In an initiative called Paint The City Black, 40 graffiti artists from the GTA and Montreal have gathered in Graffiti Alley to support the Black Lives Matter movement with murals that celebrate Black luminaries like Martin Luther King Jr. and James Baldwin, while memorializing the recently murdered, like Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, Regis Korchinski-Paquet, and Ahmaud Arbery. Beginning on Saturday, they worked on plywood fixed to scaffolding around a construction site on the west side of Augusta Avenue. I went down on Monday afternoon and found artists still working there.
On the way, I followed a woman who looked to have a caterpillar crawling on the back of her upper arm. But because she was walking quickly, it was hard to tell exactly what it was. My first impulse was to be helpful and tell her that she had a caterpillar on her arm. Then it occurred to me that it might not be a caterpillar after all; it could be a giant hairy mole. If I drew attention to it, I might embarrass myself. Better to keep my mouth shut.
After spending a while staring awestruck at the murals, I walked west of the scaffolding and plywood to look at some of the old graffiti. I passed a man talking to a woman and her young daughter. At first I thought nothing of it. I assumed they must know one another. But pausing to take a photo, I overheard some of the conversation—maybe not the words but the general tone—and realized that the older white man was delivering a bit of a lecture to the Black woman and her daughter. I couldn’t hear the words, but it sounded a lot like mansplaining, only it had to do with race. Is racesplaining a word?
The only words I heard clearly came from the woman. She said: well you and I have a very different view of things. She took her daughter’s hand and walked away. The white man stayed behind and admired the murals. I wonder what he saw when he looked at them.
Paint The City Black happens in open space which means that it’s noisy. There’s the sound of traffic from Queen Street to the north, and the sound of construction immediately to the south. Nevertheless, I can imagine approaching that space, maybe early in the morning, when it might almost feel like I’m entering a place of worship, or walking on holy ground. The thing I find about holy ground is that it has the greatest effect when approached with the mouth shut and the spirit open.
