Carrboro Completes Black Lives Matter Mural on Century Center

Artists recently finished installing the latest in a series of murals in Carrboro supporting racial justice, according to the town.

A new piece painted on the Century Center facing East Main Street and reading “Black Lives Matter” was completed on Friday. It’s the second mural commissioned by the Carrboro Town Council in response to the racial justice movement seen during the summer of 2020.

The Century Center was chosen after deliberation between the town council members about installing artwork on Town Hall, the Town Commons parking lot or elsewhere. Last month, painting on the collaborative mural on the CommunityWorx building was completed.

Carrboro Mayor Lydia Lavelle spoke to this during a recent conversation with 97.9 The Hill, saying the council went with a design that was straightforward compared to the CommunityWorx piece.

“This one is very stark,” she said, “just ‘Black Lives Matter’ in black and white. It looks really good.”

A #BlackLivesMatter mural was completed Friday at the Carrboro Century Center by Artist Erbriyon Barrett of Atlanta. The Town Council authorized the installation on the town building located at the corner of Greensboro & Main streets.
👉🏽 https://t.co/B1G2f4BYoq pic.twitter.com/scyE2q7aky

— Carrboro, NC (@CarrboroGov) January 16, 2021

The town had initially explored painting a mural simply saying “Black Lives Matter” on Laurel Avenue or a road near the Town Hall in June. The inspiration came from several public installations on streets in Washington D.C., Los Angeles, Atlanta and other major cities during the national outcry against racial injustice in the wake of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor’s deaths.

The project hit some hurdles, though, since the roads are also controlled by the state Department of Transportation and the Federal Highway Administration. As conversations shifted away from a street installation and to a town-owned property, the town council debated painting a mural either on the Century Center or Town Hall.

While the elected officials aim to eventually have artwork installed near or on Town Hall, those discussions came to a pause in December.

“We’re done for the time being,” Lavelle told 97.9 The Hill. “We originally investigated the roads, the streets around Town Hall and found it’s not so easy when you have overlay of other [organizations] that control parts of the roads. You talk about safety, you talk about markings, you talk about re-paving…we found that we had a lot of hoops to jump through. I think we’re still in the process of doing the right application with the [Federal Highway Administration] to perhaps do something on a street. So, we decided ‘let’s do it on a place that we own’ because we knew we could do it and put it up right away.”

In the meantime, the town purchased Black Lives Matter flags to hang from the entrance of Town Hall, which led to some controversy in October when the site was used as an early voting location.

The Century Center currently houses the town’s Recreation and Parks department, the Carrboro Cybrary and the Carrboro Police Department.

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Carrboro Completes Black Lives Matter Mural on Century Center

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