“Art has always been something I did. You know how you get introduced to art in elementary school and people eventually just stop doing it or stop caring about it? I wasn’t one of them. I maintained the interest and kept going. It was something that always felt right to me. People inspire me to create; they always have. Everyone has a story to be told, and I like to tell them in my own way. “

The Longview Museum of Fine Arts is bringing in a unique set of works as part of its Black History Month celebration. Four large-scale paintings created by emerging Black artists in Wilmington, Delaware, originally painted and installed on the boarded-up storefronts of a main street in the city’s downtown area, will be on display alongside photos of the artistic process.
The boards went up on the windows all over Wilmington’s downtown area on May 31st, 2020, just hours after the national civil unrest over the murder of George Floyd. The works were commissioned by Jonathan Whitney and Eliza Jarvis of Flux Creative Consulting and Joe del Tufo of Moonloop Photography. The three organizers sought to find a way to commemorate that moment in time and give Black artists a blank canvas on which to express themselves.
Artists James Wyatt, JaQuanne LeRoy, Jannah Williams, Erica Jones and E.Lizé completed works that were on view downtown for several months and gained widespread press as word spread across the nation. “I wanted to show that the history of what we’re fighting for today goes back years and years and years,” says Jannah Williams, the final artist of the four to create her work. “And we’re still fighting for it in different ways, but history is repeating itself as well.”

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As the leaves become more vibrant with the changing of the seasons, the City of Wilmington, De., is just a little bit brighter these days, thanks in part to the efforts of several community leaders who view art as the pathway to the civic soul. Popping up across the city are vibrant murals turning drab canvases of brick walls and boarded up windows into welcoming communities and neighborhoods.

In the space of ten minutes, three passersbys on the 200 block of West 9th Street stop to praise the mural that artist Erica Jones is in the process of painting. On a step ladder, jars of milky paint, all manner of magenta, lie in wait, as Jones considers her progress on her work, a larger-than-life portrait of slain Black Lives Matter activist Oluwatoyin “Toyin” Salau. The nineteen-year old’s body was found in Tallahassee, Florida after she posted a series of disturbing tweets detailing a sexual assault she had experienced as a result of her homelessness. But here IN Wilmington, Jones is painting Toyin less as a victim and more of a bold and luminous woman.