Miami Design District billboard targets racial equality

As a creative response to support racial equality, the Miami Design District has partnered with the nationally recognized project “For Freedoms” and produced a two-panel artistic billboard, which is currently on display on walls of the Moore Building. 

The billboard, facing Northeast Second Avenue, was created by Haitian-Miami artist Adler Guerrier and is to be on view through Oct. 31. The pixelated art display includes the poetic text “claimed for living, for love and trouble,” which questions ideas of freedom. 

“We really felt that we needed a visual response on the Black Lives Matter movement and what’s very beautiful about this project is that it’s not in a protest language – it resonates on a more artistic form,” said Claire Breukel. Miami Design District’s and Dacra’s curator.

“For Freedoms” is a platform for creative civic engagement, discourse and direct action. The initiative movement was founded in 2016 by artists Hank Willis Thomas and Eric Gottesman; and Inspired by American artist Norman Rockwell’s paintings of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms (1941), which advocates freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear through exhibitions, installations and public programs. In 2018, For Freedoms launched the “50 State Initiative: the largest creative collaboration in U.S. history.”

“We imagine the billboard’s functions as a fabric-self with the language of poetry and desire. The billboard wants to be that like a fabric being stretched out on the Moore Building and wanted to wrap around someone,” said Mr. Guerrier, who used photography and digital components to create the two-panel billboard. 

Spectators can explore the textures of palm trees and botanical bright sunny colors. The use of the mind as artwork along with a camera, paper and pencil and digital software is how the art form came together, Mr. Guerrier said.

It was very important to help Miami’s creative community during a time many of them have lost jobs and places to create their art, Ms. Breukel added. “Just like international artists, our local Miami artists are as good, and we want to show it on an even playing field.”