30 Jan 2015

APRA Foundation Berlin: Adrian Piper's 'Imagine [Trayvon Martin]' (2013) FREE

Adrian Piper's 'Imagine [Trayvon Martin]' (2013) FREE

I created this work to memorialize the 2012 death of Trayvon Martin, a 17-year-old African American boy, as he was walking home from a convenience store. A Euroethnic vigilante neighbor, George Zimmerman, followed him against police orders and fatally shot him in the chest. Local police declined to charge Zimmerman with any crime. In 2013, a local jury acquitted him of second-degree murder and manslaughter.

Trayvon Martin was not the first or only victim of police state-sponsored violence against unarmed African Americans. Several more recent cases have received the attention of the international press. Others, both before and since, have gone unnoticed or have been forgotten. But Trayvon Martin's shooting death was the wake-up call for many of those Euroethnic Americans for whom Barack Obama's presidency was supposedly conclusive proof that American racism was a thing of the past.

As an antidote to further memory loss, I have been distributing this work free of charge and as widely as possible. It is available for free download as a high-resolution PNG file at adrianpiper.com/art/index.shtml , and can be printed out in a variety of sizes and formats. Please take one, or many, and pass it on.


Adrian Piper