Eddie Arroyo June 5, 2020, North Miami Avenue and NE 38th Street 2020

Eddie Arroyo makes paintings that focus on the urban landscape, everyday sights and sounds of city living, and the effects of gentrification. Born and raised in Miami, Arroyo creates work that depicts the city’s recognizable buildings and structures. He focuses on areas like Little Haiti, painting the vanishing family-run stores, botanicas, and restaurants that have fallen prey to rampant gentrification. Between May 30 and June 6, 2020, Arroyo painted a series of works in real time that recount scenes from the Design District and Downtown Miami shortly after the public killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officers. June 5, 2020 is based on a photograph taken on that date by Miami photographer Sharif Slimting of the site where a battalion of Miami police officers, cloaked in riot gear, formed a human barricade blocking Black Lives Matter demonstrators from the I-95 entrance ramp at North Miami Avenue and Northeast 38th Street. This is the corner where 33-year-old Arthur McDuffie, a Black insurance salesman and Marine veteran, was beaten to death in front of a crowd of witnesses by a group of Dade County police officers on December 21, 1979. The officers were acquitted on May 17, 1980, leading to widespread protests and rioting in Downtown Miami that night.
Identification
Title
June 5, 2020, North Miami Avenue and NE 38th Street
Production Date
2020
Object Number
2020.203
Credit Line
Collection Pérez Art Museum Miami, museum purchase with funds provided by Diane and Werner Grob and Alexa and Adam Wolman
Copyright
© Eddie Arroyo
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Physical Qualities
Medium
Acrylic on canvas
Dimensions
60 x 84 inches
Visual Description
June 5, 2020, North Miami Avenue and NE 38th Street by Eddie Arroyo is an acrylic on canvas painting from 2020.  The painting is 60 x 84 inches hung in landscape format meaning that it is hung with its longest side parallel to the floor.  It is a wide, cinematically horizontal painting, featuring a row of police in black riot gear, standing in the middle of an intersection.  The sun appears to be setting behind the officers, casting a shadow onto the street in front of them. The painting is divided vertically into three horizontal rows. The left side top row of the landscape painting features a slightly purplish-blue sky filled with large yellowish white clouds. Beneath and slightly to the right of the sky with brownish forest green and yellowish green highlights. The view of these trees is obstructed by vertical poles and expressway entrant signs that recede into the background in one-point perspective. Moving closer into the middle ground on the left side of this top row are vertical poles with streetlamps arcing upward and outward to the right. To the right side of this bar is a two-story gray building with visible black letters that read “Mitchel + Bob Williams Home furnishing. Underneath this top row is the middle third of the paint. Completely filling middle section of this painting, from the left edge to the right edge of the painting are police officers wearing all black short sleeved uniforms, boots and helmets. They carry vertical plastic shields that read police in white letters on a black horizontal bar in the middle of it. Shining between their legs, yellowish gray light shines, marking a dividing line between the middle third and the bottom third row of the painting. In the bottom row, dark blueish purple shadows are cast towards the front of the image, fanning out in one-point perspective. The light that hits the pavement between the shadows, along the bottom edge of the painting is a lighter tint of purplish blue. 
Eddie Arroyo

Eddie Arroyo

b. 1976, Miami; lives in Miami

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