TakePart
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The pop-up art installation ‘Manifest:Justice’ focuses on bringing people together and inspiring them to take back their communities.
Last August, as protesters marched in Ferguson, Missouri, after the death of Michael Brown, the 18-year-old unarmed teen shot by a police officer, another group of activists began thinking about how to incorporate the creative community into the movement. The result is Manifest:Justice, a free pop-up art show taking place in Los Angeles.
“The idea is that art is at the center of social change—and social change is about more than the civil rights movement,” says Nijeul Porter, the community outreach and program coordinator of Manifest:Justice. To that end, show organizers commissioned more than 250 pieces around the theme of social justice and its intersection with issues such as health, racial justice, human rights, education, LGBT rights, and capital punishment.
The drawings, paintings, protest posters, and three-dimensional works on display are focused on one goal: inspiring people to take back their communities, challenge institutional biases and inequalities, and identify solutions.
“A lot of these artists really went in—they are really challenging the audience to think critically about what is happening around issues of justice in this country,” says Porter.
Much of the provocative art on display tackles the problem of police brutality. A poignant painting called The Talk depicts how black parents have to sit their sons down and tell them how to avoid being killed by law enforcement. Then there’s a drawing of Oscar Grant, posters with lyrics of the classic KRS-One song “Sound of Da Police,” a vehicle constructed from parts of police cars, and a sculpture of a pack of cigarettes that references the death at the hands of police of Staten Island resident Eric Garner last summer. Garner was placed in a choke hold after being stopped by the police for selling “loosies”—individual cigarettes. 
Other works on display turn the spotlight on the death penalty, the amount of money spent incarcerating individuals instead of educating them, and the effect of food deserts in low-income communities.
The show is also designed to inspire hope and action in communities that have been historically disenfranchised. To that end, Manifest:Justice is being held in Los Angeles’ Baldwin Village, a community that is infamously known as “the Jungle”—and was featured as a hub of gang activity in the Denzel Washington–as–crooked–cop film Training Day.