Patrisse Cullors - Rolling Stone "Black Lives Matter Co-Founder on Building a Movement Through Art"

Rolling Stone | June 23, 2020

“Patrisse Cullors can’t quite remember if she was six or seven when her home was raided by police.

‘We were children. My mom was young. I just remember them having no care in how they treated us,’ says Cullors, who grew up with a single mom in Van Nuys, California, a suburb of Los Angeles in the San Fernando Valley. Police were looking for one of her uncles. ‘I remember them not looking us in the eye. It felt like it didn’t matter if we were collateral damage to their raid. I grew up just watching so much violence at the hands of law enforcement, and a deep rogue nature that felt like it was going to be like that forever.’ 

Cullors, 37, has worked for the better part of a decade to build a movement focused on ending police violence and mass incarceration, most notably as a co-founder and a national leader of Black Lives Matter. (That work was chronicled in Rolling Stone’s July cover story). But she’s also turned to art as a complimentary form of resistance-building. ‘Art is how we get to the places that we want to get to,’ she says. ‘Art creates vision and hope and it grounds us. We cannot forget that the work that we do as artists has to be deeply aligned with the movements that are calling for artists to be some of the visionaries in this process.’“

Follow the link to read more about Patrisse’s art.

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