Artist finds ‘silver lining’ in defaced mural. The restored painting will be even better.

The Confederate flag was the first thing to go.

When it came time for artist Dare Coulter to repair the vandalism to her “Dare to Dissent” mural in downtown Raleigh, there was no doubt about where she’d start.

Sometime around July 11, an unknown vandal used red marker to scrawl on the mural a series of semi-coherent but unmistakably racist messages about slavery and the Civil War.

The graffiti stayed there until Wednesday afternoon, when Coulter covered the Confederate flag with brisk strokes of white paint before moving on to the rest of the mural.

“Dare to Dissent,” commissioned by the ACLU, is a 20-foot-by-30-foot mural on the west-facing exterior back wall of the Boylan-Pearce building. Coulter, 25, painted it during the summer of 2017 (with help from her mother, Alnita Coulter), depicting iconic images of protest.

The mural has become a popular backdrop for selfies on social media. It also gained favorable notice in The New York Times.

Since the mural was defaced, the community has rallied around with donations and messages of support. Wednesday’s touchup work was triage, the first step in a planned restoration.

Inspired by the public outpouring, Coulter plans to redesign the mural and enlist the community to assist in repainting it.

Given the prevailing hot-button political climate, it’s less surprising that it was defaced than that it took more than a year for vandals to strike, Coulter said.

“I am surprised it took this long, yeah,” Coulter said in an interview before she started painting on Wednesday. “Why now? The whole thing is confusing because the timing is weird. What he wrote is weird, too.”

She placed a sign on the brick wall that reads: “We won’t let racist vandalism ruin this mural for the Raleigh community. We will restore this iconic part of downtown as soon as we can.”

But she called public response to the vandalism “a big silver lining.”

“In the end, I don’t want this to be the lasting impression, or for people to feel bad or negative,” Coulter said. “I want to go back to the love there was before. My hope is that the comeback from this thing is what people will hold onto, not the vandalism.”

For more information about the restoration, go to darecoulter.com/hatewillnotwin.

This story was originally published July 18, 2018 at 7:10 PM.