All Hands, All Cities: Damon Davis’ All Hands on Deck and the Street Art of Black Lives Matter

presentation, ucsd symposium march 2019: toward (in)visibility: space, temporality & voice

All Hands on Deck is an artistic project by artist Damon Davis made largely in response to the police killing of 18-year-old Michael Brown in August 2014, and the ensuing civil unrest in Ferguson, Missouri. In this talk, I argued that All Hands on Deck is exemplary of two recent turns in the art of public space: the ability of graffiti and street art to move from “all-city” visibility to “all-cities” visibility through digital space, and the emergence of “counter-monuments” as a way to better commemorate events in public space. 

All Hands on Deck is a series of wheatpasted posters featuring the hands of community members and protestors, originally placed on boarded up businesses in Ferguson, and now spread throughout the world through social media and reproductions of the work in new cities. This paper argues that through this dissemination, All Hands on Deck achieves what Martin Irvine has called “all-cities” visibility, a major goal of contemporary street art.  Additionally, the works’ unique commemoration of the death of Michael Brown places it in the realm of counter-monument.  All Hands on Deck creates a public reminder of the events Ferguson, paying tribute to an event that the state denies was historical, and creating a uniquely synchronic and diachronic memorial.  

While much has been written about street art, Black Lives Matter, and counter-monuments, the three have rarely been considered together. This talk examined how Davis and his contemporaries seize opportunities to reclaim public space and memorialize victims of police brutality in a new way. All Hands on Deck is exemplative of these innovations in the street art of Black Lives Matter, reflecting the movements goals of claiming a right to the city, achieving a greater visibility of black lives in everyday spaces and challenging official narratives of documentation, memory and history.