PHOTO | ASHLEY MAHONEY

Georgie Nakima and Janelle Dunlap collaborated on “Manifest Future,” a series of murals in Historic West End. They’re standing in front of a mural that reflects historic monuments in the Washington Heights neighborhood.

Manifest Future is a more than a mural series.

The second mural sits in Washington Heights on Beatties Ford Road at the intersection with Booker Avenue across from Original Chicken & Ribs.

“The whole concept behind the Manifest Future series is to create a living memory of history through art,” said curator Janelle Dunlap. “Often we think about history as things that are in the past. We think [of things] that we are in black and white. We have a distance, because that’s not part of our cultural memory.”

Said mural artist Georgie Nakima, also known as Garden of Journey: “A lot of [the mural] was curated by Washington Heights. They wanted to bring historic monuments of the Historic West End in.”

Dunlap and Nakima wanted the mural to reflect the residents of Washington Heights and Historic West End as well as their history while also providing a vision for the future. Nakima wanted to showcase the beauty of black culture, but she is quick to caution that uplifting one culture does not mean trying to tear another down.

“I wanted to highlight that black culture is not a monolith,” Nakima said. “We come in many forms, but we’re still a force as a tribe. You aren’t bringing another down just because you’re uplifting this heritage. It’s something that neighborhood simply is, and we have to remember that as it goes through these changes with gentrification.”

Washington Heights was established in 1913 as a middle-income black neighborhood named after Booker T. Washington, founder of Tuskegee University in Alabama and the most influential African American in the United State in the early 20th century. The mural reflects that piece of history, also including a quote from Washington: “if you want to uplift yourself, uplift others.”

“I really like Georgie’s focus in this of bringing out African American features,” Dunlap said. “It’s Washington’s hairline that is most impressive for me. It just makes him seem if he can exist in 2020, and walk among us, and it wouldn’t look any different from what the other guys look like now. She also uses kente cloth to clothe him in, and for me that’s significant, because we always think about these people in very stuff black suits, but to put color on Booker T. Washington it’s her attempt to bring a past perception of someone to present day.”
Other features in the mural include the historic Excelsior Club, Johnson C. Smith University and the entrance to Northwest School of the Arts, which Nakima pointed out was the original site of West Charlotte High School.  

Like what you're reading? Support us with a donation.
The mural also depicts a streetcar. Washington Heights was a streetcar suburb until 1938 when the service was discontinued. The neighborhood, unlike other Charlotte suburbs, did not have race restrictions pertaining to purchasing or renting property.

“This was far enough out from the city that this was considered the suburbs, and it was seen as a huge commodity for the community to have access to the city to take the streetcar,” Dunlap said. “It was also seen as a sign of social status. This was specifically for an African American community. Streetcars were back in the day’s bike lanes.”

Dunlap and Nakima collaborated on the first mural, along with Sloane Siobhan in 2018, which is located at 1600 West Trade St. Both artists are graduates of Northwest School of the Arts, and Siobhan is now based in Las Vegas. The projects symbolize reclamation of space.

“For me, Manifest Future is really a way of connecting people back to the past, and giving them a familiarity that is present day or even future tense,” Dunlap said. “The truth is along this corridor, the history is disappearing. It’s disappearing with the people. It’s disappearing with the spaces. It’s disappearing with the housing and eventually schools. In order to prevent that from happening, we’re encouraging people to think about them being in this space in the future—specifically using black faces, black features, Afrofuturism, to bring people into a present tense of being in this space by giving them an idea of what the future can look like and also what the past looked like.”

Comments