The Diatribe Unveils Murals In Grand Rapids Anti-Racist Art Project
Part 1
On Monday, September 13, 2021, seven new murals on Black and Brown owned buildings painted by Black and Brown artists were unveiled. The murals were revealed as part of non-profit The Diatrib's 49507 Project, a collaborative effort focused on shifting the perception of the 49507 zip code towards positivity. In this interview with the Executive Director of Diatribe Marcel Price, he discusses the origins of the organization, how the murals came about and more.
GRT: How did the Diatribe get its start?
Marcel Price: Diatribe uses performing arts to empower young people to share their stories to raise awareness of social issues and to be active members of their community. We got started a number of years ago as performing artist that wanted to make the first ever blind, deaf friendly ArtPrize exhibit. What we didn't know was that there were so many kids and such a large education component to ArtPrize. So when we were doing all of these pop up shows and shows that had sign language interpreters and we had all of these videos with closed captioning and sign language, before we knew it there were droves of kids, young people and teachers who were coming to see us perform. A lot of teachers then started asking us if we had ever thought about doing this kind of work with kids, but at the time we felt that we were not meant to be in front of young people because we were night life entertainers, but before we knew it teachers were constantly staying on us about young people not having a lot of artists and creatives who look like, move like or talk like them and they really wanted us to give working with young people a try. So we came into some schools on career day and talked about what we did and before we knew it, the kids kept asking us to come back. If we fast forward to last year and we were in twenty to thirty schools a year doing after school programs, assemblies and work shops getting students to talk about their community and the neighborhood and the world around them and that is how we really got started.
GRT: How did you get involved in the project?
Marcel Price: I am one of the founding members of the organization so I help to find and create the ideas that is the DiaTribe along with a few other dynamic human beings. Gleason, who is now the director of education and Foster who is now the Donor Experience Manager.
GRT: How did the 49507 Project come about?
Marcel Price: The way the 49507 idea came about is that after the murder of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, we didn't agree how Grand Rapids responded to that and what I mean by that is that I don't agree with how the city as an entity responded to it. There was a lot of windows boarded up that were not broken and if you let the news tell it, all of down town was on fire. We had students and some of our teaching artists down there and when certain powers that be decided to start painting over some of the windows and boards, they started policing the language and saying that you coundn't paint things with messages like Black Lives Matter on them and you couldn't use certain language when painting on the boards. We didn't like the way that they were censoring people as though they were trying to control the narrative of what these artists were doing and also, they were paying the artists peanuts. So we said to ourselves, "what would a liberated art project look like?" What we quickly realized is that a lot of Blacks in Grand Rapids don't feel comfortable downtown. A lot of Black and Brown people don't feel like downtown is there's. So we decided that if we were going to do an art project, then it needs to be in our neighborhoods and we also realized that we alone could never come up with what a liberated art project looks like and that we needed to leave it to the community, because only the community can define what collected liberation looks like. So we have a program called Writing To Right Wrongs where we teach students about red lining and gentrification and we teach them about how our neighborhoods were engineered to look how they look today. So we thought, what if we taught three programs at Ottawa Hills High School where we teach students these things and what if the second day of class we brought in seven of the most talented Black and Brown artists we could find. So we did that and we asked the students if they felt that the city adequately invested in their neighborhood and what kind of art do they think would really speak for the neighborhood the way that they wanted it to be spoken for. We asked them what type of art they wanted to see in their senior pictures and what type of art did they want to see reclaim their space. All the artists took notes on what the students were saying and then we realized that we also needed to do this with adults and elders, so we did five more listening sessions with Black and Brown folks who had roots in the neighborhood and we opened it up to the public and use different people in the neighborhood to reach out to folks to fill these listening sessions and did four in English and one in Spanish. Again we asked people if they felt that the city adequately invested in their neighborhood, what would investment look like for the people, what things they wanted the city to prioritize and what types of art they wanted to see. The artists listened and the artists used those listening sessions to create a draft and then we took those drafts to the business owners and let them know that this is what the community and young people are saying and this is the art that we came up with. So the business owners got to listen to that and give some feed back. What if we did real public art that was shaped by young people and shaped by the people who live here and shaped by the business owners? So that's how these murals got brought to life and the idea is that they stand for what people want to see and what people are feeling and thinking in the seven different murals have different themes, vibes and ideologies that came from these listening sessions.
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