widely perceived that Black, Brown, and lower income people were dying at higher rates than Whites and more affluent people. Posters, banners and flags with the phrase Black Lives Matter were widely used in protests, and placed by people in their front yards and windows.
Matters in some respects came to a head in Lafayette Park, immediately north of the White House in late May 2020, as BlackLivesMatter and anti-Trump protesters became a constant presence in the park. On June 1, 2020, at the direction of Attorney General Barr, Federal officials, backed by National Park Service police, using flash grenades, smoke and chemical irritants to clear the park of all protesters; this was widely believed to be in preparation for President Trump’s walk across the Park to St John’s Church, where he posed in front of TV cameras with a Bible. A massive barrier was then erected around Lafayette Square, and the fence became a dynamic gallery of protest art (much of it subsequently collected and archived by curators at the nearby National Museum of American History).
For many in Washington DC, the clearing of Lafayette Square, a site that holds a storied place in the city’s collective Black historical consciousness, was experienced as a fundamental assault on the integrity and sovereignty of the city, which had long chafed under the first Trump administration (an intensification of over a century during which the city, especially its Black population, had resisted a sense of being “occupied” by an unsympathetic white power structure.
In this context, on June 5, Mayor Muriel Bowser moved quickly with allies to mobilize an unusual public art project, arranging in 24 hours to have the three words “Black LIves Matter” in 35 foot high letters, painted on the surface of the 800 and 900 blocks of 16th street, the major city north-south artery that runs directly north of Lafayette Park to the city’s northern boundary and beyond. Eight anonymous artists were mobilized to outline the letters with mathematical precision, and filled, with help from city workers, with bright yellow paint.
The next day the Mayor announced that this section of 16th street had been ceremonially renamed “Black Lives Matter” Plaza. After this street section reopened to automobile traffic, the words have not been easy to view from a sidewalk or while crossing the street, but are better seen from the upper reaches of surrounding buildings (to which access is generally restricted), from which my iconic pictures of the mural have been shot. (It is sometimes said that the words are “visible from space.”) For some time, these two blocks functioned as a pedestrian only mall; they were then reopened to vehicular traffic.
This street art piece has been controversial from its inception and has been subjected to multiple efforts by Republicans in Congress to have it painted over and eliminated. It is widely rumored that in the face of pressure from the second Trump administration, the DC city government may soon eliminate it.
Interpretive Notes:
At the time it was dedicated, Black Lives Matter Plaza was celebrated as an explicit space of resistance, facing off against the White House in what turned out to be the final months of the first Trump administration. As was widely known, President Trump had posed with a Bible in front of St John’s Church at the base of 16th street, in a move that was widely seen by his opponents as desecrating Holy Scripture, the church, and 16th Street itself. The Plaza in that sense was actively reclaiming city space on behalf of ordinary Washingtonians. During the Biden administration that constellation of meanings largely faded to the background: it is as of this writing unclear what the Plaza means, or will mean, in the second Trump era.
16th Street, it should be noted, has considerable symbolic significance in the city, and featured prominently in the original Pierre L’Enfant design as a grand boulevard radiating north from the Executive Mansion, later known as the White House, which is located at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue (the intersection of Pennsylvania Avenue and 16th Street),
16th street falls on what Thomas Jefferson dubbed “the American Meridian,” a north south line running from the North Pole to the South Pole, which he hoped would replace the British “prime meridian” which runs through the Greenwich Observatory near London, and which, for many, has exemplified British imperial claims to dominate the cosmos itself. Although Jefferson’s American Meridian plan was never realized, the resonance of this 78th Meridian (reckoned from Greenwich) is still celebrated in 16th’s street Meridian Park (renamed in Black Washington vernacular as “Malcolm X Park”). The Avenue was famously occupied by several embassies, including the old French Embassy, by Masonic temples, and by important residences of White and Black Washingtoninians.
The street after 1918 was festooned with 500 trees in memory of fallen soldiers of the Great War (World War I), and it may be that in a sense this old memorial imagery, though largely forgotten, informs the memorial aesthetic of Black Lives Matter Plaza, which honors the victims of racially inflected police violence.
Whether or not this symbolic history is fully known to all who view and pass by the art work, “Black Lives Matter” Plaza is one of the most striking public art works in a city in which public art sometimes seems ubiquitous. It may function as a kind of implicit symbolic burial ground for thousands of victims of anti Black violence, whose names may not be known but whose lives are nonetheless honored here. In that sense it may have implicit resonances (or juxtapositions) with the names of the fallen inscribed down the National Mall on “The Wall,” the Maya Lin Vietnam Veterans Memorial as well as the famous inscription, across the river, at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier at Arlington National Cemetery, “Here rests in honored glory an American soldier known but to God”.” The Black LIves Matter mural is in a sense a counter-memorial, standing outside of the official iconography of state sponsored iconography in the Federal City, honoring precisely those individuals and communities who have, by and large, not been recognized in official monumental architecture.
The use of the street as a canvas for the lettered work also seems highly resonant. Streets have been principal sites of protest in cities for centuries, and in DC, streets were in particular taken over by protesters in the spring of 1968, in protests decrying the assassination of Dr Martin Luther King Jr; during the 50 days of #BlackLivesMatter protests that preceded the clearing of Lafayette Park, DC streets were also celebrated as dynamic sites of anti regime resistance. Streets also have extensive associations as sites of community over policing and in that sense the yellow letters of the mural may evoke the yellow caution tape that marks the streetside locations of the deaths of many Black victims of officer-involved shootings.
Although it may be a coincidence, the 16 letters of the words “Black Lives Matter” do correspond with the numerical value of the street, 16th Street, NW.
In a sense, the Plaza may be read as marking an implicit symbolic frontier between “Washington”, the Federal enclave, and “DC”, a loosely defined entity that evokes a historically Black dominated metropolis, long associated with a vibrant Black-inflected history of art, culture, and political resistance.
To be highly speculative, there may even be a hinted association between the lettering on the surface of this important street and memories of the Middle Passage, from which the Atlantic ocean itself, as is often said, has come to function as the world’s largest burial ground, a site of undermemorialized loss for all those who perished during the slave trade. Does the street here become a kind of floating waterway, on which float the spectral traces of the ancestors who are nearly lost to us?
Prompts for closer looking:
Consider the color palette of the work: yellow, filling the letters themselves, and black, for the negative space created by the street, which functions as an elongated horizontal canvas. What are the relevant associations of yellow: the caution color on a traffic light, police tape marking the scene or a death or crime? What associations does black have, such as: the Black lives imperiled or lost through American history? The darkness of the grave or of death?
In what ways is this work like and unlike other memorial art works in Washington DC, which honor the heroic or martyred Dead? You may compare it for example to the Lincoln Memorial, the Jefferson Memorial, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, the MLK Memorial, the FDR memorial, or public statuary that honors American military leaders. The use of black granite in the Vietnam Veterans Memorial and the black street color of the mural, might in particular be worth reflecting upon.
What are the effects of the work’s unusual placement on the city’s street surface? What effect does walking (or driving) on it have for the viewer? What is it like to view the letters from the sidewalk or as one crosses the street (Please be careful in the busy crosswalks)
From crosswalks, looking south towards the White House (again, please be careful) what effects are created by contrasting the yellow letters of the mural with the distant image of the White House itself?
How visible does this work seem to be to the public? Given that the letters of this memorial are literally underfoot, to what extent so far as you can tell, do passersby actually see it?
Suggested Creative Interventions:
Propose art work or poetry that might supplement the mural and the themes of #BlackLivesMatter…
Learning Resources:
Overview of the #BlackLivesMatter movement;
Timeline on the clearing of Lafayette Park
Mural project summarized:
This is such an important memorial space. I especially like that is on 16th street, which was long a dividing line between "White" and Black DC.; Black Lives Matter Plaza now stands as an important symbolc of unity.
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