By james art Last week, a new mural by artist Shepard Fairey hit the streets of Durham, North Carolina. Rendered in Fairey’s familiar agitprop aesthetic, the large-scale wheat paste of Vice President Kamala Harris features the 2024 presidential candidate gazing stoically at a small downtown park. The text at the bottom of the piece offers a call to action that reflects the direction of the vice president’s gaze, and her campaign slogan is: “Forward.”
The mural is one of five located in five different states, most of which are considered battlegrounds in this U.S. presidential election — the ones that are seen as deciding the outcome. “It’s not just art for art’s sake,” says Wyatt Kloss, who has collaborated with Fairey, his company Obey Giant, and a legion of “trusted and committed souls” to install murals in North Carolina, Georgia, Kentucky and Pennsylvania. The goal is to inspire action in the final days before the election and get voters to vote.
Kloss, born in Raleigh, now based in Los Angeles, is the founder and creative director of Big Bowl of Ideas, an advocacy and marketing firm that spans the arts, social activism and political engagement. “Cultural organizing is fundamentally about communicating with people based on where they are,” he says. He worked with Fairey and others to finance the distribution of the artist’s works hope poster supporting Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign. “It’s about the audience and knowing that audience,” he says. “How do they go about their day? How do they go through life? And how do they get information?’
Harris’ mural, located at the intersection of Parrish and Orange streets, stands on Durham’s historic Black Wall Street, an enclave of black business owners who created a financial center for companies including North Carolina Mutual and the Mechanics and Farmers banks that served as the financial pillars of the city’s black community in the early 1900s. Historical markers commemorating the area’s rich history guide visitors to the area, originally dedicated to the economic boom. The street is now home to Ella Westa black-owned art gallery run by Linda Shropshire.
“It means so much to Black Wall Street’s legacy to honor Vice President Harris with this message because Black Wall Street has always championed excellence, moving forward and doing what it takes to make sure the next generation is far better than ours Shropshire says.
The mural, located above the gallery and facing Orange Street, reunited Shropshire and Kloss, who first collaborated decades ago when the two met at a school government camp. They have been in touch ever since. On Oct. 17, the first day of early voting in North Carolina, the two attended the mural site for “Kamala Day,” a celebratory afternoon designed to encourage voter engagement that included refreshments and local DJs. The gallery-hosted event also sponsors opportunities for visitors to mobilize their fellow voters in a letter-writing campaign. The small crowd of attendees included family, friends, community members and corporate leaders who cheered on a motorcade that included Harris’ vice president, Minnesota Gov. Tim Waltz and former President Bill Clinton as it passed the mural on its way to a nearby campaign event.
Visitors who showed their “I Voted” stickers and participated in the letter-writing campaign received copies of Fairey’s Forward poster he created in August shortly after Harris became the Democratic nominee following President Joe Biden’s withdrawal from the race.
By coincidence, the vice president is visiting Black Wall Street and Ella West Gallery in person last March, along with North Carolina Governor Roy Cooper, as part of President Biden’s Investing in America program, initiative aimed at job creation and private sector investment. For Shropshire, that experience came to a head during the activities and festivities on October 17. She says, “To me, it’s like we’re the dreams of our ancestors, and we’re embodying the dream today by bringing the vice president and her energy back here.”