(up against the wall motherfuckers)

This mural was composed over the course of the exhibition Rirkrit Tiravanija: A LOT OF PEOPLE (October 12, 2023–March 4, 2024) by artists who work at the museum and members of Queens-based organizations including Teen Art Salon and Make the Road New York. The charcoal drawings are tracings of photographs, sourced from print and digital media outlets, of protests against recent book bans in public schools across the US, a topic at the heart of contemporary debates over education, censorship, and how history is told. Since 2002, Tiravanija has clipped and saved images of demonstrations from major international newspapers, charting recent and historic activism occurring despite the pervasive sense that there is, as he put it at the time, “no future.” Tiravanija has created numerous drawings and murals based on this collected media imagery, in each instance inviting collaborators to execute them.