I am Amanda D King. I am the founder and creative director of shooting without bullets.
I'm a visual artist and activist based in Cleveland, Ohio.
The billboards explore issues of redlining instructional racism,
gender oppression, disparities in the arts, state sanctioned violence
and spirituality.
For the gender and racial disparities billboard,
we imagined what it would be like
if two of the artists in shooting without bullets,
Shatara and Leigh Leigh treated the steps of the Cleveland Museum of Art as their
You know, when I think of, you know, when I was younger or summertime,
you think of you and your friends just hanging out on your front porch.
So, thinking of this institution where historically, African-american
females have not been able to really be a part of or be represented for them to
kind of like take this space as their own.
I felt like it was really … we felt like it was really strong and powerful
and an image worth creating and then putting out there.
When you look at our faces and the stuff and you look at our persona,
it's really like, us really owning where we are and who we are, where we're at.
It also shows how much of a people we are, like, how close we are all together
and just being there for each other.
Like, I mean, if I need my hair done, I need my hair done.
Something as simple as that.
So, the state sanctioned violence billboard features Ezra who is a young photographer.
Ezra is in an apartment and he's looking into the bathroom mirror
and there are red and blue lights behind him and in the reflection
and this was a statement about police terror in our homes.
I don't necessarily fear the police but I feared their fear of me more so.
They get too intimidated by me,
they might just see me and, 'he's kind of like, tall'
and I might look mean.
What it means to me is like, the average day of a black man
and more so, looking at my son, do I really look that mean?
Do I look that intimidating?
I had this face since I was a kid, so …
The image for the Four Freedoms billboard, like, I hope people see it and
are at the very least, like, a little perplexed by the phrase on it –[un]do gender.
Gender is only a set of actions.
I think a lot of people take their gender
and their gendered behaviour as given, as just a part of them and
something that they really can't help.
I'm hoping that people who see this who are open to being changed by something
that they're seeing right in a split second as they are driving.
Having work like this in front of Cleveland and
America generally right now is incredibly important.
In Cleveland alone there were multiple murders of black trans women this year already.
Cleveland has one of the higher murder rates.
If people can continue to pretend that the trans community is non-existent, you know,
and doesn't deserve a voice and we're not real people or any of those things, like,
that violence is only allowed to just spread, you know?
There's no challenge against that.
So, this is where you
Yeah right about, right about here.
About a 150ft of red nylon tablecloth that we ran between the swing set
and then situated the children on either side of its kind of graphically illustrate the divide
that this, you know, artificial line caused.
We chose one African-american girl and one white girl because redlining really primarily
impacted black communities more than anything else
and we situated the white girl facing away from the camera
and the African-american girl facing the camera because it was this
sort of like outside looking in thing, we thought that that would have much more impact.
We thought about this one video.
There's a video where a black boy and a white boy are in New York
and they like, run towards each other and everybody is like,
you know, on CNN, MSNBC, all the newspaper media outlets, like, 'wow look at this video'.
'This is so inspiring', 'this is what America should be like'.
We thought about how many times this video was shared and celebrated but how many
people aren't ready and willing to address issues like redlining
that are preventing this connection from happening.
This project was kind of a surprise for me because when I learned that it was a billboard,
it was like, oh, wow a billboard, I'm thinking like an advertisement or whatever.
And so, when it was explained that this was exploring the idea of
community and the church and the faith and a pastor doing his, you know,
expressions of, you know, holiness and embracing the laws of Jesus and God,
I'm thinking, oh yeah, I grew up with all that because I grew up as a Baptist kid,
and I've been to many different churches.
It's a man who is praising God and the billboard says, 'joy is a form of resistance'
and if we are truly going to transform society or at least resist these systems that are oppressing us,
we have to find joy.
To me that is a part of resistance, I mean, happiness to me is resistance
If you are feeling good about yourself and feeling good from where you come from
and you're proud about it and you're trying to give the common purpose
and the common good to spread it to the masses,
that to me, that is resistance.
That phrase along with that face, the expression,
is going to just make them look twice and think twice.
I mean, I think it's a really great opportunity to maybe turn a mirror toward Cleveland itself
to kind of say, that this is the reason that we are the way that we are.
Our landscape which is pretty depressed,
we don't get to see a lot of things that are engaging
that sort of speak to our soul.
I think that, we can go through our daily lives and
be very closed and not really aware of what's happening around us
and these billboards are going to disrupt that.
I feel like it's going to bring a sense of hope
and a sense of ownership and a sense of I belong, and hopefully just have a sense of pride.
Yeah. Yeah!