‘A more inclusive art world’: How Ferguson 2014 changed the arts in St. Louis (2024)

Jane Henderson and Rosalind EarlySt. Louis Post-DispatchJasmine Osby Special to the Post-Dispatch

Artistic response after the death of Michael Brown Jr. was passionate, intense and varied.

From poetry to documentaries, St. Louis writers, artists and musicians found ways to channel anger and despair while stepping up to give voices to thousands of onlookers.

Creatives stood alongside clergymen, politicians and civilians united against predatory policing and the death of an unarmed Ferguson teen.

But it wasn’t so much the shooting of Brown as the resulting protests that inspired artist Damon Davis. His photographs of raised hands in “All Hands on Deck” took signs of surrender and made them symbols of fortitude and community, the St. Louis Art Museum said.

A play that compared an ancient Greek tragedy to what happened to Brown traveled from St. Louis to Greece to off-Broadway.

Bruce Franks, who went from rapper to political candidate, says, “What we did in Ferguson and what we did for Michael Brown changed the landscape in the entire world in terms of how you fight, how you push forward, and how you run for office.”

Art curators also see profound change. Musicians run social justice organizations. And a bookstore owner concludes, “We moved the needle a little bit.”

Here are snapshots of cultural response 10 years after the international uproar over the death of Michael Brown.

Visual art can be a ‘mighty tool’ for social issues

Since the Ferguson protests, St. Louis artists have had pieces acquired by the Smithsonian, shown at the St. Louis Art Museum, and installed in a new development.

Lisa Melandri, executive director of the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, says part of our cultural heritage is now the “Mirror Casket” piece at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History & Culture.

“Since this tragedy, art has become more responsive to issues of social justice and systemic injustice, something that we have seen in our local arts community and across the country in not only the immediate aftermath, but also the ensuing years,” she says.

The lead artist for “Mirror Casket” (which is what its title implies — a coffin covered in broken pieces of mirror) was De Nichols, who then lived in St. Louis. In 2021, she published a book for young readers called “Art of Protest: Creating, Discovering, and Activating Art for Your Revolution.” It gives readers ideas on how to create activist art and describes how visual pieces can stand out at protests.

But she also goes into the long history of art used in protest, including Francisco Goya’s “Disasters of War” etchings made in 1810-20; posters and banners included in the fight for women’s suffrage in the United Kingdom in 1914-18; Diego Rivera’s Mexican murals in the 1920s; and antiwar slogans and songs in the U.S. in the 1960s-70s.

Nichols writes: “When used in public spaces, protest art serves as a mighty tool to help people learn about social issues.”

Painted boards protected windows during the Ferguson protests, and rather than act as a temporary barrier, they have been acquired by the Missouri History Museum, inspired a coloring book and a separate children’s book and are now installed in the Delmar Divine building, serving as continual reminders for viewers.

The St. Louis Art Museum acquired a painting by Kehinde Wiley after the internationally known artist chose subjects from Ferguson and nearby through “street casting.” They posed for portraits inspired by traditional works in the museum’s collection.

For local artist Damon Davis, the protesters at Ferguson not only gave him purpose at the time, but the movement also continues to inspire him.

Lithographs of Davis’ photographic images of raised hands, “All Hands on Deck,” were shown at the St. Louis Art Museum just a couple of years ago, and last year his sculpture “Pillars of the Valley,” which marks the former Mill Creek Valley community, was installed outside CityPark. He also produced a documentary, “Whose Streets?,” after Brown’s death.

“I’ve been building on these artistic skills my whole life to use to benefit somebody other than myself,” he says. And the social justice issues underlying the protests will continue to be a part of his work:

“It’s all ongoing because America is built on exploiting Black and brown people. It’s not gonna stop; until I die, I’m going to be in this fight. So just like my father, my mother, just like they both, I’m a part of a continuum. So, no, it ain’t never gonna end.”

Davis, 39, says protest is a symptom of something bigger. “We as artists are supposed to be scribes of the times that we’re in.”

James McAnally, director of the public art initiative Counterpublic, points out that Davis and others are also moving beyond protest art. Davis’ recent work centers on futurism.

“Seeing only the pain, seeing only the anger is doing a disservice to the Black experience,” McAnally says. “The range of art we’ve seen in the last decade connects to that journey. And I hope that as audiences we’re ready to receive that as well, to see the images of joy, futures of fantasy, that kind of, you know, those aren’t totally different than images of protests, you know. A continuum all needs to be there.”

Significantly, the protest art may have especially long-lasting effects on museums.

“To me, it’s hard to overstate the impact that it’s had on art and on culture more broadly,” McAnally says.

In the past 10 years, he says, museums have hired more diverse leaders and shown more inclusive exhibits.

“If you enter a museum now, you see the collections that are of the shows that are happening with Black and Indigenous artists. And I think there’s a direct connection to what was happening with the protests in St. Louis and the uprising in Ferguson, to what you see now in a more inclusive art world.”

Writers add to literature of social justice

Poetry can be a way to make social commentary, says Jason Vasser-Elong, who wrote about Michael Brown’s death in a poem that was published 10 years ago in the Post-Dispatch.

This year, he’s written a poignant new one, “Mike Brown at the Library,” in which he imagines seeing the Ferguson man at age 28, browsing books by Black authors.

The past decade has been “jarring for writers” like him, he says. Vasser-Elong says, “I think a lot of writers, myself included, would romanticize about the Civil Rights movement, Black Arts movement, the Harlem Renaissance, and these different pockets in history where we were comfortable in that not being our reality. But now, these things are our reality. So, what do we do with this energy? A lot of us are writing.”

Vasser-Elong, 45, is a professor at the Honors College at the University of Missouri-St. Louis. He teaches writing to students, some of whom were only 9 or so when Brown was killed.

“Now in college classrooms, the discourse is centered around, you know, these different moments of tragedy (particularly police killings), and they have to grapple with it differently now. They’re like, ‘Oh, well, I remember Mike Brown, like I remember him as, you know, we played kickball together,’ or whatever it was. It didn’t hit them how significant his passing was.”

Although Vasser-Elong doesn’t think writers should use Brown’s death as a mere “platform” for themselves, he also asks, “How do we allow these police killings to keep happening? I feel a sense of urgency in the Black community and in the white community, too — the people who are allies to Black folks — that we need to do something about this. This is not how we ought to be remembered.”

Kris Kleindienst believes Brown’s killing had an impact in the world of books: “It woke some people up and mobilized others.” The owner of Left Bank Books, where she has worked for 50 years, says people were suddenly asking for books about mass incarceration or by James Baldwin.

“Things we could barely justify keeping on our shelves suddenly became bestsellers. Young people interested in justice were one set of buyers, but also middle class white people who were wondering, ‘How could this happen?’”

The bookstore, which began during the Civil Rights movement, has always been about supporting gay rights and antiracism.

Kleindienst says, “Every time there is a crisis of some sort, a bookstore’s response is ‘What do people need from us now?’”

Ten years ago, the store replaced some books in its windows with Black Lives Matter signs. A Central West End patron wrote a letter of objection and said they would never buy another book there.

But now, Kleindienst says, literature by and about people of color sells to a broader audience. And interest in social justice was reignited after the deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor.

“We moved the needle a little bit.”

Over the last 10 years, the needle has also moved on diverse books. In 2014, according to the Cooperative Children’s Book Center in Wisconsin, only 5.2% of children’s books they surveyed were about Black people. In 2023, that number was 15%.

Although one can’t draw a straight line from Brown’s death, the resulting uprisings, discussions about Black lives and awareness of racism over the decade seem to affect the book industry. (The movement has also led to censorship efforts and other counterreactions.)

In 2017, Mississippi novelist Angie Thomas said she had already been working on her bestseller “The Hate U Give,” when Brown died. But she admitted:

“It was another wakeup call. We saw it with Trayvon (Martin), and we saw it years before with Oscar Grant, but there was something about Michael Brown and the reaction to Michael’s death that really hit me, specifically how this young man was villainized and blamed for his own death.”

Now, Kleindienst sees not just a hunger to read about difficult things, but an appetite for “joy” — an increase in genres like Afrocentric fantasy and rom-coms.

She says, “People are also looking for things that aren’t linked to suffering.”

Theater moves forward, despite setbacks

After Michael Brown was shot, Duane Foster started getting tons of text messages from his Normandy High School students.

“That’s Mike in the news!” they wrote him.

Foster had been Brown’s drama teacher in 7th and 12th grades. In fact, he’d helped Brown earn a fine arts credit in the alternative school program earlier that year.

“Instead of doing regular coursework, I created a makeshift recording studio so he was able to record his rap songs, because he was heavy into rap. That’s how he got his credit. And he ended up graduating that summer, pretty much three days before he was killed,” Foster recalls.

In addition to attending vigils and supporting students, Foster remembers being invited to participate in concerts with the school choir he directed. He even appeared in “Antigone in Ferguson” a play produced by a Brooklyn theater company that played for 15 weeks off-Broadway and even in Greece.

The Brooklyn company, Theater of War, reached out to Phil Woodmore, artistic director of voice at the Center of the Creative Arts (COCA), to write the score. For the Greek chorus in the play he incorporated the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department Choir, Trinity Community Church Choir, students from COCA, as well as singers from the community.

Foster says working with the police was eye-opening. “(The officers) weren’t told to not talk about it, but it was kind of understood that they just didn’t discuss Ferguson. It was kind of taboo, and doing ‘Antigone in Ferguson’ gave them an outlet to be able to talk about it,” Foster says.

During those first few years after Michael Brown’s death, creatives poured into St. Louis to be part of the moment. It caused local creatives to pause.

“We wanted to make sure people weren’t coming in and being vultures on the trauma that the community had experienced,” recalls Jaqueline Thompson, artistic director for Metro Theater Company.

She worked on the Every 28-Hour Plays, a festival that featured 80 one-minute plays in response to Ferguson. It involved national playwrights and producers from Oregon. But it also brought together the local community to stage, act in and direct the plays.

The attention and funding St. Louis theater was getting made it feel like there was a real change in the offing.

The Repertory Theatre St. Louis brought in Hana Sharif as artistic director, the first Black artistic leader in the theater’s history. Plus, some early career directors of color were getting more opportunities, Thompson recalls. In 2019, the same year that Sharif started, the Black Rep staged the original production “Canfield Drive” about the events surrounding Michael Brown’s death.

But everything shifted in 2020. “Once the pandemic hit, theater in general was just trying to figure out how to survive, and we’re still feeling the residuals of that,” Thompson says.

Rather than take risks with new plays, theaters started to stage more tried-and-true fare.

“I think that we have fallen back into just doing, you know, run-of-the-mill musical theater and plays,” Foster says.

Plus, without the press still writing about St. Louis, not as many people were looking to collaborate. “It feels like a lot of the outside organizations that came in, they came in and did what they did to get their names circulated with Ferguson and they left,” Foster says.

Ron Himes, artistic director for the Black Rep, agrees: “Five years after Ferguson, you could go to a (former) funder who’s like, ‘Oh, we’re not funding social justice anymore. Now we’re doing health care,’” he says.

That doesn’t mean that Brown’s impact still isn’t felt in theater. Himes points out that the Black Rep has always done the work, and continues to do the work, of putting on shows that explain the society in which a Michael Brown can happen.

“A lot of the work that we do is not necessarily specifically speaking about Ferguson, but it speaks to the issues that precipitate a Ferguson,” Himes says. “It speaks to issues about police states, and how a police department can operate in a way toward the Black community, which is different than the way it operates in other communities, that resources and opportunities are not the same for Black communities as they are in other communities.”

When Ferguson happened, Thompson was a drama professor at University of Missouri-St. Louis. Earlier this year, she also took over artistic leadership at Metro Theater Company, which puts on theater for young people. In that role, she is recommitting to telling the untold stories of our community.

“I’m going to be intentional about what I consider, finding the outlier stories and finding the things that have this human connectivity that connects us all,” she says. “But (stores that) are also different enough that whoever we’re representing feels celebrated and seen.”

That’s not an easy feat, especially nowadays with America’s divisive political atmosphere. But theater makers across St. Louis are willing to keep trying.

“Ferguson itself happened, but symbolically and metaphorically speaking, Ferguson is still happening,” Foster says. “We are still having injustices. We are still having inequities. And we have to continue to lift the arts up and use it as a mouthpiece for those who otherwise wouldn’t have a voice.”

Musicians on the front line of protests

Nothing was the same for Bruce Franks after Aug. 9, 2014.

The community leader and rapper had grown in popularity under the moniker Oops. He’d had many wins as an artist, recording over 400 tracks and gaining traction on the battle rap scene. But when Michael Brown was killed, Franks stopped recording music.

“I was not the same person on Aug. 9 that I was on Aug. 8,” Franks says. “I changed overnight. Everything that I thought mattered on Aug. 8, everything that I thought was important, everything I thought I was willing to die for was not the same after Aug. 9.”

Franks was one of many St. Louis artists on the front lines after Brown’s death in Ferguson 10 years ago. The rebellion that followed catapulted the community into what became known as the Ferguson uprising.

The number of musicians present during the protests that ensued was countless. Rapper Tank the Machine recalls seeing artists like Tef Poe, T-Dubb-O, Bates, Bo-Dean, Ron G, GA Barz, the late Darren Seals, and many others on the front lines.

But it wasn’t just musicians. Poets like Corey Black and Tim Anderson used their voices to help mobilize the community. Local clothing brands like the Woke Brand gave them uniformity in their messaging through fashion. Together, rappers, dancers, singers and creatives created chants to rally and inspire protesters. They were connected through a shared rage and used their creativity as an outlet for their pain.

“I’m a musician, so when I feel strongly about something, I have to do something about it, even if it’s as simple as stating my opinion to these rhythms and this melody,” Tank the Machine says.

The residual organizations and actions that followed reflect the aftermath of the uprising on the St. Louis music community. T-Dubb-O and Tef Poe went on to co-found Hands Up United, a social justice organization dedicated to Black liberation. Through Hands Up United, the two artists provide free books and meals to the community through the Books & Breakfast initiative. It also creates a safe space for teens and young adults with Friday movie nights and makes coding classes accessible for youth through the Roy Clay Singham Tech Program.

Franks never returned to recording hip-hop music. Although he continued battle rapping, his passion for making music faded. In 2016, Franks was elected to the Missouri House of Representatives. He says Brown’s slaying was his sole reason for running for political office.

Both T-Dubb-O and Tef Poe lost opportunities as musicians due to their involvement in the protests. T-Dubb-O says they fell under scrutiny from both the federal government and local police. However, he says he doesn’t regret his decision to stand up for the Black community and Brown.

“We always did our own thing, stood up for who we wanted to be, and be the artists that we wanted to be,” T-Dubb-O says. “Going out in Ferguson and fighting was just us being who we were, the artist and the person.”

T-Dubb-O says the lasting impact was on the entire St. Louis community. He and Franks agree that there has been some change in the last decade. However, Franks says there is still more work to do.

“I think we have seen change,” Franks says. “I think we don’t give ourselves credit enough. That’s not to say that we should be satisfied or we should think that we’re done.”