Cork In 50 Artworks, No 3: Frederick Douglass mural on the Grand Parade
Kevin O'Brien's image of Frederick Douglass, the anti-slavery campaigner who visited Cork in 1845.
Perhaps Frederick Douglass, escaped slave and abolitionist leader, once strolled along the Grand Parade during his 1845 visit to Cork, passing the future site of Kevin O’Brien’s impressive mural in his honour.
The Douglass mural is one of the latest works to adorn Cork’s electrical boxes, formerly drab pieces of urban furniture which have become sought-after canvasses for arts groups engaged in guerrilla street art in the rebel city, with groups such as Reimagine Cork, Mad About Cork, and the People’s Republic of Cork (PROC) bringing welcome colour and joy to the city.
Kevin O’Brien - co-founder of the volunteer arts group Mad About Cork - says his own introduction to street art was through Reimagine Cork in 2015. O’Brien, who has an MA in history and a special interest in Ireland’s revolutionary period, cites as a particular influence on his own work Alan Hurley’s portraits on Kyle Street in Cork of Thomas Kent, Michael Collins and Terence MacSwiney.
“We were doing guerrilla gardening projects, and that led to street art,” explains O'Brien. “Our main aim was to dignify run-down spaces, and the first thing we did was to just paint walls white, to make them look better than what they were. That led to more intricate works of street art.”
Mad About Cork split from Reimagine Cork in 2017, focusing on small-scale, ongoing activities, and although Covid-19 has halted that work over the past year, O’Brien is hopeful it can resume safely in the months ahead. Among the Cork heroes honoured on Mad About Cork’s murals are Cillian Murphy, Mary Elmes, and the Frank and Walters.
The Douglass mural is “spray-paint, for the most part”, and O’Brien says the painting took perhaps three hours, with the earlier stencil work taking perhaps the same time.
However, the thought-process that went into the work took weeks.
“I wanted to get that Cork connection, rather than just have a portrait of Douglass, and also to link it to George Floyd and the larger Black Lives Matter movement, and the Irish connection of Direct Provision.’”
Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey was born into slavery on a Maryland plantation, in February 1818. At the age of 20 he escaped north and, taking the name Douglass, he soon became famous for his eloquent anti-slavery writing and powerful oratory.
Prompted by fears that his 1845 autobiography, The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, might lead to his recapture, he embarked on a two-year lecture tour of Ireland and Britain, arriving in Cork that October.
Douglass loved his month in Cork, and the welcome shown him by its people, writing years later that “Amongst them all, I saw no one that seemed to be shocked or disturbed at my dark presence. No one seemed to feel himself contaminated by contact with me.”
O’Brien’s mural – blue against electric pink – features a famous Douglass quote about his time in Ireland, “I breathe, and lo! the chattel becomes a man”, and beneath it the hashtags #BlackLivesMatter and #EndDirectProvision.
O’Brien says he was struck by the resonance between Douglass’s “I breathe” and the last words of George Floyd - “I can’t breathe” - as he was murdered by a police officer in Minneapolis last May.
His mural provides a link between those tragically-different utterances.
