Not A Crime Shines Light on Mary McLeod Bethune School in Harlem

Residents of St. Phillips House, a fourteen-story senior-living facility in Central Harlem, say they wake up each morning ready to go out on their balconies, or to just get outside somehow, in order to take a look at the freshly painted murals across the street from their homes. 

“I’m downstairs by 7:30, and that’s the first thing I see,” said Brunilda, 65, a retired mental health counselor. “I get to look at something super beautiful, that’s full of inspiration,” she said. 

She was referring to four sprawling works of art that wrap around the Mary McLeod Bethune School on West 133rd Street in Central Harlem. The murals, the work of street artists SeeOne, Tatyana Fazlalizadeh, Marthalicia Matarrita, and Lmnopi, are some of the final installments in this year’s Not A Crime campaign. Not A Crime raises awareness about the plight of Baha’is in Iran, who are banned from teaching at and attending university, face employment restrictions, and are often imprisoned without just cause. In particular, the campaign, which teamed up with arts curation organization Street Art Anarchy, commissioned the murals to draw attention to the situation of Baha’is in Iran during the United Nations General Assembly conference, when an Iranian delegation, along with delegates from 170 other countries, was in New York. The conference ended on September 30. 

“I’m trying to show a person who has dreams and ambitions to become something, and the different colors that sort of look like her hair represent the different opportunities that she could go after if only she had an education,” said SeeOne, 35, from Queens, New York. “She could do almost anything that she wanted to do, that’s why there’s a lot of different colors.” SeeOne’s mural features a woman gazing into the distance at a white orb, which he said “represents her bright future were she able to learn something.”

A few hundred feet away, another mural features a smiling face cut in half just above the nose, and a plant sprouting out from the skull. There is a hand reaching down from the sky pulling at a flower with a banner flying from it that says, “Education.” The artist, Marthalicia, said of her work: “When you nurture a plant you give it water, you give it proper sunlight. Similarly, a human child needs all the support they need to grow mentally, spiritually, physically. So overall when an adult can invest in one child, one seed, you never know how that one child can create a forest, or a civilization.” 

Meanwhile, on the other side of the building, a mural by Lmnopi (pronounced L - M - N - O - P, like the alphabet) shows bright golden beams of light shining from an image of Africa and the face of a young woman, Marley Dias, an 11 year-old from New Jersey, interposed onto the continent. “She [Dias] started a campaign to get more books in schools that tell stories about black heroines instead of ‘white boys and dogs,’” Lmnopi told IranWire. “She called her campaign #1000blackgirlbooks.” The mural features silhouettes of open books flying like birds across it. The artist told IranWire that she painted the books because they represent a doorway into a whole new world, and that education is a basic human right that should be open to people everywhere. 

Tatyana Fazlalizadeh, whose mural oversees the school’s playground, approached her piece for Not A Crime from the mindset of a young woman of color. “Most of the work I do in the street is looking at how women and girls are treated, particularly in public spaces,” she said. The artist is most well-known for her project ‘Stop Telling Women To Smile,’ which, according to her website, describes “attempts to address gender-based street harassment” through featuring drawn portraits of women and captions “that speak directly to offenders.” The project brought Fazlalizadeh international attention. Her piece for Not A Crime portrays a young girl reading a book with flowers blossoming out of her hair. “I started to think about where this image was going to be, which is here in Harlem, in a black neighborhood,” she said. Fazlalizadeh wanted her mural to address educational disparities in the United States. “If you are poor and brown and black, and you live in poor and brown neighborhoods, and you go to public school, then your access to education and the type of education you’re going to be getting is not as great as if you are white and rich,” she explained.

People in the neighborhood immediately connected with the stories behind the images. “It’s pretty inspirational to the time that we’re living in right now cause people look down upon people of color and stuff like that,” said Rolando, 18, a high school student at Democracy Prep, commenting on Lmnopi’s image. “Promoting them learning and stuff is positive to society. It’s bringing light to the darkness,” he said. His friend, Matthew, 17, took a similar stance, which he talked about while looking at the mural. “I see the painting as an achievement because for so long black people have been striving to get education and become free, so I see the painting as a symbol of how far black people have come, how educated they are, and how successful they’ve become in these past years.” Alisha, 15, who attends the High School For Arts, Imagination And Inquiry said, “This is about black empowerment, about black girls, and more education for black women. It’s really cool honestly.”