“The function of art,” writes Bell Hooks, “is to do more than tell it like it is. It’s to imagine what is possible.” What public art imagines is, often, what a place has been unwilling to say aloud. The tensions, omissions, and silent aspirations of a city, a nation, a land.
Richmond, Virginia, a city once punctuated with monuments, now vibrates with murals. The imagination is still being built. More than 150 walls across the city have seen their bricks transformed to canvas, many of them shaping a radical form of conversation. “Trust Building/s,” a new mural series by artists Noah Scalin and Alfonso Pérez Acosta, forms a new kind of invitation to listen to what, after a history of fracture, still wants to be mended.
The soaring new works are a kind of spiritual sequel to “Together We Rise,” the pair’s original mural painted in the rumbling wake of George Floyd’s murder in 2020. That work, created under the auspices of the Mending Walls project, offered archetypes: anonymous figures locked in shared struggle, their backs meeting, each the other’s means of gaining height. Around them, a ribbon of police tape names the murdered and mourned. It was emblematic, aspirational, mythic: a fresco for a city learning to mourn aloud.
Five years have passed, and Richmond’s Confederate colossi have been removed from their pedestals. Streets once militarized now bear banners for mutual aid. The rupture has been historic, but resolution remains elusive. Into this ambiguous terrain comes “Trust Building/s,” a bold invitation to consider what remains unfinished.
Where “Together We Rise” was symbolic, the first mural in the “Trust Building/s” series is sharply particular. The figures of “Reliability” are real, participants in facilitated dialogues through “One Small Step,” the national program that records civil, joyful conversations of discovery across lines of political difference. The mural project will draw from four such conversational pairings, each embodying a dimension required to build trust in the unique fractures of the American experiment.
Richmond, of course, is both symbol and site of that fracture, a palimpsest of postbellum fictions, tobacco fortunes, Black intellectual ferment, Jim Crow repressions. It is a place where official memory has often betrayed lived experience. And where, increasingly, mural art has become a kind of unignorable civic counter-memory. Its mural boom didn’t begin with Floyd, but it accelerated in that tense summer, catalyzed by the “Mending Walls” initiative that paired artists of different racial backgrounds and commissioned them to work across lines of difference. It gave a grammar to risk and response. Scalin and Pérez’s “Together We Rise” became one of its most enduring images, an imagining of tense but necessary contact, staged in the middle of a pandemic and a righteous uprising.
If that piece spoke in the conditional tense, “Reliability” speaks in the imperative, a shift felt in the figures, which are now specific, embodied, and facing each other, leaning toward, faces uplifted, in an intimate act of togetherness. The wall itself lengthens in a narrative unspooling. Phrases, lifted from the “One Small Step” dialogues, are rendered in clean, varied typography across the painted scenes. One reads: “Remember the good around you is still there.” Another: “An epidemic of human connection.” They function as wayfinding signs through a labyrinth of civic disrepair. As Solnit might say, meditations in an emergency.
“Trust,” Scalin reminded me when we spoke, “was the unnamed center of our first mural. But it’s also been the center of our collaboration.” Art made with another asks something else of its makers. Openness, compromise, tolerance of ambiguity. True of the mural’s process as much as its subject. The duo shifted from sketch to digital, tape-measured every line by hand, without projections or shortcuts. “We didn’t know the right way,” Pérez says, “but we knew how we wanted it to feel.” What results is less a product than an artifact of relationship: provisional, adaptive, resisting closure, inviting return.
Even for the artists. In an act of additional vulnerability, Pérez himself will be the subject of the next mural in the “Trust Building/s” series. A young, immigrant Colombian father alongside a white octogenarian and lifelong Richmonder, the two paired randomly through “One Small Step.”
“At first, I said no to the idea,” Pérez admits. “No self-portraits.” But it kept coming back. Scalin kept nudging. The One Small Step team encouraged. His wife insisted. “She saw something in that relationship,” he says. “Something I couldn’t not say. To paint oneself on a wall, to say, publicly and permanently, “I am an immigrant, and I belong here” is a gamble of a gesture.”
And a gift to all who look. Murals, Susan Sontag once wrote obliquely, “are a form of public dreaming.” But dreams can be complicated. What we dream reveals what we fear. What we hope. What we’ve yet to understand. “Trust Building/s” is not a dream of resolution. It is a dream of effort. It returns us to the premise that democracy, in its truest form, is a process of listening. There are no angels in the conversations, and no neutral narrators. Merely neighbors painted on cinderblock and aging brick, in a visual speech where once there was silence. A scaffolding of empathy, still under construction. A place to begin.
