Boarded Up - Landscapes, Portraits, Architecture, and Street Photography

BOARDED UP

On May 31st, 2020, Santa Monica, a coastal city that is over 70% white, was site to a Black Lives Matter protest attended by looting. The city’s main commercial district, located around 3rd Street Promenade, subsequently boarded up, either to cover broken windows or in anticipation of a second wave of pillaging; Abbot Kinney, a smaller commercial district several miles south in Venice, did so as well. Over the following two weeks – and in part due to the efforts of a spontaneously-created local organization, Paint the City Peaceful – artists and other well-meaning individuals from all over the city covered the boards in mostly BLM-themed murals that ranged from beautiful and poignant to crude and perhaps missing the mark. For two weeks at most, Santa Monica was a vast outdoor art gallery, exhibiting a largely non-black community’s artistic efforts at supporting and expressing alliance with BLM. Once the fear of repeat looting faded and the state lunged into its ill-fated reopening, however, this gallery came down piece by piece until only a handful remained.