-Helen Grant
It had been a month into the shelter at home orders when I asked the other organizers at Resonator about the possiblity of painting a window mural addressing Covid-19. Initially I wasn’t sure what form it would take. I gathered from my walks around downtown Norman that foot and car traffic in the area seemed fairly steady. Additionally, a few retailers and restaurants were advertising curbside and online ordering options in their storefront windows. It seemed like a logical progression for an art space to get creative with their windows too, even if Resonator as a whole wasn’t sure what that would be quite yet.
2020’s first Resonator window mural had been painted by artists involved in the “Cat Castle: Love Letters to Everyone” 2nd Friday Norman Art Walk on Feb. 14th.
Image via Google Street View. A “behind the scenes” sketch by Julius can be found in Resonator’s May 2020 Zine
For text readers: on the west side windows an adorable, supersized, Kawaii cat walks the city streets, passing tall buildings with lit windows, all beneath a crescent moon. Moving to the doors: op art lines frame Resonator’s logo and name. In the east side windows multicolored, pompom garlands hang behind the windows as fluffy, painted clouds sweep across the glass.
In keeping with our collective spirit, I asked fellow organizers for any input they might want to share as Resonator is comprised of a small, but dedicated group of board members, organizers, artists, and recurring volunteers. Since we were all dealing with the fallout of Covid-19 in our own ways (let’s just say an amount of depression and frustration was certainly shared and motivation was at an all time low) there was little to be said during the time I was seeking feedback.
Regardless, it would become apparent what direction to take soon enough.
In the midst of all the Covid-19 updates I grew concerned as more and more hate crimes targeting Asian Americans were reported across my social media feeds. Verbal and physical attacks were documented and shared. Various groups in the media were calling for the White House and other leadership to use the term Covid-19 to describe the disease, and to refrain from attributing the virus to minority groups. The hate wasn’t solely focused on Chinese Americans, however, nor was it exclusively white Americans targeting the vast spectrum of Asian American communities in our country. As stories proliferated it was clear Asian Americans, regardless of profession, age, sex, or class, were not safe from racists attacks at any level in American society.
It led me to think back on what Roxane Gay, an African American writer, had to say about “model minorities” and deception in her book, “Bad Feminist”. Gay described the behavior of a performatively nice, but racist white receptionist in her apartment building. This receptionist had felt comfortable enough to gossip disparagingly about a set of former tenets (Korean students) who had just moved out. The receptionist claimed there were lingering smells in the apartment and that they, management, were doing everything to get rid of the odor, as if Gay also harbored similar thoughts and feelings about Asians.
That this kind of racism exists is not shocking no matter how ironic and absurd the play on stereotypes and steps to “othering” seems. Gay’s forthright experience of being temporarily “in grouped” reminded me of a Vietnamese classmate and friend I had made in the Ft. Smith, Arkansas area during the early 90s. I recalled how my friend’s upper-middle class presenting self didn’t necessarily net her immediate inclusion with kids repping the same name brands. She was only “a sometimes member” in the popular girls’ crowd when it suited them to include her.
To that end, I really appreciated what John Cho wrote in his L.A. Times Op-Ed about how your community’s belonging in the United States is conditional when you’re made to feel like a “model minority”, a token-y, pedestal-lifting gesture, if you will, as the reality is that we live in a multifaceted, racist country.
You can still be scapegoated. You can still be excluded. You can still be considered foreign in a society that likes to think of itself as some great melting pot, all while it conveniently skips over the part where the land was stolen, the treaties were broken, and we have to crowd fund to save Navajo elders from the spread of Covid-19 lest another American culture disproportionately lose their remaining connections to their ancestors.
This confluence of old memories, new reads, social media feeds, and pressing current events was the mix needed. I made a concept drawing in the Procreate app, which I shared with the others at Resonator. I got the green light to make the mural happen. It wasn’t something I’d done on a large scale before, but I felt up to the challenge.
What would have been worse to me was not making an attempt at all.
For text readers: just imagine a more symmetrical version when I finally describe the west side windows in the finished photo taken by Curtis Jones, depicted next in this post.
We were out of the white Resonator logo shirts, so the east side window concept, which would have listed our virtual programing and directed people to online Resonator shirt sales and Patreon, did not materialize. Access to a vinyl cutter as well as printing new shirts was not happening at this time either. Although given time another iteration of the east window’s concept may still come to pass.
Not long after I began painting the #HateIsAVirus window mural, inspired by a social media campaign started by We Are Uprisers to support Asian American businesses and fight racism, a photo taken in Oklahoma City’s Paseo Arts District circulated online much to my dismay. I want to tell you it was shocking on some level to see hate speech directed at our Asian American communities in Oklahoma, but unfortunately, given the Paseo’s proximity to OKC’s Asian District, I don’t think anyone familiar with Oklahoma’s consistently racist track record was at all surprised, much less shocked. Disappointed, however? Always. For me the incident was more like a bitter acknowledgement that it had been only a matter of time before hate speech would once more be documented in locations closer to home.
Photo by Curtis Jones and can be found in Resonator’s May 2020 Zine
For text readers: the image contains an oblong pill shape on Resonator’s west side windows. The black window frame that bisects the pill serves as a natural dividing line between the two halves. On the left hand side, the yellow pill half reads “We’ll Get Through This Together” in black paint. On the right hand side, the white pill half contains seven, spiked novel corona virus bodies of varying sizes in red tempera paint. Under the white half of the oblong pill, written in white chalk marker, reads the hashtag “Hate is A Virus”.
I left the #HateIsAVirus mural up from April 29th to June 3rd. I didn’t make much of a statement about it online until recently, but I’m sure many people saw it in real life as they passed by Resonator or saw it in the zine we released. At one point I got called back to a job I would later quit after giving my two weeks notice. Dealing with that and other things set me on a path to isolate and rethink my future plans.
Fast forward to the June evening I removed the mural from the windows. The world had changed a lot in that 35-day span. Non-essential businesses were reopening left and right, Black Lives Matter protests were underway, and I witnessed a drunk, angry man with AirPods in his ears pace the sidewalk in front of Resonator and the surrounding businesses shouting, unmasked of course, about racism among other topics of discussion to whomever was entertaining his drunk call. Although it wasn’t entirely unexpected given recent events, the outburst was still eye-opening and led to some further reflection on these troubled times.
Photo taken on June 9th by Helen Grant
For text readers: two “Black Lives Matters“ posters hang in Resonator’s west side windows. The paper is black, the words are white, and there are three yellow lines underscoring the message. These posters were printed by Michael Wilson and Alex Emmons for Curtis and Tammy Jones to pass out at the march. Under one of the “Black Lives Matter” posters hangs a white paper poster, printed in black ink that reads: “Listen to the Oppressed,” handed out by Andrea Duran at the march, hung by Curtis and Tammy Jones in the window. On Resonator’s East side windows hangs a “No Justice, No Peace” banner in black and red paint on white fabric. It was made by Noah Willard-Oates and hung by Eric Piper.
I’m glad Resonator is on the path to continue its collective art activism. No one took a poll and asked if we should keep it up, rather individuals that associate with the space have carried it on, whether it takes the form of a mask-wearing, poster art campaign, introduced by Alex Emmons and facilitated by Curtis Jones, to sharing messages written on protest banners and signs printed and distributed by artists/activists. Even now as I document this time at Resonator, there are plans to further develop 2020’s Covid-19 informed “Diversity University” programming, an effort largely spearheaded by Ashley Morrison.
If Resonator’s windows let you peer into its soul, be ready to see the kind of messages we continue to reflect.