(Image: CHS)
The City of Seattle and the group of artists that shepherd the creation are hoping for a run of dry October weather for the annual repainting of the Capitol Hill Black Lives Matter street mural.
The Seattle Department of Transportation says the collaboration with the Vivid Matter Collective to care for the mural remains intact along with help from the Seattle Office of Arts & Culture to gather every year to clean up and repaint portions of the street-tall E Pine mural.
SDOT crews were spotted at work on the the clean-up around the mural in September but a planned repainting event never took place due to rain, the collective said.
The city says the repainting “to restore the mural’s colors and vibrancy” requires good weather and is hoped to take place the weekend of October 19th or October 26th depending on the forecast. Current forecasts call for stretches of drizzle that could further delay the effort.
Vivid Matter Collective has yet to announce a new date for its 2024 effort
The Vivid Matter Collective shepherds the long-term responsibility of maintaining the Black Lives Matter mural created by artists and activists in 2020 in the first days of the protests in Seattle.
The “A Collective Thought” work was adopted by the Seattle Department of Transportation in the months following the July 2020 clearance of the Capitol Hill Occupied Protest zone to make the big block-lettered mural a permanent part of the street to help memorialize that summer’s protests that came in the wake of the police killing of George Floyd in Minnesota.
As part of the changes, SDOT reconfigured E Pine to “limit vehicle access to the mural” and also add a much needed crosswalk connecting across the street to Cal Anderson Park.
CHS was there for the summer 2023 work party to touch up the letters as artists honored Elijah Lewis, the community organizer gunned down in an April 2023 road rage shooting just a couple blocks from the mural.
Another symbolic addition to E Pine’s streetscape, meanwhile, also got a refresh. CHS reported here on the recent work to repaint the vandalized Broadway Pride crosswalk.
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Wish it was more visible or in a more visible area. You can’t really easily see it thru the yellow traffic sticks and it being in the middle of the road.
I’m all for this mural continuing to exist — and find the attitudes expressed regarding this mural and generally on this blog to be abhorrent — but this is a terrible, no good location that just takes up space *in the middle of a street* and can’t be seen by the public.
We really need to have a discussion about some way of relocating, i.e., reproducing, this mural somewhere that is more vertical.
This current situation is just not working, both from a visibility perspective and in terms of traffic.
And, again, I’m not looking to hear at all from the creepy conservative voices on here. The mural *should* be a part of the community, but its current location is just terrible.
“In terms of traffic”? That entire stretch of Pine for many blocks is one lane in either direction. So, this mural did not displace any lane whatsoever. Pray tell, how is this mural affecting traffic on half a block through the hill.
There were bike lanes in both directions that were removed.
Anything taking up that much space on a roadway will affect traffic, period.
More tho the mural isn’t viewable in its current position, we need to find another place for it.
You’re wrong. It was a turn lane. I’m not against the mural, but it did take a lane away. It’s worse for bikers now as well as getting to the bike lane on the other side of Broadway to go downtown is more difficult without that extra lane.
Totally agree. I’ll remind people that when this was put there, disabled people lost 2 important, even critical bus stops. I want it, but not there.
I agree that the location of this mural does not make sense. It just pointlessly blocks use of a big chunk of a busy road. When you are on the road you can’t even read what it says, so no one thinking “gee why can’t I drive hear” is even being messaged to by the mural. Pointless virtue signaling by the artists and their city enablers.
More traffic in front of the park?
It’s helped immensely. It’s a walkable area now.
I’m all about public art, and the cause here is great, but I just can’t help feeling like this sort of thing should be the very first thing to drop off when the budget isn’t balanced. There are far more important things to be addressed.While we’re at it, maybe we can stop paying absurd money for “traffic calming” speed lumps in arterials, especially those with no history of pedestrian deaths.
Yes but one should never let a good virtue signal opportunity go to waste…
You do understand that art is in the budget. The cities art collection is vast.