BY KATIE HAYES CONTRIBUTING WRITER JUNE 15, 2020 05:45 AM
As children play on the sidewalk, multiple artists are priming plywood and painting scenes while a small crowd watches. Earlier, a 4-year-old girl contributed a salmon that dances across the bright wall filled with names and portraits. Her work helps tell the story of oppression.
The little girl’s grandfather, Robert Upham, sits on a burgundy office chair on the sidewalk. Upham is the artist facilitating the project, and has spent 16 hours a day on the mural. He will continue to do so until the plywood comes down.
“They took his breath away,” said Upham in reference to George Floyd. “So this artwork — for all of us participating — it’s our breath, it’s our art, it’s our statement and it’s a representation of the lives of these people.”
The 90-foot mural is on Fifth Avenue, directly across from Capitol Theater. Local artists have painted large portraits of Black people, indigenous people and people of color who have died. Many were killed by the police.
In the center of the mural is a portrait of George Floyd, his name in large letters above him. Near his portrait is one of Breonna Taylor, a black woman who was shot by police inside her apartment in Louisville, Kentucky. Another is of John T. Williams, a Native American woodcarver who was shot four times by a Seattle police officer in 2010.
On May 25, George Floyd was killed by a Minneapolis police officer during his arrest. For nearly 9 minutes, Minneapolis Police Officer Derek Chauvin knelt on Floyd’s neck while Floyd repeatedly said, “I can’t breathe.” The officer now faces murder charges.
Protests to end systematic racism and police brutality erupted across the nation. People have taken to the streets in some form or another nearly every night in Olympia since late May. Some business owners have boarded up their windows to prevent vandalism.
Upham is an activist, storyteller and artist who rents office space in the building that the mural covers. When he learned his building would be mostly covered in plywood, he began planning a mural as his form of protest. It was one that didn’t require him to be in a large crowd during COVID-19.
Upham primarily creates ledger art on antique accounting ledger paper. He is a Dakota Sioux and Salish Indian, as well as part Irish. His art promotes his history and culture.
As he watches over his paint supplies on the sidewalk, he directs a blonde-haired teen who asks if he can help. Roughly 40 people had contributed to the mural as of last Wednesday, all directed by Upham. Like the teen, some just approach him on the street and ask if they can contribute.
Ayda Rose and Vincent Li have spent days on the mural after learning about the project through word of mouth. Rose first came to donate paint, but then she made the stencil for Floyd’s face, as well as salmon stencils, and began touching up other parts of the mural. Li learned about the mural from Rose, and joined in when he saw people painting.
“I’ve been dealing with this level of anxiety in my tummy and I don’t know how to cope with it,” Li said. “I want to help, but I’m not great at speaking. I’m not great at putting together bills and stuff, but what I can do is I can paint decently. I wanted to at least use that to commemorate and pay respect to the victims of police brutality.”
Rose said she hadn’t joined a rally downtown, but was considering participating in one.
“As an artist, sometimes it’s hard to know your place and how to get involved in this type of social uprising, where you fit in, what you can do,” Rose said. “I know before I saw Robert’s call I was really conflicted about how I can get involved.”
At the base of these protests, she said, is that the current justice system does not serve all people. She notes that these frustrations aren’t new.
“The so-called justice system that we have in place is not serving the people,” Rose said. “People are frustrated and George Floyd has kind of been a spark to ignite all of this. These frustrations have been simmering under the surface for a long time.”
Li considers lack of police accountability one of the major drivers of the protests, but said it isn’t the only one.
“We’ve always been told that if you break a law, or if you do something wrong, if you hurt someone, there are consequences to that,” Li said. “I think that people being able to get away with that, I don’t want to say that’s the basis of it, but it’s part of it. It’s one cog in this crazy machine that we’re all in right now. I think if we can fix that, then I think we’ll be heading towards a better place.”
Upham said he isn’t trying to co-opt the Black Lives Matter movement, but he believes that Black people, indigenous people and people of color are bound together by the oppressive nature of Euro-centric history.
“I just think that with the mural project, me being a business owner that the boards are against, it allows me to facilitate and coach what goes on here,” Upham said. “So we have George Floyd, who is the spark of the flame of the fire of the rage against the police force that has used force against the people and squeezed the light out of us. Everybody is tired of it. I’m just as tired of it as a Black person and I’m an American Indian.”
Upham dumps out an entire tray of paint on the ground in search of the right blue, and leaves the teenager priming some of the plywood.
“When I woke up and I saw George Floyd being strangled, I cried,” Upham said. “I wish I was there to hit one of those cops over the head with a 2-by-4, but nobody is allowed to do that — question the cops’ authority and what is going on right now.
“There are a lot of 2-by-4s being swung right now, and I don’t condone that, but if I’m there witnessing a killing, I would at least hope that I would have tried to protect him, despite myself going to jail. I guess I just want it to be said that I cried when I saw him being strangled.”
Across the nation, people are pushing to defund police departments.
In Olympia, the city council temporarily banned the Olympia Police Department from using chemical weapons — such as tear gas, pepper spray and pepper balls — to control crowds. At the Olympia City Council’s most recent meeting on Tuesday, roughly 50 people spoke during the public comment period.
Many voiced support for defunding and disarming the OPD. People also voiced support for investigating whether any Olympia police officers have ties to white supremacist organizations, after a photo circulated on social media of an officer with armed men making the 3 Percenters sign, a sign has been adopted by some white supremacists.
“We are in this fight together, fighting against institutions that try to suppress us and our voice,” Upham said. “We’re all afraid of the police. Most people of color are afraid of the police. Myself, I don’t call the police. I respect them, I’ll talk to them like anybody else, but they’re not who I will call to enforce any kind of safety because I’ve never seen any kind of evidence they work that way.”
Li is the one who painted a portrait of Yvonne McDonald, a black woman who died in Olympia in 2018. Some members of McDonald’s family allege that the OPD mishandled her case. McDonald’s niece, Talauna Reed, is currently in a legal battle with Thurston County to obtain Yvonne McDonald’s autopsy report.
McDonald’s sister, Sharon Smith, requested the artists add a portrait of McDonald to the mural, even though she has not been part of the activism around her sister’s death.
“They just blow it off, like my sister’s life didn’t matter,” Smith said. “It did matter.”
Smith said that, for her, justice for her sister would be OPD reopening McDonald’s case and finding who was responsible for her death.
“I want the Olympia Police Department to do their job and do the right thing,” Smith said. “I want them to open up an investigation into my sister’s death, like they would do if it’s their family member — like they would do for anybody else.”
Interim Olympia Police Chief Aaron Jelcick declined to comment. “This case was investigated and I really don’t want to comment any further on this case,” he said.
Six months before losing her sister, Smith’s mother also passed away.
“This (mural) means a lot to me, to everybody,” Smith said. “… I look at my sister’s picture on my wall, my mom’s picture and I just cry. Her birthday is coming up, you know. She should be here. She should still be here, whatever she’s doing, she should be here. But she’s not here.”
Smith tried to pay Li for the portrait, but he wouldn’t accept the money.
“Whatever we’re good at, we should use that to help push the world forward,” Li said. “Or at least make the place we live in just a little more bearable.”
