Shawn Harper/American Family Insurance Institute
"Let's Talk About It" documents the murals downtown, but also is meant to spark conversation.
Let’s Talk About It: The Art, the Artists and the Racial Justice Movement on Madison’s State Street is more than a coffee table book. It’s a conversation-starter for a hard conversation.
The hefty volume (more than four pounds!), complete with slipcase, is a joint project of the city of Madison and the American Family Insurance Institute for Corporate and Social Impact. It documents the more than 100 murals commissioned by the city created on the plywood that covered downtown store windows following the protests of the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis at the end of May.
The photographs in the book document the art, which changed over time, sometimes due to added graffiti, sometimes due to the wear and tear of the elements, sometimes just because store owners removed the boards.
Project director Nyra Jordan, with the American Family institute, hopes that the book and the art will “open the door to conversation,” as its title suggests. “Not just, ‘Oh, this art is great’ but ‘This piece of art makes me feel uncomfortable, and why am I feeling uncomfortable?’”
American Family Insurance Institute
Nyra Jordan
Jordan foresees the conversation moving to questions like “Why were artists compelled to show up in this way?” to “What’s my role within my community? How can I help, how can I bring unity and move forward?” Jordan hopes that “we sit with it and not move past it quickly. So we do have the conversation that we need to have, and that we don’t try to move past this because we don’t like where we are.”
The book follows a path from the Capitol Square at the top of State Street toward campus, documenting each city-commissioned mural along the way, with photographs of the art, sometimes while the artists were still working on the murals. “It is intentional how it’s laid out,” says Jordan. “We’re trying to recreate the feeling of seeing all the murals, and recreate the feeling of the moment, of what was going on last summer.” Jordan and colleague Adam Schrager tried to contact each artist for a statement; when an artist didn’t want to provide text or couldn’t be contacted, they tried to pull some relevant description from Instagram posts or other media. Most often an Instagram or website is also included, so readers can learn more about the artists and their art.
“We didn’t edit those statements,” says Jordan. “Those are the voices of the artists.”
Sometimes the artists focus on the artistic side of their work: “This is a visual representation of beauty within color,” says Silvan Fleming Jr. of his work at the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art. Others focus on where the personal meets the political: “The simple fact is that Blacks are dying in this world at a time when we are supposed to be thriving. And, it’s like, it does not matter!” writes Comfort Wasikhongo of his work called “George Floyd.”
Throughout the process of making the book, Jordan tried to keep everything “authentic, to capture the movement. The font used is called Martin, and it’s one that was often used during the Civil Rights movement.”
American Family also offered the artists access to a business accelerator for artists and entrepreneurs, which provides information and guidance on such topics as copyright law, networking and business models.
Hedi Rudd
Hedi Rudd, one of the many photographers whose work is featured in the book, says she was down on State Street taking pictures even before she was contacted by city arts program administrator Karin Wolf to start officially documenting the murals.
“Whenever you can, you try to pull something else into the photo,” Rudd says, to make it more than just a straight-on catalogue of the art. “Still, you are aware that the art here is the art, and not your photograph.” Rudd says that the photographers understood the historical significance of what they were doing: “It was more than just taking pictures.”
Ultimately, Rudd looks at the book project as a reminder that this summer’s protests about racial injustice “could have torn us apart, but the art helped us come together.”
Anwar Floyd-Pruitt, an artist who completed several murals, one on the Overture Center and one at Warby Parker, says that having all the stories in a single book “feels important. Having a cohesive document of all the artwork is really special.”
Floyd-Pruitt says that for him, it feels almost like a yearbook, as a way to remember all the other artists he met and talked with while he was on State Street creating. He thinks the book, as a physical object, is “beautiful and one that can be prominently displayed,” but he also hopes that it will function to “keep the conversation going. Art can be a tool, a conversation-starter.”
Floyd-Pruitt hopes that now, post-presidential inauguration, we will have “a moment to exhale, a moment to reflect — something people really haven’t been able to do.” He hopes there will be an opportunity to get together on Zoom, or sometime even in person in a public forum, “to further decode these works.”
“Maybe now we can do a deeper dive into the art, and the social and racial injustice that spurred all this.”
Those wanting a copy of the book should visit the website; there, American Family says there “may be a wait to get a copy as we’re trying to keep up with demand.”
