Last week, a new mural by the artist Shepard Fairey appeared on the streets of Durham, North Carolina. The large-scale wheatpaste of Vice President Kamala Harris, rendered in Fairey’s familiar agitprop aesthetic, features the 2024 presidential candidate casting a stoic gaze over a small park in the city’s downtown district. Text at the bottom of the piece proffers a call to action that echoes the direction of the Vice President’s gaze, and her campaign’s slogan’s: “Forward.”
The mural is one of five situated in five different states, most of which are considered battlegrounds in this US presidential election—those that are seen as decisive to the outcome. “This is not just about art for art’s sake,” says Wyatt Closs, who collaborated with Fairey, his company Obey Giant and a legion of “trusted and committed souls” to install murals in North Carolina, Georgia, Kentucky and Pennsylvania. The goal is to inspire action in the final days before the election and drive voters to the polls.
Closs, a Raleigh native now based in Los Angeles, is the founder and creative director of Big Bowl of Ideas, an advocacy and marketing firm that spans the arts, social activism and political engagement. “Cultural organising is fundamentally about communicating with people based on where they’re at,” he says. He worked with Fairey and others to fund the distribution of the artist’s Hope poster in support of Barack Obama’s presidential campaign in 2008. “It’s about audience and knowing that audience,” he says. “How do they go through their day? How do they go through life? And how do they get information?”
The Harris mural, located at the intersection of Parrish and Orange streets, stands on Durham’s historic Black Wall Street, an enclave of Black business owners who created a financial hub for companies including North Carolina Mutual and the Mechanics and Farmers banks, which served as the financial pillars of the city’s Black community in the early 1900s. Historical markers commemorating the district’s rich history guide visitors to the area originally dedicated to economic uplift. The street is now home to Ella West, a Black, women-owned art gallery run by Linda Shropshire.
“It means so much to the legacy of Black Wall Street to honour Vice President Harris with this message because Black Wall Street has always championed excellence, moving forward and doing what it takes to make sure the next generation is far better than ours,” Shropshire says.
The mural, located above the gallery and facing Orange street, reunited Shropshire and Closs who first collaborated decades ago when the two met during a student government camp. They have remained in touch ever since. On 17 October, the first day of early voting in North Carolina, the pair were on hand at the mural site for “Kamala Day” , a festive afternoon intended to encourage voter engagement that featured refreshments and local DJs. The event, hosted by the gallery, also sponsored opportunities for visitors to mobilise fellow voters in a letter-writing campaign. The small crowd in attendance included family, friends, community members and corporate leaders who cheered on a motorcade containing Harris’s running mate, the Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, and former President Bill Clinton, who drove past the mural en route to a nearby campaign event.
Visitors who showed their “I voted” stickers and participated in the letter-writing campaign received copies of the Fairey’s Forward poster, which he created in August shortly after Harris became the Democratic candidate following President Joe Biden’s withdrawal from the race.
Coincidentally, the Vice President visited Black Wall Street and Ella West Gallery in person last March, along with North Carolina Governor Roy Cooper, as part of President Biden’s Investing in America programme, an initiative focused on job creation and private sector investments. For Shropshire, that experience came full circle during the activities and celebrations on 17 October. She says: “To me it is like we are the dreams of our ancestors and we are personifying the dream today by bringing the Vice President and her energy back here.”
