On December 6, 2014, during the opening reception for its inaugural exhibitions, UMM invited anyone who shared a sense of injustice and sadness around the recent cases of Michael Brown and Eric Garner to participate in a painting project titled “Light to Dark Brown: A Meditation on Brown and All Browns.” The work was later selected to participate in the Response show at Smack Mellon in New York City, which was reviewed in the New York Times, The Guardian, Hyperallergic and others.
September 2020 Postcript: UMM was born in 2014 with this participatory project, and a sense that suburbia is a sheltered state of mind that complements its own geographic isolation from the problems of race and difference (and indifference). Given that brown, black, ethnically diverse, immigrant neighbors were not going to go away anytime soon, UMM wanted to examine our own silent complicity in individualizing the problem and situating it far away from us.
RIP (most recent cases in Los Angeles): Dijon Kizzee, 29 (August 2020), Andres Guardado, 18 (July 2020)
