In painter Don Perlis’ re-creation of the brutal killing of George Floyd, an officer kneels on Floyd’s neck and two other officers further pin him down, as another officer in the background looks away from the scene. Floyd’s eyes, frozen in anguish, gaze out toward the viewer.
The oil painting, alongside a quote from the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. — “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere” — is amplified on a 16-by-48-foot billboard at La Cienega Boulevard and Holloway Drive near the Sunset Strip in West Hollywood.
The billboard, which went up Monday, is from a group called the George Floyd Justice Billboard Committee. Its goal is to keep Floyd’s death front and center amid a seemingly never-ending news cycle, which most recently included a shockingly different police response to Trump supporters who violently broke into the nation’s Capitol. In late October, the group ran a similar billboard in New York’s Times Square with a quote from the Dalai Lama: “Be kind whenever possible. It is always possible.” The West Hollywood billboard will remain up for four weeks, and a replica is up in Atlanta.