PaintedBlack STL began with an idea and some purple paint.
The group, co-founded by Jayvn Solomon and Tyson Baker, works with local black artists to paint boarded-up businesses in St. Louis, those that were damaged by or closed due to recent protests spurred by the death of Minneapolis man George Floyd in police custody.
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Baker, the group’s organizer, lives near Bella’s Frozen Yogurt. He watched as the storefront was damaged, and out of the destruction came an idea. He contacted Solomon, an artist and graphic designer, and Austin Blankenship, the owner of Bella’s, and the group set to work right away.
“Before we knew it, I was downtown painting those boarded-up windows,” Solomon says.
A rectangle of black dots and lines overlaps with purple semi-circles. The center bears Solomon’s message: a black fist inside a white heart, and the letters “STL BLM”—St. Louis Black Lives Matter. His design was simple: “I wanted to personally communicate something that was concise and really to the point. It’s not necessarily leaning one way or the other, and I know Black Lives Matter tends to be polarizing, depending on the crowd who sees it, but it’s just what it is,” he says. “Another philosophy of mine is, if you’re going to make it, especially if you’re going to make it public, make it look really damn good.”
Blankenship says he was happy with how it turned out.
“We got a lot of great feedback on it. People have loved the movement,” he says. “The day that [Solomon] was painting it, he got a lot of people stopping him, just asking how they can support the PaintedBlack STL group.”
The answer: Check out its Instagram and donate to its GoFundMe. In the 10 days since it first posted its mission on Instagram, PaintedBlack STL amassed over 1,800 followers. In that time, it’s added four more paintings and the founders have heard from about 40 artists and businesses hoping to work with them, Solomon says.
The group has also raised $10,740 on its GoFundMe page as of Monday. The money will go toward buying supplies and paying the artists, an important cause for Solomon, who worries artists, especially black artists, often go underpaid.
He hopes the group will be able to expand, potentially creating permanent murals across downtown and preserving the ones they’ve done so far, potentially even creating a museum display.
The goal will stay the same, though: giving a voice and a platform to the city’s black artists.
“What we wanted to make distinct in this whole effort was that we should be supporting local black artists, really in general, but especially in this effort where there’s so much to be said and expressed,” he says. “We are about a unified St. Louis, and we think part of that is doing the right thing and, in a literal sense, putting our money where our mouths are.”
PaintedBlack STL, Solomon says, is its own form of protest, and while he doesn’t expect it to change the world, he hopes it can at least make some sort of difference in bringing black artists of all kinds into the conversation, and using the art as a form of protest.
“You don’t have to be a super-overt protester to make a difference,” he says. “It’s this and that. If you want to protest and support our black artists and creators here, great. If you feel your actions are better served by doing either/or, that’s cool, too. But there are several ways to [protest]. And what matters is utilizing what you have to do the best job that you can.”
