Quaranzine 11.5

QUARANZINE MINI ISSUE 11½
AUG 17, 2020

WASH YOUR HANDS & STAY TF HOME!!!!!

FOLLOW US ON INSTAGRAM @quaranzine.club

Please consider donating to the Anti Police-Terror Project, a Black-led, multi-racial organization that seeks to build a replicable and sustainable model to eradicate police terror in communities of color.

🕸🍄✨

The Murals After

by Molly Bolten

In the days following first week of major protests in June, Oakland's artists transformed the boarded up banks and pharmacies and mega-chain coffee shops into gallery walls—exorcising the pain and glory of the people onto raw plywood.

I walked down Broadway Street in downtown Oakland one late Sunday afternoon to photograph the art before it got painted over or torn down to repair the shattered windows. The streets were quiet and reverberant and the shadows were long. I thought about context and the gatekeepers of culture, the way we learn to value art according to where and how it is presented. The way our society scorns, then lifts up black culture, holding it just out of its creators’ reach. I thought about who decides what the people see, whose work is studied in college art history classes and whose work gets torn down with an old building in favor of luxury condominiums and a City Target.

I thought about Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, Tony McDade, Oscar Grant and so many more once living and breathing whose names we don't know, whose loss at the hands of white settler colonialism coats the hearts of their suriving loved ones in a dark veil. Remember that the fight for justice cannot be contained. It overflows in its inevitability, with voices and cookouts and music and murals and radical compassion. As Nina Simone once said, "an artist's duty, as far as I'm concerned, is to reflect the times." Consider them reflected.

Artist links are available under photos of signed work.