The plywood came first. When the protests following the killing of George Floyd reached New York in late May, businesses across Manhattan boarded up their windows in anticipation of unrest. Within days, the boards were covered. SoHo, which had been a ghost town since the pandemic shuttered its boutiques and galleries in March, woke up one morning to find its streets transformed into an open-air exhibition of raw, urgent, extraordinary art.
The murals appeared with astonishing speed. On Broadway between Houston and Canal, nearly every boarded storefront became a canvas. Portraits of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery were painted with technical skill that belied the improvised conditions. Statements of rage and solidarity — some eloquent, some raw, all sincere — filled every available surface. By the first week of June, the stretch had become a pilgrimage site, drawing thousands of visitors who walked the sidewalks in a kind of open-air gallery crawl, phones raised, some weeping, many standing in silence before images that captured something words could not.
The Artists
The artists who transformed SoHo's plywood walls into a memorial and a manifesto came from every corner of the city's creative community. Some were established figures in the street art world — veterans of the Bushwick Collective and the Welling Court Mural Project in Astoria. Others were fine artists who had never painted outdoors before but felt compelled by the moment to take their work to the street. Still others were amateurs, young people with spray cans and a need to express something that could not be contained by Instagram or Twitter.
Jasmine Brooks, a painter who had been showing work in Chelsea galleries for five years before the pandemic closed them all, spent three days painting a 15-foot portrait of Breonna Taylor on a boarded-up Prada storefront on Broadway. "I had never done anything like this," she said. "I work on small canvases in a quiet studio. But the studio was closed, the galleries were closed, and the streets were the only place left. It felt like the only honest place to put art right now."
Beyond SoHo
The art was not confined to Manhattan's most affluent shopping district. In Williamsburg, the walls along Bedford Avenue and the blocks around the Marcy Avenue subway station bloomed with new work. In the South Bronx, where a vibrant mural culture had existed for decades, artists added new layers to the neighborhood's visual conversation. In East Harlem, on 116th Street and along the corridors of Third Avenue, murals addressed both the national reckoning with racial injustice and the specific toll that the pandemic was taking on communities of color.
The geographic spread of the work was significant. Street art in New York had always existed in a complicated relationship with the gallery system. Banksy's 2013 residency had highlighted the tension between street art as democratic expression and street art as commodifiable product. The 2020 explosion bypassed the gallery system entirely, not by choice but by circumstance. There were no openings, no press releases, no sales. There was only the work and the wall.
Preservation and Loss
Almost as soon as the murals appeared, questions arose about their preservation. The plywood boards were, by their nature, temporary. As businesses began to reopen and remove their protective barriers, the artwork faced destruction. Several organizations mobilized to document and, where possible, save the work. The Studio Museum in Harlem and the Museum of the City of New York both undertook photographic documentation projects. A handful of boards were carefully removed and donated to cultural institutions. But the vast majority of the work was lost — discarded, painted over, or destroyed as the city slowly reopened.
This impermanence was, for many of the artists, part of the point. Street art has always existed in tension with the idea of permanence. It is made for the moment, and its power derives in part from its vulnerability to weather, time, and the next artist's spray can. The 2020 murals were not created for museums. They were created for the people walking the streets on a specific set of days, in a specific state of grief and anger and hope, and their relevance was inseparable from that context.
But the impact endured beyond the physical work. The explosion of street art during the summer of 2020 reestablished something that the increasingly commercialized New York art world had been in danger of losing: the idea that art could be public, free, unsanctioned, and urgent. That it could appear on a wall overnight and change the way a person saw the block they had walked down a thousand times. The galleries eventually reopened. The boarded storefronts came down. But the permission that the summer of 2020 granted — to make art in public, for the public, about what matters right now — has not been revoked.
