Say Their Names Memorial Mural Unveiling and Site-Specific Performance
Join visual artist, activist, and Inaugural 2020 Ellies Social Justice Award Winner Chire Regans as she unveils Say Their Names: A Public Art Memorial Project with a performance by Loni Johnson in rememberance of the victims commemorated in the mural.
The large-scale mural that recognizes over 500 lives that have been lost due to gun violence, police violence, hate crimes, gender violence, and domestic violence and acts as a site for collective mourning and remembrance.
Masks and social-distancing are required.
The memorial mural is on view on the west-facing wall of Bakehouse Art Complex, along NW 6th Avenue and is accessible to visitors 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
Off-street parking available. Please refrain from parking on NW 6th Avenue, between 32nd and 33rd Streets.
To RSVP for the event, click here.
About the artists
Loni Johnson is a multi-disciplinary artist born and raised in Miami. Her work varies from painting, drawing, and sculpture to performance and installation. Johnson uses her work to explore how Black women occupy spaces, redefining how Black women navigate spaces that were not created for them. She works through how they grieve, love, and feel. Johnson's performance and installation works focus on the reactivation of feelings of community as well as ancestral and historical memory. Johnson is an artist, an educator, a mother, and an activist that understands that as an artist, there is a cyclical obligation to give back and nurture her communities with her creative gift, utilizing it to better our world.
Chire Regans , aka VantaBlack, a proud mother, visual artist, truth-teller, and community advocate. was born in Saint Louis, Missouri, and relocated to Miami in the late 1980s. After graduating from Florida A&M University, Chire’s artistic practice focused primarily on portraiture. As societal issues began to weigh heavily on her conscience, the emergence of the Black Lives Matter movement pushed Chire's art in the direction of social awareness and change. Chire serves on the Community Relations Board's Criminal Justice and Law Enforcement Committee works as a Teaching Artist at the Perez Art Museum Miami, and is the Fall 2020 Artist-in-Residence with the Community Justice Project.
Image: Chire Regans working on Say Their Names Memorial Mural at the Bakehouse Art Complex. Photo by Mateo Serna Zapata, 2020.