A Story of Juneteenth:
Paint a Fence, Remove a Wall
By Glen Parker
Office of Dispute Resolution (ADR)
Welcome to Flatbush: a message of creativity and community.
Last Juneteenth weekend (2022), I got a crash course in diversity and inclusion.
It started with a 67-foot fence that separates my family’s yard from Church Avenue, a bustling Brooklyn street with two-way traffic, bus lanes, and numerous small businesses. For years, this fence had been gathering dirt and graffiti and become an “unruly eyesore,” as one of the restaurant owners from across the street described it. Early last year, I decided to do something about it.
Since simply painting over it could just invite more graffiti, I thought it would be nice to have a mural. But since I am not an artist, I would need help to create it. I invited neighbors to help me plan the mural, and though everyone loved the idea, no one stepped-up to help make it happen. For months I struggled with this, questioning “how do I get a mural on this fence if I’m not an artist?” I brought it up in many conversations, with various people, over several months – by which time my wife was also getting a bit tired of how much I stressed about it!
The fence, “before and after” – a graffiti-covered eyesore gets a makeover.
After a while, an idea finally materialized. I emailed my neighborhood listserv: we’ll paint “Welcome to Prospect Park South” (the name of our neighborhood), in big block letters, and have local children and families each take one of the letters to paint in – and I sketched-out what I thought it could look like.
Everyone thought it was a fun idea, and I felt good about it. I set a date, the weekend of June 18th, and sent out invitations to my neighbors.
It was a relief to finally have this on the calendar. Shortly after setting the date, however, I learned that our neighborhood officially ended at our side of Church Avenue, and that across the street was a neighborhood with a different name - Caton Park. I also heard that there was “bad blood” between the two neighborhoods, at some point in the past. As a fairly new resident of Prospect Park South (5 years), I had never noticed any of that, but it suddenly felt like if we painted the name of one neighborhood on the fence, we’d be marking our territory instead of celebrating the larger community. And with that, the mural project became stressful again.
I eventually came up with another idea: have neighbors trace the form of their body on the fence, and then paint whatever they wanted within that outline. It was similar to the previous idea, just instead of letters, it would be silhouettes. I felt like I needed to provide structure for people, i.e. a clearly defined space to paint within. This was for their benefit – it would provide useful parameters for creativity – but it was also for my benefit – it felt important to have the mural be organized and fitting a certain vision, and that it “not get too crazy.”
In preparation, we put a colorful rainbow base coat on the fence to cover up the graffiti and aged wood. And then the next week, with a bunch of old house paint and brushes gathered from my basement, I set up shop next to the fence at 9am on Saturday, June 18th. My plan was that I would paint the outline of anyone who wanted to contribute to the mural, in any pose they wanted, and leave it to them to fill it in. I was excited.
My first customer came along at around 9:15. A 12-year-old boy, Pedro, with his mom.
“Hello! Welcome! Want to paint something?” I said.
Pedro looked at his mom, who nodded to him. “Can I paint Snoopy?” he asked.
“Of course,” I said, “I’ll just draw your outline and you can paint Snoopy or whatever you want inside it.”
This time he didn’t look at his mom, “Can I just do Snoopy?” He asked, almost wincing – clearly not as excited as I was about the outline idea.
“Sure!” I said. But really, I was unsure – what would happen to the plan? The vision? I took a deep breath and gave him the supplies he needed.
Urmi and Oisin painting hands.
As Pedro was painting Snoopy, a younger fellow, Oisin, who was 5 years old, came over with his mom, Urmi. I explained the outline idea, and Urmi suggested an outline of Oisin’s hands, since they didn’t have time to do much more. That made sense and we did that. But I began to think that maybe my outline idea didn’t make a lot of sense.
More people stopped as they were walking by, asking what was going on. I invited them to join in and paint something. To my surprise, that is how it went for the rest of the weekend. I gave up my “outline” plans in favor of letting people paint whatever they wanted. And so it went for the three days of that Juneteenth weekend. Hundreds of people stopped to paint. I was amazed. Putting myself in their shoes, it was hard to imagine stopping to spontaneously paint something without having planned it, especially if I was on my way somewhere. But that’s what happened.
On that first day of painting, one young woman, Eleonore, was on her way to meet friends at the Coney Island Mermaid Parade when she stopped. She spent more than two hours painting her contribution to the fence – a kind of cosmic tree, with messages of love and peace written in multiple languages.
The bus, and Eleonore’s tree.
On the third and last day of painting, a bus stopped in the middle of the block where I was standing (not a bus stop, btw). The driver opened the door and said with a smile, “You have to paint a bus!” It didn’t occur to me to take requests – I was just the guy providing others with paint. But why not let the bus driver participate too? So I painted a bus in the little space there was left, near the trunk of Eleonore’s tree.
A cab driver pulled over in the bus lane and requested permission to paint. I gave him a brush and supplied the half-dozen colors he asked for. For over an hour, he painted a map of Haiti and the Haitian flag, in impressive detail. When he was finished painting, he started making a video (which he later told me was part of a podcast) about his pride as a Haitian.
“New York is my home, but Haiti is my homeland,” he stated pridefully into his camera.
I felt opened-up by everyone who came by. Many contributed, and others were happy to look on and appreciate.
A foster mom stopped by to paint a tribute to one of the young adults she cared for nearby. He had recently died of cancer at the age of 22. To honor him, she recreated a butterfly he had drawn while in the hospital. She also told me a bit of his story. That he had left his birth family’s home because his parents struggled to accept his sexuality. She said the young man never saw his parents after leaving home, even after they learned he was ill. The woman described him as full of light and joy, despite the tragedy of his circumstances. It was a true honor to have this young person memorialized on our mural.
The foster mom sent a photo of what she had painted to the young man’s sister. The next day, in the midst of children painting, passersby talking, and me running around cleaning brushes, an older woman in modest black dress stood alone in front of the fence. I approached her as I approached everyone I saw that weekend, “Hi! Welcome! Want a brush?”
Not taking her eyes off the fence, she said in a Caribbean accent, “This is my son.” She put her hand on the fence and started to cry.
Two men approached me then, and asked with suspicion in their voices: “Can I paint something?”
“Sure,” I said.
“Anything I want?”
“Yeah, that’s the idea.”
“Ok, cool, can I get a marker?” Then he said to his friend, “check this out.” After I handed him a marker, he said, “so I can do anything?”
Now I was nervous, but I was committed to the original idea: let people paint what they want. So I said, “That’s right,” but added as I held my breath, “hopefully something that everyone can enjoy…”
“Okay, right. So watch. I’m going to do a code.”
A code? This did not make me any less nervous. I must admit – my mind went to something gang-related or anti-social.
He took the marker and wrote “16-5-1-3-5”.
“You get it?” he asked me.
Despite my love of puzzles, I was stumped.
“Think about it,” he said.
Staring at it got me no closer to cracking the code. “I have no idea,” I said, feeling a bit defeated.
“What’s the 16th letter of the alphabet?” was the only hint he needed to provide. It all became clear, and I became relieved. What he has written was code for the letters that spelled P-E-A-C-E.
16-5-1-3-5: a coded message for PEACE.
I should have known. That is, I should not have been so suspicious of what he was going to write. Indeed, what he created fit right in.
The spirit of this mural could be summed up with a few simple phrases that were repeated over and over again, in various colors and symbols: Love, Peace, Respect. The artists were two-year-olds and eighty-year-olds. They were immigrants from dozens of other countries, speaking many different languages, yet expressing these same ideas, over and over again.
This spirit was clear in the places where neighbors wrote "Black Lives Matter" and "Love Who You Love." We saw it in the little girls who painted “My Hijab is my Crown” and the little boy who drew a picture and then told us “Soy yo, ayudando a mi hermana” (This is me helping my sister). People often built upon what other people did. One person drew a cloud, another made purple rain drops, and then other added a line from Prince’s “Purple Rain.” Someone wrote a poem about fireflies, then someone else painted a bunch of fireflies all around the poem.
I experienced how most people will welcome – and will even seize upon – the opportunity to contribute and express themselves. And in a space where they can create anything they want, they will want to contribute something meaningful and positive.
This mural helped me see that I don’t always live like that is true. Rather, living in the city, I often feel a wariness about what people want to put into the world. But this mural reminded me that most people want to put love and positivity into the world. People want to contribute and self-express, and they want to do so in a good way. And the more we make room for it, the more it’s likely to happen. And so I learned that a key part of diversity is holding space for others.
My world was limited in a way I hadn’t seen, until I saw that mural. My assumptions started with a few square blocks of my neighborhood association, and some predetermined ideas about outcome. From that initial point, there were a few barriers for me to overcome to get to a place of inclusion and connection. I didn’t see those barriers at first – I imagine they looked a lot like what water looks like to a fish. My perspective gradually broadened until it got to a point where I could hardly believe how limited my point of view was. I could not be happier with how the fence looks now. It’s really a treasure.
Messiness and disorder are just a point of view. Looking past the limits that I had imagined, and the lines I initially sought to draw within, there was a richness of expression, and a foundation for connection. Following the thread of inclusion, I realized that all the little neighborhoods around me (Prospect Park South, Caton Park, Little Pakistan, and perhaps a dozen others) are actually part of a larger neighborhood – Flatbush -- and that one edge of the fence faced one of its borders. In tribute to this, and in honor of the efforts of the over 100 people who contributed, I painted a welcome sign after all.
What an honor to be the site of so many people’s creativity and passion. Through this experience, I realized that the key was not to come up with a good idea, nor was it to paint something that would deter graffiti and make the neighborhood more beautiful. It wasn’t in the planning, or about finding a professional artist. I didn’t need to convince people to commit, or box them in with some pre-conceived controlling shapes. All I needed to do was to hold space and witness (and of course, hand out the paint and brushes), as the people around me expressed themselves and created something beautiful. The key to this community endeavor – and perhaps all movements towards diversity and inclusion – was a simple, yet magical invitation: “Would you like to paint something?”
Purple Rain, one of many themes in the mural.
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