Updated on January 30, 2021 at 9:18 am
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Drivers entering the District via South Capitol Street will now see a large billboard on the left near Audi Field.
It features an oil painting that depicts the death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police.
Painter Don Perlis’s work, entitled “Floyd, is an unflinching look at the moment burned indelibly into the conscious of so many last summer.
One police officer kneels on George Floyd’s neck, two others pin him down further.
Floyd’s eyes, frozen in anguish, gaze out toward the viewer.
To one side, a quote from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.: “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”
On 26 May 2020, people protested in Minneapolis against police violence after the death of George Floyd Photo: Fibonacci Blue
The advocacy group behind a public work depicting the death of George Floyd says they still hope to show the piece in the city of Minneapolis even though the plan was thwarted last year. Don Perlis’s painting, entitled
Floyd (2020)
, was shown in Times Square in New York last October and is currently on show on a 16ft by 48ft billboard at La Cienega Boulevard and Holloway Drive near Sunset Strip in West Hollywood.
The billboard has been organised by the New York-based George Floyd Justice Billboard Committee, a group of New York-based artists that, according to its website, aims “to get a painting of George Floyd s death by Don Perlis displayed prominently on billboards around the country”.
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 Lam
Clear Channel Outdoor pulled the billboard ahead of its planned display next month.
December 14, 2020
Harlem s George Floyd tribute wall at the New York Public Library s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. Photo by Sarah Cascone.
Billboard company Clear Channel Outdoor has pulled the plug on an artist’s billboard in Minneapolis depicting the death of George Floyd, an unarmed Black man, at the hands of the city’s police. The display, based on an oil painting by artist Donald Perlis, was set to go on view the week of January 11, 2021, just ahead of Martin Luther King Jr. Day.
“The violent and tortured death of Jesus Christ is depicted in every art museum, every church, every Christian Institution in the world. Are they rejecting the martyrdom of George Floyd because he was a Black man?” Perlis said in a statement. “This is censorship at its worst.”
An advertising company has rejected an artist’s depiction of George Floyd’s death that was set to be displayed on a billboard in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in January.
Clear Channel Outdoor, the owner of the Minneapolis billboard where the art was set to be displayed, sent an email to Brooklyn artist Don Perlis on Thursday, informing him that the outdoor rendering of his oil-on-canvas painting entitled Floyd was being rejected because it depicts “acts of violence.”
“Unfortunately, after going through our PR team, your Bulletin design has been rejected because it ‘Depicts Acts of Violence’ … I apologize for the inconvenience. Is there another image (maybe just of George Floyd) that you can switch out the image for?” the email read, KARE 11 reported.