A small piece of art in downtown Raleigh highlights the big issue of gun violence
Artist Kyle Holbrook realizes his new mural in the Warehouse District may seem “underwhelming” compared to some of the larger paintings and public art splashed across the city’s walls.
But the mural — the outline of a hand making a peace sign — is small by design, he said.
That’s because it includes an important message about a big problem, he says: “Stop gun violence.”
“We want the murals to be small enough so people can take pictures with them,” said Kyle Holbrook, a Miami-based artist, in an interview with The News & Observer.
“Then they’re spreading the message. And that’s really the purpose: to capitalize off of the popularity of street art to spread the message of stopping gun violence.”
Holbrook, 43, is painting peace signs in every state as part of a national tour called Peace Tour for Gun Violence Awareness. This week, he unveiled his contribution in Raleigh on the wall of the former Dillon Supply building on South West Street.
Holbrook, who painted a similar piece in Winston-Salem, wants to highlight that violence is a national epidemic.
The mural comes as gun violence in Raleigh — crimes involving guns and homicides — sees an upward surge since the COVID-19 pandemic, statistics show.
Holbrook has been a muralist for decades and is known for colorful and social justice-oriented murals in Miami and Pittsburgh.
He is director of an art nonprofit called Moving Lives of Kids, or MLK for short. The organization collaborates with youth in various cities to create murals as an educational and artistic outlet and to also promote topics related to racial justice.
He started the national tour earlier this year because of his own experiences with gun violence. He said he lost several friends and family members to fatal shootings as a child growing up in Wilkinsburg, a borough near Pittsburgh.
“I do murals that are elaborate and that are big as 20 stories high, but I wanted to have these murals be more simple in a contemporary street arts style: two colors, or three,” he said.
“Red, burgundy and white, similar to N.C. State colors. I’ve been keeping them really simple ... it’s more impactful, because people can interact with it because it’s smaller.”
2021 Raleigh shootings on the rise
In Raleigh, there have been 420 assaults this year involving guns, as of Nov. 10, compared to 265 in the same time frame in 2019 — a nearly 60% increase over three years, according to Raleigh Police Department data provided to The N&O.
In 2021, there have been 645 crimes related to guns reported in Raleigh, an increase of 45 since September, The N&O previously reported.
There were 510 of these reported in 2019 in the same period, Raleigh police data shows.
Also in the same period, there have been 23 homicides due to shootings this year, compared to 19 in 2020 and 16 in 2019. The 83 cases of gunshot wounds from assaults surpass the 72 reported in 2019 in that period.
This year’s figures have also surpassed those of 2020.
“Raleigh is not a stranger to some of the gun violence, unfortunately,” he said, adding that a friend who lived here told him about it.
“The murals are intended to draw attention to (gun violence) right in people’s faces so it can’t be just swept under the rug,” he said. “It happens so often in our country and in our communities that people become desensitized and just look for distractions instead of just dealing with the issues.”
