Rachel Wolfe-Goldsmith | |
---|---|
Born | January 13, 1991 |
Nationality | American |
Occupation(s) | Artist, creative director, muralist, NFT artist, curator |
Employer | Bay Area Mural Program |
Known for | Murals |
Rachel Wolfe-Goldsmith (born January 13, 1991) [1] is an American artist based in Oakland, California. She is known for her large-scale murals, and she is also the creative director of the Bay Area Mural Program. [2]
During the spring and summer of 2020, following the murder of George Floyd, Wolfe-Goldsmith was among the many artists who painted murals in response to the killing on pieces of plywood covering storefronts in downtown Oakland. Her piece on 15th St. is called We Can Breathe. [3] During this time, the Bay Area Mural Program, with Wolfe-Goldsmith as creative director, and African American Arts & Culture Complex organized the Black Lives Matter mural in San Francisco, which ran for three city blocks. [2] [4]
The group She Will Rise, which is working to get a Black woman on the United States Supreme Court, commissioned Wolfe-Goldsmith to paint a mural in Washington, DC. Completed in October 2020, the work features Black women judges and activists. [5]
In November 2020, it was announced that Wolfe-Goldsmith would be painting a mural focusing on social justice with fellow muralist Joshua Mays. The mural was commissioned by Kaiser Permanente and ABG Art Group, and was displayed outside of Kaiser's offices in downtown Oakland before a planned move to Liberation Park. [6] Also in downtown Oakland, Wolfe-Goldsmith has painted a 3-story mural of artist Stoney Creation and model Yanni Brump. [7]
In February 2021, West Oakland homeowner and curator Jilchristina Vest commissioned Wolfe-Goldsmith to paint a mural of women in the Black Panther Party on the side of her house at Center and 9th Streets. [8] The 30-foot mural is based on several photographs taken by Stephen Shames and portrays Delores Henderson, Angie Johnson, Lauren Williams, and Williams's daughter Mary. The mural currently features the names of over 300 women, and is planned to be 2,000 square feet when completed. Black Panther leader Ericka Huggins was consulted on the project. [9] [10] [11] [12] [13]
The Mountain View Cemetery is a 226-acre (91 ha) rural cemetery in Oakland, California, United States. It was established in 1863 by a group of East Bay pioneers under the California Rural Cemetery Act of 1859. The association they formed still operates the cemetery today. Mountain View was designed by Frederick Law Olmsted, the landscape architect who also designed New York City's Central Park and much of UC Berkeley and Stanford University.
Emory Douglas is an American graphic artist. He was a member of the Black Panther Party from 1967 until the Party disbanded in the 1980s. As a revolutionary artist and the Minister of Culture for the Black Panther Party, Douglas created iconography to represent black-American oppression.
The Black Panther Party was a Marxist–Leninist and black power political organization founded by college students Bobby Seale and Huey P. Newton in October 1966 in Oakland, California. The party was active in the United States between 1966 and 1982, with chapters in many major American cities, including San Francisco, New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Seattle, and Philadelphia. They were also active in many prisons and had international chapters in the United Kingdom and Algeria. Upon its inception, the party's core practice was its open carry patrols ("copwatching") designed to challenge the excessive force and misconduct of the Oakland Police Department. From 1969 onward, the party created social programs, including the Free Breakfast for Children Programs, education programs, and community health clinics. The Black Panther Party advocated for class struggle, claiming to represent the proletarian vanguard.
ESTRIA, also Todd Johnson, is a graffiti artist and muralist based in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Edythe (Edy) Boone, is an African-American artist and activist. She has worked as a muralist, counselor, and art teacher throughout her life in an under-served area in California.
Joshua Mays is an American painter, illustrator, and muralist. His work, which typically features black subjects in fantastical settings, is considered by many to be an example of Afrofuturism, although he does not use the label to describe himself. He was born in Denver, and is now based in Oakland.
Dewey Crumpler is an American painter and an associate professor at the San Francisco Art Institute. His work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, and is featured in the permanent collections of the Oakland museum of California; the Triton Museum of Art, Santa Clara, California; and the California African American Museum, Los Angeles. Crumpler has received a Flintridge foundation award, National Endowment for the Arts fellowship grant, and the Fleishacker Foundation, fellowship eureka award. A digital image of his murals have been included in the 2017 Tate Modern’s exhibition Soul of a Nation: Art In the Age of Black Power in London.
Grete Waldau was a German painter and mural artist who specialized in architectural painting. Some of her works were owned by Carol I, the king of Romania, and Wilhelm II, the German emperor.
Many artworks related to the Black Lives Matter movement have been created. These works are either seen as a direct tribute to those who have died or more broadly to the movement. Often the pieces are created in the streets as to be more publicly visible. As such several attempts have been made at preserving the art created in protest on the basis of their artistic merit and cultural significance. Increasingly, the erasure of the artwork has been a problem for preservationists. As such, the artworks below represent a fraction of the works created.
The Black Lives Matter street muralin Indianapolis is a large, colorful mural reading "#BLACKLIVESMATTER", with a raised fist, that 18 artists painted across a downtown roadway in August 2020, as part of the George Floyd protests. The mural is located on Indiana Avenue, the historic hub of the city's Black culture, on the same corner as the Madam C. J. Walker Building.
In August 2020, eight artists painted a Black Lives Matter street mural in Salt Lake City's Washington Square Park, outside the Salt Lake City and County Building, in the U.S. state of Utah. The city had commissioned the painting with a contest "to support and memorialize the national movement to eliminate systemic racism".
We Stand With You is a 2020 mural of Ahmaud Arbery, George Floyd, and Breonna Taylor by artist Christian Grijalva, installed in Portland, Oregon.
A mural of George Floyd was painted by Emma Berger outside Portland, Oregon's Apple Pioneer Place, on June 1, 2020, a week after his murder, against the background of the ongoing protests against police brutality. She expanded the mural to show Ahmaud Arbery and Breonna Taylor and phrases associated with the Black Lives Matter movement. The work was vandalized in August, and repaired by the artist. It was covered by Apple Inc. in December for preservation, then removed in January 2021 to be donated to Don't Shoot PDX.
A "Black Lives Matter" street mural has been painted in Santa Cruz, California.
Many artworks related to the Black Lives Matter movement were created in New York City, during local protests over the murder of George Floyd and other Black Americans.
A "Black Lives Matter" street mural has been painted in Cincinnati, in the U.S. state of Ohio.
A "Black Lives Matter" street mural was painted in Seattle, in the U.S. state of Washington in June 2020. Maintained by the Seattle Department of Transportation, the artwork has survived longer than many Black Lives Matter street murals across the United States.
Nikkolas Smith is an American contemporary artist, illustrator, and activist. He predominantly depicts African-American marginalized voices, as well as social justice in his works. His digital paintings are widely shared on social media and have been featured in Times Square, The Washington Post and The New York Times.
George Floyd was an African American man who was murdered by a Minneapolis police officer on May 25, 2020. He was memorialized via events, protests, artwork installations, organizations, official designations, and campaigns.