In Tamir Rice's death, artists found inspiration to carry on his legacy Favorite 

Samaria Rice, left, and Terrence Spivey welcome the crowd at the Tamir Rice Sweet 16 event to raise funds for a new youth oriented cultural center Thursday, June 14th, 2018, at the Cleveland Museum of Art in Cleveland, Ohio. Photo by Tim Harrison/Special to The Plain Dealer

Inspired to carry on Tamir's legacy

CLEVELAND, Ohio -- When Terrance Spivey signed on to direct the documentary play “Objectively/Reasonable,” he viewed it as a form of peaceful protest over Tamir Rice’s death at the hands of a Cleveland police officer.

The play, which premiered in 2016 at Cleveland’s Creative Space at Waterloo Arts, is just one of a slew of creative works inspired by Tamir and others killed by law enforcement officers across the U.S. They are among the latest examples of protest artworks created as nonviolent responses to social issues.

Spivey compared works like the play he directed to the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and 70s, which fostered black pride through creative arts.

“It was a call to action in the community,” Spivey said in a phone interview. “This was a chance for me to stand up, and for arts to stand up, and have something to say.”

Tamir’s mother, Samaria Rice, has supported many of the works inspired by her son. She’s appeared in documentary films, consulted with artists during the creative process, and helped promote several projects.

On Nov. 20, she will unveil plans for the Tamir Rice Afrocentric Cultural Center, which will provide artistic, educational and civic youth programs to the community. She’ll also appear with artists that night for the “Art, Activism and the Legacy of Tamir Rice” event at the Cleveland Museum of Art.

Amanda D. King, an artist who runs the youth arts and activism program Shooting Without Bullets and helps run the Tamir Rice Foundation, credited the artistic community with carrying on Tamir’s legacy.

“Artists and cultural producers, since Day One, have kept Tamir’s name in the media,” King said in a recent meeting with cleveland.com editors and reporters. “They have made work that is challenging policies, that is challenging representations in black youth, that show Tamir as a holistic individual, [and] are asking people about who’s safe and unsafe in America.”

The art inspired by Tamir has included films, documentaries, songs, stage plays, paintings, installations and photo-murals. Here are just some examples.

Courtesy Sheila Pree Bright. Left: Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, headed by Julian Bond, with his daughter Phyllis Atlanta, Georgia, March 23, 1963 Photograph: Richard Avedon, copyright The Richard Avedon Foundation. Right: Mothers March On, copyright 2019 Sheila Pree Bright

“Mothers March On,” photographed by Sheila Pree Bright

Sheila Pree Bright photographed the Black Lives Matter movement for several years before the Atlanta, Georgia-based organization WonderRoot asked her and other artists to create social-justice themed murals throughout the city in advance of the Super Bowl in early 2017.

She chose to recreate Richard Avedon’s 1963 photo of civil rights leader Julian Bond, who co-founded the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and served as the Southern Poverty Law Center’s first president.

“I thought it would be great to recreate that image in contemporary times,” Bright said in a phone interview.

Bright’s updated photo-mural featured Samaria Rice and other mothers who’ve lost children to police violence. They included Wanda Johnson, whose son Oscar Grant was shot to death by transit police in Oakland in 2009; and Gwen Carr, whose son Eric Garner died after a New York City police officer put him in a chokehold in 2014.

Before she photographed the mothers, Bright rented an Airbnb in Atlanta for a three-day retreat. The retreat largely focused on self-care, but Bright also had the opportunity to get to know each mother. She also watched them bond over their shared trauma, she said.

“It was very emotional. It was very heartbreaking,” Bright said. “But what I saw was the bonding among these women.”

“Traveling While Black,” directed by Roger Ross Williams

An interview with Samaria Rice serves as an emotional centerpiece for director Roger Ross Williams’ virtual reality documentary “Traveling While Black,” which earned a nomination for Outstanding Original Interactive Program at this year’s Emmy Awards.

The VR documentary, produced for The New York Times in collaboration with Felix & Paul Studios and Oculus, relates the challenges African-Americans faced as they traveled through the U.S. in the mid-20th Century to contemporary stories of police violence.

Williams, who in 2010 became the first black filmmaker to win an Academy Award for his documentary short film “Music By Prudence,” told cleveland.com that Tamir’s story encapsulates the message at the center of “Traveling While Black.”

“Nothing for me illustrates more the danger and the urgency for this piece, and the danger we face as black people in America,” Williams said. “He was a child, and he was in a community where he was supposed to feel safe. To me it illustrated how much things have not changed from the past.”

Williams said he chose to film in VR because it fully immerses viewers into the story. It also offers a different perspective for viewers he worries have become numb to stories of police violence.

“Every day, when we sign onto social media or Facebook, and we see all these [police violence] videos all the time,” Williams said. “It’s not shocking anymore. It’s a way of life, and we become numb to it. But with VR, you can’t turn away from it.”

“The University of St. Tamir,” E.J. Hill

E.J. Hill’s series, which he displayed earlier this year at the annual Art Basel show in Switzerland, imagines an ideal educational institution free from racial and social constructs. He conceived the exhibition during his residency at Radcliffe College, which is part of Harvard University but formerly operated as its women-only counterpart.

At the time, the Los Angeles-based artist had been “thinking about the idea of schools as sites of learning,” he said. He’d also been thinking about what it means to be a saint, he said in an interview with cleveland.com.

“Not in the traditional religious sense,” he said. “But in the sense of someone whose life and death are of note.”

Hill felt he needed Samaria Rice’s blessing to name the project after her son, so he reached out to her. She liked the idea so much that she became a partner in the process, and contributed a message for a plaque that dedicates the exhibition to Tamir.

The series features a painting of the university’s insignia above mountaintops, and a sculpture of a lectern topped with a dozen lilies that represent each year of Tamir’s life. It also includes what Hill called “Lesson One,” a blackboard featuring the words “We are not our pain.”

“I think that’s an important place to start because so often we are relegated to narratives of our suffering,” Hill said. “We are as dynamic and whole and complexly layered human beings. It was a message to us that we’re so much more than this.”

The tragedy of the University of St. Tamir is that is represents the potential the 12-year-old boy never had the chance to fulfill, Hill said.

“We’ll never know what he would’ve grown up to be,” Hill said. “We’ll never know. And that breaks my heart.”

“A Color Removed,” Michael Rakowicz

Rakowicz conceived his “impossible project” in 2015 when Case Western Reserve University invited him to give a lecture in Cleveland. The Chicago-based artist asked the city of Cleveland to remove the color orange from its city streets, the same way the orange tip had been removed from the pellet gun Tamir was holding when a Cleveland police officer fatally shot him.

The project culminated in an installation last year at the Spaces gallery in Ohio City, as part of the first FRONT International: Cleveland Triennial for Contemporary Art. It focused on the idea of the color orange being recognized as a symbol for safety, in everyday objects like traffic cones and safety vests. It also spotlighted color in the action of a white police officer shooting a black child, Rakowicz said.

“I found it horribly visual, to be thinking about the removal of a person of color being justified because of this removal of the color orange from the gun,” he said.

Rakowicz also worked with black artists from Cleveland to realize his vision. Artists who contributed to the installation included Amanda D. King, who runs the youth arts and activism program Shooting Without Bullets; Amber N. Ford; M. Carmen Lane; and RA Washington.

“I don’t think that I can ever – as someone who identifies as an Arab Jew – possibly know the trauma and pain felt by something like the murder of Tamir Rice,” Rakowicz said. “I don’t think I could’ve done my project without being in conversation with artists in Cleveland.”

One of Rakowicz’s lasting memories of the project came when he sought and received Samaria Rice’s permission to use her son’s name. He offered to cook lunch for her and decided to make some of the boy’s favorite foods, which included childhood favorites such as chicken wings.

“He wasn’t allowed to live to the point where his tastes would’ve evolved,” Rakowicz said. “And that was so devastating.”