Truly humbled and honored to be apart of the Black Lives Matter mural in Charlotte. The organizers had 48 hours to put this together and we had less than a day to paint each of our respective letters. Shout out to Sam Guzzie and Dammit Wesley for putting this together. The result and media attention speaks for itself. I had the letter “I” in LIVES. What does it mean?
I knew I had to execute fairly quickly so I wanted something that was going to be as impactful as possible within our time constraints. I was quickly drawn to the idea of using type so I was playing around with the idea BLM and CLT. I liked that the two words shared an "L" so I initially was sketching a bunch of ideas around that. I honestly don't remember what happened next, I was in a zone, but somehow I got the idea to use a "code" and I was off and running. I played around with a few different concepts using this code idea and eventually landed where I am now. I typically have a signature aesthetic and color palette I am known for, but I abandoned that and used black and white to show the coming together of black and white. The piece itself is called "Hidden Figures" because of the hidden code and a play on words from the movie/book. The message itself has nothing to do with the movie, but I used it as an opportunity to create awareness to the book/movie. It’s meant to be difficult and it’s meant for people to come together to create dialogue. There’s no sign language, no Roman numerals, and no math involved. Hint: Each symbol represents a letter. Good luck deciphering ;)
PHOTO: Will Jenkins
