Form and Power: Black Murals in Los Angeles

Wake Up

Noni Olabisi’s mural, Wake Up is on the outside of a treatment center for women. The simple but effective art is eye-catching due to its immense size and bold colors. The bold red and blue outlining the words draw the viewer’s attention to Olabisi directive: Wake Up. Similar to graffiti art, as graffiti art, many may overlook Wake Up, mistaking it for vandalism. However, through its simplicity is a call to action.

Prototypes is a treatment center that was founded in 1986 to change the way children and women were treated in healthcare. When Prototypes first opened its mission was to first get expanded resources to women. In 1994, they created HIV/AIDS services and offered rehabilitation services that were more stigmatized. To this day the center still functions under its original mission. Olabisi draws attention to the treatment of women and children but especially trans women who did not have proper access to a facility that could help. Wake up, functions to draw people’s attention towards the issues and populations that are outside the mainstream and stigmatized: drug addiction and trans women. Currently, our society deals with addiction by pushing it to the side in hopes that those dealing with addiction will find their own help, or simply fade away. In an interview about Los Angeles murals, Noni Olabisi has said she is - “Just now starting to be visible because I was invisible,” perhaps identifying with the patients at Prototype who felt isolated and erased. Through her artwork, Olabisi is allowing herself to be seen and calling on women and other Black women to get the attention they deserve.

Written by Sy’Naeh Shell, c/o ‘24

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