By Zainab Ummie Sillah
At the corner of State and Capital in downtown Olympia is the Olympia-Rafah Solidarity mural. A large tree grows from concrete, obstructed by bright blue waves crashing over. Since 2011, the eye-catching colors of each leaf invite the viewer to take a deeper look into who the leaf depicts. Indigenous people, activists, musicians and radical organizers are painted in vivid color as important leaders in the Olympia community.
Art Forces has created a diaspora of peoples working on art and social change from the streets of San Francisco to Olympia, Washington, and across the globe to refugee camps in Palestine and Lebanon. Their artwork articulates global issues of social justice, precarity, borders, migration, and decolonization.
Spearheading the movement is muralist Susan Greene. The New York City native has led over thirty public art projects worldwide. Greene’s work as a social art practitioner, educator and clinical psychologist sparks the discussion of world commonality and connectivity. A San Francisco activism archive, Freedom Archives, says she focuses on “the borders and migrations involving memory, decolonization, and the relationships between creativity, trauma, and resilience in the context of globalism.”
Founded in 2001, Art Forces states its use of community art and technology, including murals, websites, social media, is to inspire analytical thinking and action. The vision of Art Forces is to connect social justice struggles and histories that have been decimated or consigned to oblivion. Their official website states their work is in “the intersection of trauma, memory, creativity, resilience and resistance.” The project aims to “imagine new possibilities,” by disturbing and rupturing perceptions of culture, in order to create cultural alliances that offer the public an opportunity to see global connections.
Evergreen student Ana Beatriz says the mural “makes me feel like there are so many stories, that I can never cognitively understand them all. But I can get a view of them from this mural.”
Art Forces straddles many mediums with its ongoing goal “[of using] culture as an organizing tool to bring people together across movements.” Since its inception, the movement has completed over fifty public art projects in the United States, Palestine and Lebanon. Their projects and products are used by activists and organizers to promote change in many arenas, including mental health, non-violent resistance and the environment.
