Freddie Gray lives on in art, his eyes watching Baltimore

The Baltimore Banner
April 15, 2025

His stare is impossible to pass without locking eyes. That was likely the point.

The mural at the corner of Presbury and Mount streets in Sandtown-Winchester depicts a close-up of Freddie Gray’s face. The 25-year-old is flanked by protesters — one group led by Martin Luther King Jr. during the 1965 marches in Alabama, the other by activists during the Uprising, the local protest movement after Gray’s arrest by Baltimore police led to his death.

The triptych in West Baltimore garnered international attention but was just one of countless responses from the city’s arts community following Gray’s death, 10 years ago this month. For many in Baltimore and around the country, the Uprising felt like the culmination of decades of long-simmering tensions between the police and Black Americans.

Artists, as they always do, employed their talents to express the myriad emotions that cannot be summed up solely by words.

Artists from outside Baltimore felt compelled to make their own statements. Steve Locke of Hudson, New York, used photographs of Gray — a family photo, an image of his arrest and Gray in the hospital on life support — to create large monochromes that were installed on the facade of Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum from June 2018 to January 2019.

“Three Deliberate Grays for Freddie” was a site for mourning and healing while showing the abstract progression of his life to death. Years later, Locke says he intended to make a work about Gray’s “erasure” at the hands of police.

“That’s what a memorial is supposed to do,” Locke said. “It’s not just supposed to be a pretty picture. It’s supposed to indict. It’s supposed to accuse. It’s supposed to remind people that this person was lost to us because of the state.”

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Read full article at thebaltimorebanner.com.

 
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