#MARCH4OURLIVES
2018
CAMILLE PERROTTET, designer/lead artist
Artists: Jane Weissman, Vera Weinfield, Emily Via, Jennifer Osher
Welling Court (30th Street & Welling Court), Astoria, Queens, NY
Ad Hoc Art/Welling Court Mural Project
9’ x 13’, acrylic on concrete block
Photos © Jane Weissman
The third of Artmakers’ Welling Court murals, #March4OurLives honors activists Naomi Wadler and Emma Gonzalez, American students and gun control advocates.
Photo © Ad Hoc Art
As a high school senior, Emma survived the February 14, 2018, Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School shooting in Parkland, FL, and in response co-founded the gun-control advocacy group Never Again MSD, calling for tighter regulations against gun violence. The group coordinated the 880 March for Our Lives events that took place around the world a month later on March 24. U.S. attendance was estimated to be between 1.2 and 2 million people, making it one of the largest protests in American history.
At the Washington, D.C. protest, 11-year-old Naomi Wadler spoke about the importance of remembering the lives of black women and girls lost to gun violence, words that went viral. In early March, Naomi and a friend organized a walkout at their Virginia elementary school. While many American student protests lasted 17 minutes – to honor the 17 Parkland victims – the two elementary school pupils added an additional minute to honor Courtlin Arrington, an African American teenager recently shot and killed at her high school in Alabama.
Established in May 2010 and coordinated by Ad Hoc Art, under the director of Garrison Buxton, the Welling Court Mural Project was conceived to help local residents, led by Jonathan Ellis, spruce up their neighborhood. Each year, approximately 150 street artists from NYC and around the world return to create a new mural on their assigned wall, their work filling the residential streets that radiate from Welling Court and 30th Avenue.