Written January 2022 for a class
Anti-Racist Street Art and the Right to the City
How can the Lefebvrian concepts of “Right to the City” and production of space be applied to how artists/activists use street art in response to George Floyd Murder?
Introduction:
The Murder of George Floyd by Derek Chauvin on May 25th, 2020, and the protest mobilizations in response sparked what might be considered “the largest global explosion of street art addressing one single event or subject in history” (Ugagwau 2020). The image of George Floyd and the language of the Black Lives Matter movement have been imprinted on walls of cities all over the world, but notably in Minneapolis, the city in which the murder took place. This asks the question: what role does street art play in the protest response to the murder of George Floyd? Henri Lefebvre’s concepts of the right to the city and the production of space permits one to understand the role that street art played in this movement and movements like it. Within the framework of the right to the city, street art has been considered a form of spatial reclamation and resisting control (Dickinson 2008; Zieleniec 2016; Molnár 2017). Similarly, the usage of the right to the city has been a feature of racially influenced protests throughout history (Garbin and Millington 2018). Street art is thus a tool that has been used by urban denizens to claim the right to the city.
This essay consequently aims to examine how street art, in response to George Floyd’s murder, was used by the anti-racist protest movement to claim their right to the city in Minneapolis. The first section details how street art was used to respond to George Floyd’s murder and how street art images have been collected. The next section describes how Henri Lefebvre’s writings about the right to the city, informed by the production of space, are used to theorize street art. This section entails what street art represents within the Lefebvre framework and what it means to use street art as a form of reclaiming the city. The final part of this essay synthesizes the first two sections, using a theory-heavy framework of the second section and applying that to the specifics within the first section to examine street art’s role in the Minneapolis protest. This section additionally uses the work of Charles Mills to examine how cities are understood through the racial contract. This essay links right to the city, street art, and urban protest movements by connecting empirical examples of street art with urban social theory and critical race theory. In doing so, the hope is to examine why street art has been employed by this movement and how street art can act as an agent of social change.
What exactly constitutes street art (vs. graffiti) has long been a contested debate (Snyder 2011; Mcauliffe 2012; Young 2014) so it is important to address what is meant by street art. This paper employs Young’s (2014) perspective that the term can be used as a catch-all term for all urban street writing and art; this encapsulates the tiniest scribble to the grandest mural. This definition is supported by the Urban Art Mapping Team (Urban Art Mapping) who believe all writings to be legitimate forms of street art. Additionally, Molnár (2017) argues that street art intends to communicate a message whereas graffiti is just pure expression; since the art that is being examined in this essay is understood as a response to George Floyd’s murder then these writings are street art, not graffiti, in that they clearly communicate a message.
PART I
The murder of George Floyd sparked global protests in the middle of 2020. Street art responding to the event, the man, and the movement quickly appeared all over the world, as street art’s strength exists in that writers can respond to events and cultural shifts without delay (Ugagwau 2020). This burst of street art was especially present in Minneapolis, the epicenter of the movement (Urban Art Mapping). The Urban Art Mapping team state that the murder “sparked a massive proliferation of spontaneous art to appear right in our own backyard. Tags and murals were suddenly everywhere in Minneapolis and Saint Paul” (Ugagwau 2020) . The street art was not bound to Minnesota however, as images appeared all over the world in many cultural contexts (Moran 2020). The portrait of George Floyd was not only painted on the walls of Minneapolis buildings but across cities in the United States and globally, notably on a wall in Palestine (Moran 2020)
Street art is often an ephemeral art form, as street art is taken down and removed due to the art being legally criminal (Snyder 2011). This is evidenced in cities, such as New York City mobilizing special units to prevent and remove street art (Dickinson 2008). Knowing this, scholars and students took to developing archives of what they understood to be anti-racist street art. This essay focuses specifically on “The Urban Art Mapping George Floyd and Anti-Racist Street Art Database” which was formed by a diverse team of researchers from St. Thomas University in St. Paul Minnesota (Goethe Institute 2020); however, there are similar databases such as Walls of Justice and Street Art Utopia that collect and share anti-racist street art. The aim of the Urban Art Mapping project, as described on the website (Urban Art Mapping), is “to document examples of street art from around the world that have emerged in the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd”. Being user-submitted these databases are by no means all-inclusive of all street art in response to the murder. At the time of this essay’s submission, this database includes 2325 images of user-submitted, anti-racist street art. Because street art is an ever-expanding and changing social form, documenting these images could be understood as a form of photographic cartography, where the captured images develop a map of a space-time (Ulmer 2017).
The whole of the Anti-Racist Street Art Database includes a diverse array of images that demonstrate the range of ideas written and repeated in response to George Floyd’s murder. Within the archive many images specifically reference the events of May 25th, such as portraits of George Floyd, RIP George, and “I Can’t Breath”. Many writings do not specifically mention Floyd but are instead attached to the BLM movement in general, associated with other forms of protest ideas (e.g. tags of ACAB or abolishing the police), or generalized phrases such as “Justice”. The Anti-Racist Street Art Database organizes the submissions into various thematic categories based on user-submitted tags for the art submitted. These categories include portraits of George Floyd, Black Lives Matter, “Say Their Names'', and “‘I Can’t Breath’/Last Words” (Urban Art Mapping). The images collected range from simple tags or writings to complex murals. Founders of the project believe: “ that everything from the most violent and confrontational tag to the most beautiful and positive mural is a legitimate representation of real experience and emotion” (Ugagwau 2020) and they consider it their obligation to document and collect these forms for the future. This database and the myriad of images are evidence that street art played a significant role in the protest movement that was a response to Floyd’s murder.
Part II
The effectiveness of this artistic element of protest is supported by and understood through how individuals claim the right to the city. Lefebvre’s (1996) right to the city claims that people have the right to access and develop their own space through the work of daily repetitions of lived experience. He (Lefebvre 1996) believes that there is a human need for creative activity and that people should have a right to use and develop space through their creative capabilities rather than be forced into space developed through a capitalist institution that supports the capitalist system . Contemporary cities are marked by consumption and are shaped primarily by the market elite, so right to the city suggests that the people of the city ought to have a say in how the space is used (Harvey 2008). Lefebvre believes inhabitants of urban space participate in the space and therefore make the city a collective form of art, or as Lefebvre puts it, “L’oeuvres” (1996:147). This theory of the right to the city thus acknowledges radical freedom over capitalist and governmental forms of control.
Lefebvre’s work on how space is produced is fundamental to understanding how people can claim the right to the city. “Production of Space” (Lefebvre 1991) is a foundational text on the concept of social space. To summarize, Lefebvre (1991) argues that space is not merely material but is constructed in a network of symbols and meanings; space is socially produced. Space can be understood in three ways according to Lefebvre (1991): perceived space, conceived space, and lived space (also representational space). This paper is concerned with this third method of spacing, as representational spaces are “spaces directly lived through its associated images and symbols” (Lefebvre 1991:39), which in terms of street art is the space that is symbolically interpreted by people (Zieleniec 2016). This is the day-to-day understanding that people have of the space in which they exist, the lived realities of a city’s denizens. Further, this type of space is the space that can be changed or altered through the means of imagination and symbolic systems. Representational spaces consist of “complex symbolisms…linked to the clandestine or underground side of social life” (Lefebvre 1991:33), and it is through these symbolic systems that people can turn a city into L’oeuvre.
The right to the city is when people inhabiting cities produce their own space through the reproductions of lived experience, making the production of urban space a grand piece of art (Lefebvre 1996). People make claims to the city by producing representational space through lived experiences, not space that is produced by capitalist institutions (Lefebvre 1991,1996). Harvey adds to this concept by saying that it is within the freedom of a human to shape urban environments through representational space; the right to the city is “the right to change ourselves by changing the city” (Harvey 2008:23) or put another way “the freedom to make and remake our cities and ourselves” (ibid:23). Both argue that this needs to be done not through the influence of capitalist systems, but rather by the people who inhabit the city as creative beings; the city needs to be by and for the people, not designed for profit and consumption (Lefebvre 1991; Harvey 2008). Claiming the right to the city is a form of protest because it disrupts political and capitalist institutions that prevent individuals from claiming their own space.
The models of production and space and the right to the city aid the understanding of street art. Street art is explicitly representational space, as people (the artists) are using urban spaces as their canvas to express their own artistic and social/political ideas (Zieleniec 2016). Graffiti developed as an embodied act to put oneself into the city through the repetitions of their names (Snyder 2011), an idea that is compatible with Lefebvre’s conceptions of lived space. Further, street art can be a complex language of symbols, and the repetition of this symbolic language thus gives power to the art (Molnár 2017). This matrix of symbolism is the production of representational space.
Recognizing street art as a representational space allows one to connect the role street art plays in right to the city. Kindynis (2018:252) defines the role of street art as “a subcultural practice that is an embodied action that resists social control and reclamation of urban space”. Street art is linked to the right to the city because individuals make claim to their own unique spaces outside of the control of profiteering structures. Individuals use their creative potentials to produce the space they want to see and create, altering public space through symbolic means and reclaiming space for the people rather than for profit-focused institutions (Zieleniec 2016). Additionally, there is a commutative social value to street art due to the fact these forms of art can make the walls a public forum of idea exchange (Young 2014), democratic public space (Dickinson 2008), and as a way to communicate with the public (Molnár 2017). Street art is a method in which urban denizens are producing space under their own terms to create the city as a modern oeuvre as it is overlaying the controlled space of the city with new creative geographies (Chabbert 2015). In short, street art is a method of reclaiming the right to the city by means of creating and reproducing representational space for and by the people of the city.
Part III
The previous section examined how street art is a method for claiming the right to the city. This section first examines how the racial contract can be applied to urban space, then extrapolates how street art, as a claim to the right to the city, can be used as an act of resistance and how it has been used by artists/activists as a protest tool in response to the death of George Floyd.
The racial contract is the assumed system of racial expectations shaped by a white supremacist society. All individuals existing within the society are subjected to it and expected to conform to it (Mills 1997). By a white supremacist society, Mills (1997) means that the system in place is understood and implied to be hierarchical with white people on top and that this system is historically linked to economic, social, and political oppression as well as histories of exploitation and coloniality. This benefits white people as the system has been shaped by and for white people. Applying this to space, under the racial contract white people are the group that feels comfortable in space because that space has been constructed by and for them, and non-whites are imagined under the racial contract to be alien to these spaces (Mills 1997). For societies under the racial contract, space is inherently racialized.
Applying this to Lefebvre’s (1991) production of space model, the normative symbols that are expressed in urban spaces are therefore produced within the eurocentric (white) frame. Therefore, cities in the global north, such as Minneapolis, are effectively produced for and by white people, and non-whites are understood to be alien to these spaces due to the structural default of white supremacy (Mills 1997). Hall’s (1980) articulation of societies structured in dominance links these perspectives. He (Hall 1980) continues that class and race are inextricably linked, this link being facilitated by a capitalist economic system and white-supremacist cultural hegemony. Cultural hegemony thus dominates urban space, a space that is designed for exploitation and profit (Harvey 2008). To contextualize Hall, Minneapolis, as a spatial object under the racial contact and facilitated by capitalist structure, belongs to the white dominant culture. Examined with the right to the city, the protests were in resistance to this system.
Claiming the right to the city can be thought of as a protest against formalized systems of oppression and control within a city (Harvey 2008). Right to the city has been historically applied to global protest movements, as urban spaces are often the grounds in which protests occur and injustice is most present (Garbin and Millington 2018). The urban area is the location where protests take place and is the center of these protests. The right to the city ideology is applied to racially conscious movements because capitalist forces within the city are designed to exclude certain groups of people from full participation within the city (Purcell 2003; Garbin and Millington 2018). In terms of Minneapolis, the usage of street art in the protest movement claimed the right to the city because the artists produced representative spaces that did not align with the hegemonic power structure in place. Because the art is symbolically black, it subverts the white supremacist racialization of space.
The protest movement changed the representational space of the streets in Minneapolis as a response to the George Floyd murder. Storefronts of large chains, institutions designed for consumption and commodification, put up plywood. This plywood was then painted over by new symbols, words, and images developed by the people as a part of the movement (Urban Art Mapping). Dissected through the theory, these actions of the right to the city, show how the art associated with the protest claimed the right to the city through the means of creating new representational space.
As an embodied act, street art can be understood as an act of resistance; especially as understood by those who create street art. In ethnographic studies of street art, artists understand themselves as being antithetical to mainstream systems, resisting and rebelling against forms of control (Snyder 2011; Kindynis 2018). The embodied act has powers as street art “simultaneously disrupt[s] authoritative spatial order…whilst superimposing its own alternative social geography onto the city (representational spaces)” (Kindynis 2018:252). Acknowledging the racial contract, anti-racist street disrupts systems of control and applies new symbolic language. A notable example of this is in Minneapolis on the Lake Street/Midtown Subway Station where an artist wrote: “ACAB, RIP GEORGE, Arrest All Four”. This act replaces what are the walls of structural order and control within a subway station with language that is explicitly used by the movement in response to George Floyd’s murder. By subverting spaces of control within cities, street art disrupts systems of power and claims right to the city by introducing symbolic language aligning with anti-racism.
The criminalization of street art contributes and enforces the idea that it is an act of resistance. Criminalizing street art has had the reverse of the intended effect because it makes individuals more persistent in creating art that makes a change (Dickinson 2008; Kindynis 2018). Street art resists neoliberal capitalist power claims over social space (Molnár 2017), communicates ideas that may not be permitted to be exchanged through mainstream forms of communication (Zieleniec 2016), and actively repeats ideas of protest or dissent (Awcock 2021). The racial contract is often in place within the language of the criminality of street art. Dickinson (2008) reports that the history of criminalization of street art in New York is linked to racialized language. Additionally, Choi (2020) remarks that street art activism is regarded by white hegemonic powers as vandalism and that the structures of criminality exist as a way to suppress diverse voices. These stigmas and criminalization efforts are evidence of the racial contract because under the racial contract art should only be created and displayed through “traditional” means, means that are advantageous to white people.
The language of resistance and protest were used throughout Minneapolis in response to George Floyd’s murder. Examples of this are the words “This is not a riot! It an uprising” written on plywood or “End White Supremacy” written on a curb in George Floyd Square. There are several examples of cries for Justice written all over the walls and plywood in the streets of Minneapolis. Written on the wall of the Brooklyn Center Police Station in Minnesota, black spray paint “No liberation of the oppressed has ever been won through non-violence” accompanied by the red-lettered ACAB. These spaces are thus being physically and symbolically changed by language linked to the protest movement. Other examples of how street art changes space are the memorial portraits of George Floyd scattered throughout Minneapolis; the symbolic language of the murdered man’s face brings the power of memory to the wall. In acknowledging the recognition of the man, one is able to recognize the meaning behind the movement These images are part of the place-making aesthetic (Young 2014); whereas Minnenapolis’ representational space has been constructed to express ideas adverse to the racial contract.
Street art has additionally been used by this protest movement as a means to give a voice to marginalized groups. Street art has the ability to give voices to the powerless and the disenfranchised (Zieleniec 2016). While street art is by no means an activity in which all people can participate, there are often physical barriers that would exclude people who are non-able bodied (Kindynis 2018) and there are gender-based exclusionary biases within the subculture (Snyder 2011), the writers who do write can project ideas that are normally not mainstream on the walls. Young (2014) expands on this, claiming street art allows for making cities more public spaces, that street art can be used as a political device to incite change.
Marginalized groups further used street art as a way to reclaim narratives about communities that have been excluded or erased from mainstream discussion (Choi 2020). This links to the right to the city through the racial contract because inhabitants are disqualified from participation in the mainstream due to structural barriers and cultural exclusion (Purcell 2008). In reclaiming space, protest art groups are demonstrating their right to the space and to be heard. The image of a microphone on a boarded-up storefront can be read as to how street art is amplifying the voices of people in Minneapolis that are not normally present in public forums. Ulmer (2017) notes that street art can be a way to decolonize American cities by applying street art to spaces that are being gentrified. This could be understood as the right to the city as it is reclaiming space that is occupied for commercial consumption processes (Harvey 2008). To demonstrate the rationale behind street art as used by activists Choi (2020) notes “[margniliazed groups] are using street art to remind gentrifiers that they exist, that they’ve existed long before white hipsters and big retail chains overran their districts’”. She (Choi 2020) continues that this is done explicitly as street artists intentionally target chain commodity stores, which applies to Harvey (2008) as it is producing new representational space over space designed for profit.
Artists and activists used street art as a way to reproduce space and claim rights to Minneapolis in response to the George Floyd murder. By being an embodied act of resistance, using the language and symbols of protest to alter space, and allowing marginalized ideas to be expressed on the public forum of the city walls, street art subverted the racial contract built into the production of space in Minneapolis.
Conclusion
The street art that was created during the 2020 protests was a way in which the Minneapolis denizens claimed their right to the city through radical change. The street art here depicted cries for justice, equality, change, and accountability of the police. Using representational space, artists spread the language and symbols of the protest and claimed the right to Minneapolis by having the walls match the meaning of the movement. These images were then collected and spread through online platforms, aiding the symbolic lexicon to the global movement. The examples within Minneapolis are evidence that street art can aid in urban protest movements and global mobilizations as a tool to effect and advocate for systemic social change by means of the right to the city.
References:
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Street art Citations:
“ACAB and Liberation Message,” 2021. George Floyd & Anti-Racist Street Art , accessed January 9, 2022. https://georgefloydstreetart.omeka.net/items/show/2317.
“ACAB RIP GEORGE,” George Floyd & Anti-Racist Street Art, accessed January 9, 2022, https://georgefloydstreetart.omeka.net/items/show/2946.
“End White Supremacy,” 2021. George Floyd & Anti-Racist Street Art, accessed January 9, 2022, https://georgefloydstreetart.omeka.net/items/show/2765.
paint_our_peace on Instagram, 2020. “Megaphone,” George Floyd & Anti-Racist Street Art , accessed January 9, 2022, https://georgefloydstreetart.omeka.net/items/show/2949.
“This is not a riot! This an UPRISING,” 2020. George Floyd & Anti-Racist Street Art, accessed January 9, 2022, https://georgefloydstreetart.omeka.net/items/show/2950.
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