Digital Poster, Black Lives Matter/Defund the Police

This poster created by Ernesto Yerena Montejano and Nancy Mbabazi Musinguzi marks the period of protests that erupted following the May 25, 2020 public suffocation of a Black man, George Floyd, under the knee of a White police officer during the COVID-19 pandemic. As many as 26 million people in the United States—an unprecedented number—participated in the George Floyd demonstrations under the banner of Black Lives Matter, a decentralized movement protesting police brutality and racially motivated violence against Black people. Demonstrators carried both handmade and printed posters, and graphics were shared and freely circulated in digital spaces to show support for the movement.

In the week following Floyd’s death when the scale and breadth of the protests was becoming clear, Yerena Montejano was approached by BLD PWR, a Los-Angeles-based activism nonprofit, to design a poster. A Chicano silkscreen artist and printmaker who often works with portraiture in his prints, Yerena Montejano based his design around a portrait taken by Musinguzi at a Minneapolis-based rally. He centered the portrait’s subject, a first-generation Nigerian college student named Akpos Eyafe, on the poster using handcut Rubylith stencil techniques set against a yellow ground. Her blue surgical mask to protect against the coronavirus stands in stark contrast, marking this historic moment in 2020 when the movements for racial and social justice intersected with a global pandemic. The choice to use the “Defund the Police” slogan alongside “Black Lives Matter” signifies the advocacy to reallocate police funding to other governmental agencies that support and serve marginalized communities. (The “Defund the Police” phrase is used by activists with varying intentions.) BLD PWR coordinated with Minneapolis-based Black Visions, a collective for social justice, to produce and share the digital poster, making it freely available online.

Digital Poster, Black Lives Matter/Defund the Police; Designed by Ernesto Yerena Montejano (American, born 1986); Photographed by Nancy Mbabazi Musinguzi (American, born 1991); image (computer generated); Museum purchase from General Acquisitions Endowment Fund; 2021-27-2

This object was previously on display as a part of the exhibition Design and Healing: Creative Responses to Epidemics.