Colorful Legacy
Item
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Title
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Colorful Legacy
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Rights
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© 2015 City of Philadelphia Mural Arts Program / Willis Nomo Humphrey & Keir Johnston
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Type
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StillImage
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Creator
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Humphrey, Willis Nomo
Johnston, Keir
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Date
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2015
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Description
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“Colorful Legacy” was painted by Willis “Nomo” Humphrey and Keir Johnston as the culmination of a year-long series of workshops uniting Black and Asian American North and South Philadelphian men in a discussion of the social problems they face and ways to overcome challenges (MAP, “Colorful Legacy”). The fact that Hikes chose “Colorful Legacy” as a frontispiece for her article on Black queer Philadelphians invites viewers to reinterpret the mural’s expressions of Black, implicitly straight male self-affirmation in a queer way. The word “Proud” on the right side of the mural, an index of Black pride from the civil rights movement, also conjures up LGBTQIA+ pride marches in Hikes’ reframing. Hikes headed what became a global “More Color More Pride” initiative in 2017, by introducing to Philadelphia’s City Hall a pride flag which added black and brown to the now standard LGBTQIA+ rainbow flag to symbolize racial inclusivity (Orso). In “Colorful Legacy,” the combination of multi-hued “rays” (red, yellow, orange, green) symbolizes the powers of the Black male imagination. The blacks and browns of the central identifiably male face both recall Hikes’s “More Color More Pride” initiative and put a racialized and gendered face on it.
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Description source (see 20)
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Format
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image/jpeg
1700 × 1133 pixels
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Language
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English
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Place
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Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
4008 Chestnut Street
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Contributor
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Photo by Steve Weinik
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Extent
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485 KB
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Identifier
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img-3
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Relation
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Mural Arts Philadelphia (MAP)
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Subject
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public art
mural paintings (visual works)
Asian LGBTQ+ people
BIPOC
Black LGBTQ+ people
LGBTQ+ pride
LGBTQ+ pride flags
LGBTQ+ communities
LGBTQ+ civil rights
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Temporal Coverage
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2015
Colorful Legacy