On Chicago Avenue in Austin, among the vacant storefronts and businesses like Deno’s Hair Kingdom, S.B.M. Beef Inc., and Yoo’s Supermarket, hang a series of vivid acrylic four-by-six signs. An orange-and-white one reads “Black mothers proud to be” in large letters. The smaller text below says, “I’m showing them what a real role model is. If you can believe it, achieve it. Do what you got to do.” The opposite side carries another message: “They think that I am more than what I am.” Below: “It is a lot of responsibility and you can’t do what you want to do. Can’t go where you want to go.”
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The signs are part of “Family Voices/Austin,” a public design project of the Lincoln Square-based nonprofit group Community Architexts. “We’re trying to counter the stereotype of inner-city mothers,” explains School of the Art Institute associate professor B.J. Krivanek, who founded Architexts a couple of years after moving here from Los Angeles in the mid-90s. “When you think about the urban landscape, all you’re surrounded by is commercial messages telling you to buy things,” he says. “There are no other messages out there.”
Many of the women who participated in the project came to a “site activation” in June, during which a side street was closed off and their statements were projected onto a wall. “The whole point is to talk to a community that’s been rendered invisible in the culture and make what they have to say very public and visible,” says Krivanek. When the signs come down later this month, the hardware–which Community Architexts either rehabbed or built from scratch–will be given to local shop owners.
