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A Vehicle For Difficult Conversations

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In response to the killing of George Floyd and the ensuing protests, artist Arthur Brill launched the Ashland Peace Project — which is not just a work of art, but a series of conversations intended to meet people where they’re at.

Last summer, the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis spurred protests over police brutality and racial inequality in every corner of the country. Even the little town of Ashland, VA, with just less than 8,000 residents, was affected. 

As people nationwide grappled with the question, “What can I do?,” Ashland artist Arthur Brill found his answer in what he knows best: art. 

Almost a year later, on March 27, Arthur Brill officially unveiled the Ashland Peace Project sculpture at South Taylor Street Park in Ashland – a 40-inch tall wooden peace sign painted in two skin-tone and covered with messages from residents. Mounted atop its base, the sculpture stands about seven feet from the ground to its highest point. It is one part of Brill’s project; he has also committed to host 35 one-hour long workshops with guest panelists to discuss challenging issues about peace and unity in America through June 2021. 

“I think that’s what this peace project can do; it creates the vehicle for people to have what can be difficult conversations,” said Scott Garka, president of CultureWorks, an organization that promotes arts and culture in the Richmond and Tri-Cities region. “But I think great things can come out of it in terms of enriching the community in a new way, and helping us find a path forward.”

As Black Lives Matter demonstrations reached the small town in May 2020, Brill got curious. He decided to ask some questions online: Why are the people of Ashland taking part in the protests? Is it to support the national movement or to protest against the local police department? The following week, Brill was invited to another protest in front of town hall in support of George Floyd. This time, the artist wanted to take the conversations he had online into the real world. He decided to set up a table where he could invite people to join discussions about issues with the Ashland police.

“So as a focal point for that, I wanted to have something – a piece of art,” he said. That’s when the peace sign came into action.

The hand sign itself seems to have been made specifically for this project – but it wasn’t. The 40 inches tall sculpture had been sitting in Brill’s studio, Behind the Curtain, since 2014, after it had been gifted from a friend. Yet, almost overnight, Brill turned it into a symbol of hope and unity for the town and beyond. 

Only 24 hours before the protest, Brill decided to paint the hand into two different skin colors. The artist stayed up all night painting. The next morning, he started writing messages on it. A couple of hours later, the sign was at Ashland town hall and residents started adding their own messages to the piece; without knowing it, the Ashland Peace Project was born. 

Since then, Brill has brought the hand to several rallies and protests, including some to change the names of Hanover County’s Lee-Davis High School and Stonewall Jackson Middle School – which were both successfully changed in October 2020. 

The peace sign is covered in messages: “May all the beings in the world be happy and free.” “Make it real, no more empty promises!” “Pray for the future of our children!” On the back of the hand, a long list of names of Black people killed by the police is painted, under the heading, “Say their names.” 

“When I start reading the messages that are actually on the sculpture or when I start writing names from that list on there … something kind of transcendental happens, and I really feel the weight of the entire thing,” Brill said. “In the end, like I said, all I can do is what I can do – and this is what I can do. There’s a lot of cards on the table, and if it helps a little bit rather than hurts… then, that’s a good thing.”

Brill knew that for his project to have a meaningful impact on the community, he needed the support of the town. 

In July 2020, Ashland’s town council voted to fund a new arts and culture incentive program to support local art businesses. Brill and two other winning artists were awarded $4,000 for the Ashland Peace Project. The program was built to be a three-way win, explained Joshua Farrar, Ashland town manager. Its goal is to support local artists, as well as meeting the town’s strategic goals, and being beneficial to the community. 

This is how the Ashland Peace Project went from a symbolic statue to a series of 35 one-hour-long workshops hosted by Brill and panelists.

“It was really easy for me to justify that that would be a win for the community, regardless of how the conversations went,” Farrar said. “Having that conversation is a value in and of itself. So that’s where I saw the value, was making sure that Ashland wasn’t just being the sleepy little bucolic town – that we were having those hard conversations.”

The sculpture originally started with just the hand. But the storming of the U.S. Capitol on January 6 prompted Brill to expand the statue to allow more space to write on. After the insurrection, Brill added a column as a base for the sign to emulate one of the columns in front of the Capitol. 

The sculpture has an original crack that seems to split the piece in two. Again, Brill decided to use the original features of the sculpture to highlight his message and painted the crack in a bright red. After adding the base to the statue, the artist decided to continue that crack all the way down through the column to represent the foundational issues of this country. The crack becomes smaller as it goes up and finally disappears as the fingers pointing upward in a peace sign begin. 

“His sculpture started with the hand. But people wanted to keep adding to it, they wanted more places to write, so he had to find a way to make it bigger. And that’s powerful to me,” Garka said. “The theme of unity is tremendous. It takes a lot of work to make unity happen. But if … more and more people in the town are getting behind that idea – as evidently they are because they want to put their words on there – then that gives me some hope that we can, one day, find that.” 

For the next couple of months, Brill will keep hosting workshops and will keep bringing the sculpture to local events to continue to fill the sign with messages. This weekend, you can find the statue in Carytown for Chalk Up The Town. The event runs from Friday, May 14 to Sunday, May 16; the Ashland Peace Project statue will visit on Saturday the 15th.

In the future, Brill said, he hopes to take his sculpture across the state, and then later to the many other Ashlands in America. 

While there are already many signs on the statue, one particularly grabbed Brill’s attention. At one of the rallies to change the names of the schools, a young girl came up to the artist and asked him to write something on there. 

“What would you want me to write?” he said he asked her. “And she said, ‘Don’t be mean to Black people.’”

All photos via Ashland Peace Project

The Great Gatsby

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Activist, rapper, mustache-haver — Goad Gatsby is a lot of things. At the end of the day, he just wants to make the world a better, more chill place — and maybe inspire others while he’s at it.

When Kristopher Goad’s friends wanted to get him signed up for Facebook in the mid-2000s, none of them knew his full name. He was known only by his last name within the group, so they signed him up using the name Goad Gatsby.

“And then everybody just decided that my name was Goad Gatsby at that point,” said Goad.

Since then, he has become well-known within Richmond not only as a hip-hop performer with a highly recognizable “disco mustache,” but also as a longtime adversary of the Virginia Flaggers and their public displays of the Confederate battle flag on Arthur Ashe Boulevard. More recently, he’s also gotten some attention as a documenter of the protests in Richmond this summer and the police’s response.

In 2015, Goad was featured in a documentary series by The Atlantic called Battle Flag, about people’s opinions of the modern use of the Confederate flag.

At that point, Goad had been blasting hip hop music next to the Flaggers while they stood in front of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts on weekends for about a year, and was the subject of a considerable amount of vitriol from the group.

“They thought I was a carpetbagger until they found out that I really was just a scalawag,” said Goad.

The Flaggers began to lose momentum in 2015, when they stopped announcing their appearance schedule publicly after two members were arrested on kidnapping charges. Carlos Lesters and Megan Everett of Florida kidnapped Everett’s two-year-old daughter in 2014 in order to prevent the child’s father from vaccinating her or enrolling her in public school.

These days, the Flaggers make it out to Arthur Ashe every once in a while, much less often than their onetime near-weekly basis. But there’s a whole new right-wing movement in Richmond now. Based on his knowledge of who the Flaggers were and who is affilliated with the Trump Train vehicular caravan that rolled through the city in October, Goad doesn’t believe there’s much overlap between the two groups.

Beginning when protests began in the streets of Richmond in late May over the killing of George Floyd and the ongoing issue of police violence, Goad was on the front lines. He did his best to document the response from the police and the city government, as he saw it, on social media. This brought him a whole new wave of attention, for better and for worse.

Goad was arrested several times during the summer, including once in September when he was charged with obstructing the free passage of others. At the time of the arrest, the police alleged the incident he was being charged for happened two weeks earlier during a demonstration in front of the Richmond jail, in which 11 people were arrested. Goad says he wasn’t even there at the jail on that day.

When he was arrested, he was taken to the Third Precinct Police Station, where they took his phone while he was attempting to get in contact with his lawyer. Goad never saw a warrant for his arrest; instead, a city attorney informed his lawyer that the warrant was sealed. He never got his phone back.

Since then, he has kept a lower profile, and the protests have declined. However, he is still keeping tabs on right-wing activity in the city. When he considers the ongoing unrest that occurred across Richmond throughout the summer, it’s his impression that the city created a self-perpetuating cycle of violence by retaliating against protesters instead of addressing the problems that inspired the protests. This, in turn, created more problems and further fueled the unrest.

Photo via Goad Gatsby/Twitter

One issue he sees as important to the way everything played out is the fact that police were brought in from precincts across the city, as well as other localities, as reinforcements during protests. Many of those that operated in this capacity had prior reputations for aggressive behavior.

“People were telling me about some of these officers’ past interactions, and it seemed like they were getting some of the worst officers to deal with protesters,” Goad said. “Instead of getting police that are experts in de-escalation, they were getting experts in doing no-knock raids in the projects.”

Goad believes the police have a particular inclination to go after journalists and people who film protests. That’s because the more specific information gets out, the harder it is for police and city officials to justify their actions.

“If somebody is saying ‘The police are bad because they’re doing something I don’t like,’ that’s something they can just brush off. But if somebody’s being like ‘The police fired less-lethal rounds at people before there was any type of confrontation, here is some footage to go along with that,’ then the police go ‘Oh no, this isn’t good. They’re building a case against us in the court of public opinion,’” said Goad. “I wish I could build a case against Richmond police in City Hall, or the court of law, but unfortunately I don’t have that ability.”

For now, he’s sticking with the internet, where he continues to fight misinformation and lack of knowledge. He believes that making people aware of what’s really going on is the best way to convince them to take action.

“A lot of people are either willing to help but don’t know what to do, or they’ve never seen the type of information that would make them act,” said Goad.

Top Photo via Goad Gatsby/Twitter

AARNxBRWN: The Prodigal Son

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Recording artist and producer AARNxBRWN dropped a new video and has a new album on the way. His musical journey over the summer coincided with a quest to find himself and justice for his people through protests and activism.

Before this summer, rapper/producer Aaron Brown, known to the music world as AARNxBRWN, didn’t consider himself an activist. But when protests started around the murder of George Floyd and people began taking to the streets to demand justice, Brown joined in. He wound up with a megaphone in his hand and a new way of thinking about his music.

Photo by LOSINGMYEGO

Since releasing his debut album, GHost, in 2019, Brown has built a reputation for his melodic production and expressive sound, as well as his dynamic lyricism. But his participation in the protests, where he marched alongside thousands of Richmonders for several weeks, made him want to record something as a means of expression. He produced the beat for his single, “Value,” and wrote the first verse after the first week or two, and returned to finish the track around a month in. 

“I finally felt like I had enough information and enough experience and enough of a story to finish,” Brown said. 

LOSINGMYEGO, a self-described “one woman multidisciplinary creative studio” and Brown’s friend, shot footage of the protests night after night using her phone and a Moment lens, unbeknownst to Brown. When he finished “Value,” she asked to make a video for the song. 

“When I finished the song she was like, ‘I need it, give me the song,” Brown said. “She put together this crazy video with all these shots I didn’t even know she had.” 

The end result is a powerful representation of the summer’s struggles. The black and white shots cut quickly from scene to scene, lingering in striking moments of visual symbolism — a fist raised in air filled with tear gas, a burning flag, masked protesters perched on the sides of the monument at Marcus-David Peters Circle. Between biting, emotional verses, Brown reminds his listeners, “know your worth / know your value.”

For Brown, knowing your worth means knowing who you are and what you deserve. He isn’t content to settle only for what bureaucracy and systems of injustice deem feasible. 

“A lot of the older folks and people were like, this is how you do it I guess, one small step at a time, and we just need to keep trucking along,” Brown said. “I think my mentality was like, I’m really tired of just piecing together equalities for us.”

Brown knows he’s new to the work of activism. His experiences in the protests and working with justice causes now have changed the way he thinks about his music, but for him, it still comes down to his talent for putting what he experiences into words and beats. It’s just that now, his subject matter is slightly different. 

“This is the first time in my life where I stepped out into the thick of something that was national, international attention,” Brown said. “A lot of my music is influenced, because I’ve been in new spaces and I’ve learned so much about my own culture and my own standing in America … It’s made my music more impactful, I think. It’s truer to me.”

Photo by LOSINGMYEGO

Taking risks has become a central theme of Brown’s upcoming album, Save Me I’m Drowning, which drops November 6. He talks about a kind of inspired urgency — a willingness to jump in the water and ignore others’ fears. 

“Now it’s like there’s a fire under my ass,” Brown said. “There’s a single off of the album … the whole concept is almost like a prodigal son story, the idea of going away and ‘jumping into water’… Taking that risk, whatever it is — whether it’s a social risk or a life risk or whatever that thing is — and people being scared of you taking that risk.”

In order to learn, the prodigal son had to leave, Brown explained. Even if it meant making mistakes, he could only gain and grow by venturing out before returning home. 

“He had to go away to get enough wisdom to understand that everything he needed was home,” Brown said. “At some point of time he had to take that jump.”

Photo by LOSINGMYEGO

For Brown, the future is all about risking dangerous waters to emerge as the person he needs to be — a prodigal son seeking justice for all. 

You can pre-order Brown’s upcoming album, Save Me I’m Drowning, at Bandcamp, where you can also hear a two-track preview of the album.

Top Photo by LOSINGMYEGO