The National Building Museum in Washington, D.C., is staging an outdoor exhibition on the museum’s west lawn as a way of encouraging turnout even as most museums remain shut to head off the spread of COVID. The show, Murals That Matter: Activism Through Public Art, presents six new murals that depict the “big six” civil rights leaders who organized the March on Washington in 1963 (John Lewis, Whitney Young, A. Philip Randolph, Martin Luther King Jr., James Farmer, and Roy Wilkins) along with 18 other murals relocated from the streets of the city. The show opened in August to coincide with the 2020 March on Washington.
The relocated murals were commissioned by DowntownDC BID and the P.A.I.N.T.S. Institute for boarded-up storefronts in the Gallery Place neighborhood of D.C. The artworks were created after the killing of George Floyd, and they respond to the wave of public action that followed.
The show will be up through November. More information is available here.
