February 19, 2021
As widespread interest in the racial justice movement began to fade, artists used their work to remind the nation.
SHOW TRANSCRIPT We step out of the shade, unafraid, the new dawn blooms, said poet Amanda Gorman.
Art has served as a clarion call for justice. So as widespread interest about movements like Black Lives Matter and George Floyd began to fade, Corinne Basabe s team decided to remind the country using art. A billboard is something you can t ignore; it holds your gaze, said Basabe, chair of the George Floyd Justice Billboard Campaign. The trouble with movies is that they move, and conversely, the great thing about painting is that it freezes time, noted artist Don Perlis.
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George Floyd billboard in DC issues statement for justice
By FOX 5 Digital Team
Published
Artist says DC billboard memorializes George Floyd
A new billboard on South Capitol Street has gone up to promote dialogue about racial and social justice.
WASHINGTON (FOX 5 DC) - An activist group teamed up with artist Don Perlis to install a billboard in D.C. to commemorate the death of George Floyd – and to call out for social justice.
The picture shows in stark detail the violent act that took the life of the Minneapolis man – when a police officer locked his knee into Floyd’s neck and refused to move despite his pleas.
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”.