The cheerful smiles of Eyanna Flonory and Amani Smith beam down from a large portrait of the mother and son mounted on the wall. Their bright faces are visible from the street outside through the big picture windows of Fenway art gallery The Fourth Wall Project. Next to their photo, dozens of statements about the young family stretch the length of the wall.
“The
black youth of today seem determined to make their own race extinct,” reads one
comment. “Add Mattapan to the list of cities that need to be nuked off the face
of the planet,” reads another.
And
near the bottom of the wall, one comment flatly states, “Save your tears for
the toddler. He would have grown up to be a gang banger too.”
What
can’t be seen from the street – what’s missing from the wall all together – are
the faces of the people who posted the comments. And though the words and the
images are close together, to many, the lives of this young family and the
people who posted the comments about them are worlds apart.
Flonory, Smith and two others were murdered outside their home in September 2010. Dubbed the “Mattapan Massacre” by news outlets, in the weeks following the homicides, local media provided exhaustive coverage of the incident. And with every new article published, the number of negative comments pointed towards the young mother, her child and their community increased and became more and more malicious.
“I
read [the] comments…and I was like, how could you possibly say that about
anyone, let alone a two year old?,” said Joanna Marinova. “Disgusted” by the
media coverage of Flonory and Smith’s deaths and frustrated with the cycle of
violence that makes many of Boston’s youth innocent murder victims, Marinova, a
media producer and media arts activist and teacher, channeled her anger into
action.
After
connecting with Dorchester-based nonprofit Mothers for Equality and Justice, Marinova
spent the next nine months building relationships with Boston families who’d
lost a child to violence, listening to their stories and cobbling together
writings and photos of the youth, their families and friends. This November,
she, with the support of local organizations and institutions like Press PassTV, The Louis D. Brown Peace Institute, The Boston Phoenix, The Museum of Fine
Arts and StreetSafe Boston, gave birth to Anonymous Boston: Words of Mass
Destruction, a two week exhibit meant to tear down the wall of anonymity that
commenters hide behind and shed light on murdered youths’ lives – not just
their deaths.
As
much a memorial to those lost as it was an
exposé on the role that the media plays in negative portrayals and stereotypes
of urban youth and communities, the poignant images and powerful words on
display were alternately beautiful and haunting, encouraging and disheartening.
One thing was certain: Anonymous Boston was unsettling, and that’s exactly how
Marinova intended it.
“This
exhibit wasn’t meant to make anyone feel comfortable. Not my goal. My goal is
to shake you up to your roots so you can feel that we’re losing our real
currency. Everybody’s talking about foreclosures, but our children are our real
currency,” she said.
Life-sized
portraits of murdered youth – some smiling, some looking more serious – consumed
the the gallery’s stark white walls, while their writings – some from essays
and job applications, others taken from letters and poems, flanked the walls
beside their images. Their words painted a picture of young lives full of
promise, talented youths with the drive, intelligence and skills to achieve
success, characterizations that sharply contrast the negative comments and
assumptions plastered across the gallery’s walls. Contrary to how media
articles about their murders portray them, many of the youth featured in the
exhibit weren’t criminals or ‘gangsters’, but rather concerned and compassionate
young people who wanted to put an end to the violence in their communities.
“Ironically,
many of these young people wrote incredible works on peace and community before
they died,” Marinova said. “There are messages in these lives that we’re
missing because we’re not listening. I know that if we heard some of these
stories a little more, things would be different, because really, the journey
begins when that coffin closes, for many of these families.”
While
grieving and healing is certainly part of that journey, for families of murder
victims, having the opportunity to tell the true story of their loved one’s
life can be an essential part of that journey too. Throughout the exhibit,
placards next to each child’s photo document their parents’ thoughts and
feelings about the sadness, anger and confusion of their loss and the urgent
need to stop more youth from dying.
In
one part of the exhibit, the words “What Is Beautiful Never Dies” emblazoned
the top of a wall. Below the affirmation, fourteen framed family portraits,
images captured by artist/activist and Banner photographer Ernesto “Erocc”Arroyo, are hung horizontally across wall. Seated in their family homes,
relatives of the deceased hold a picture of the child, each family members’
face telling a different story about the loss they now live with every day.
Beneath the portraits, the families speak in their own words about carrying on
with their lives while trying to carry on the youth’s legacy.
“[Telling]
the truth [about their child’s death] has liberated them from a lot of
suffering that they’ve been under,” Marinova pointed out. “While they were
going through their grief, they weren’t able to properly defend their children,
and that’s a weight that they carried on their shoulders for a very long time.”
In
another part of the exhibit, photocopied articles circle the floor around a
platform that elevates three colorful, rubber-clad sneakers off the ground.
“A lot of their children’s bedrooms have
been turned into real life memorials,” Marinova said, recalling her visits to
the families’ homes throughout the process of curating the exhibit. “One of the
things that struck me was the shoes, perfectly lined up in the corner.”
The sneakers, on loan from the victims’
families, not only a symbol of youth and street culture, but also represent
“steps interrupted, a life interrupted,” said Marinova, and act as “an
invitation to the viewer to take a walk in their shoes and…wear this burden.”
“This
is about violence being everybody’s responsibility, regardless of whether
you’re in a jail cell or a million dollar mansion,” she said. “It’s up to all
of us, especially the media, because their role is to educate and inform, and it
fails to do either. It’s not really examining the root causes… of this violence.”
Instead, she said many media outlets profit
from sensationalizing urban homicides while paying little attention to how
their coverage exacerbates the pain of families coping with the loss of a loved
one.
One article among the several that circle
the sneakers is a story about the murder of Johnny Davis. The photo
accompanying the story, the last to be taken of the athletic teen, shows his body
lying unmoved on a Dorchester sidewalk. According to reports, he was left there
for 92 minutes before being recovered by police. It was through this article that
Shondell Davis learned of her son Johnny’s death.
Marinova
said it’s inaccurate and insensitive media coverage like this that desensitizes
people to violence and death and makes it more difficult for families to heal.
“You have a media that treats Latino, Black and poor white life like it’s
disposable; it dehumanizes our communities and makes violence seem ‘normal’,”
she said.
In
an effort to counteract those negative depictions, education and dialogue were also
essential parts of the exhibit. At the core of those knowledge-sharing
opportunities was “If It Bleeds, It Leads: The Role of Media in Urban
Violence,” a gathering where local media professionals from the city’s top media
publications, including the Boston Globe,
The Boston Phoenix, El Planeta and the Bay State Banner, and local residents impacted by the city’s violence
discussed both moral and practical guidelines for covering homicide in the
city.
Though
the exhibit mainly features images and information, the lone piece of art, a
grey and black mural painted across the gallery’s interior wall, is perhaps its
piece de resistance. It depicts
distressed Boston neighborhoods, headstones sprouting out of city sidewalks, boarded
up schools, police officers brutalizing citizens, politicians taking bribes and
prisons. A shooting is taking place at the center of the painting, and the
blood running from the body of the young man caught in the middle spells out
the word “ENOUGH” in bright red paint on the pavement below. Above them, a
mother mourns, her empty arms outstretched to the heavens. And high above the
mural, near the spot where the ceiling and wall meet, the faces of murdered
youth – as babies, at graduations, celebrating birthdays – illuminate the wall.
Far
from depicting an urban utopia, the piece, painted by local muralist Thomas B.
Kwest, depicts in startling detail the causes and effects of violence in urban
communities.
“I
wanted to do more than just a family mourning or someone shot on the ground,”
he said. “I wanted to uncover some of the other aspects of the violence. It’s
not always just about some thug or some person who is just running around randomly
with no sense – it’s deeper than that.”
Certainly,
the mural and the youth’s images and words make the mood in the gallery heavy,
but the exhibit doesn’t just dwell on death – it’s also full of hope and offers
grieving relatives and friends a space to heal.
When
Shondell Davis first viewed the exhibit, she, like many others, was
overwhelmed. Not long after she arrived, she had to leave. Seeing the youth’s
faces, reading their stories, being in the presence of other grieving families —
it was simply too much.
“I
was crying when I was there, but I had to take that walk, I had to separate, I
had to tell myself to breathe. I knew this was coming, I was prepared for this
for months, but seeing it was totally different,” she said.
Despite bringing up memories and feelings
that can be hard to cope with, Davis agreed to participate in Anonymous Boston
because she wanted to keep Johnny’s name alive. She said she eventually came to
see the exhibit as “a comforting place.”
“When
you go there, you’re with other people that know exactly how you feel. You
don’t have to pretend, you don’t have to put on that mask,” she said.
On a Saturday when the exhibit was closed to the public, she took her daughter to the gallery for a special art therapy session for siblings and friends of murdered victims. There, the two worked through their feelings as they worked with other grieving family and friends to create a “Tree of Life” to celebrate those they’d lost.
“We listened to music, laughing and playing
and dancing, it was just…” Davis sighed, thankful that a supportive space like
Anonymous could exist for her and her daughter, even if only temporarily.
“Then one of the mothers said to me, ‘You
know their spirits are with us right now?’ And I looked at her and said, ‘Yes.’”
Published in The Bay State Banner
