In front of Cincinnati City Hall, a block of Plum Street is painted with letters wide enough to drive over. A few years later, a pair of oversized star-framed glasses showed up in a downtown plaza. The same collective made both, and if you’re visiting Cincinnati, they’re two easy stops for your list.
Who is Black Art Speaks?
Black Art Speaks is a Cincinnati collective of artists, led by founder and executive director Alandes Powell. It grew out of the city’s Black Lives Matter! street mural, and it has since become an ongoing organization that creates opportunities for Black artists and puts public art in the community.
The poem that started it
Powell wrote a poem called “We Want What You Want,” and each letter of the mural represents a line from it. Each letter was designed and painted by a different Black artist. The Black Lives Matter! mural runs across Plum Street between Eighth and Ninth streets, directly in front of City Hall.
The timeline was fast. Cincinnati City Council voted unanimously to approve the mural in June 2020, and painting started that same night. Seventeen lead artists and a team of volunteers finished it in less than 20 hours spread across three days, in time for a Juneteenth dedication on June 19. The project was privately funded, with partners including ArtWorks, ArtsWave, and the Urban League.
Black Art Speaks also published a coffee table book on how it was made, called The Making of Cincinnati’s Black Lives Matter! Mural.
Powell said it best herself, “One day I just thought we deserved a mural ourselves and thought about the location… and from the moment I had the thought, probably within a week or two, it was there.”
Black Art Speaks didn’t stop at the street. They kept building: giant letter sculptures placed in neighborhoods around the city, mentorship and paid opportunities for Black artists, and a book documenting how the mural got made. Powell has said the organization grew out of one piece of public art into something meant to create opportunity for artists. I find that more interesting than the mural alone, because a mural fades and a pipeline for artists doesn’t.
Hear Alandes tell the story here: The Murals Changing Cincinnati’s Streets
The letter sculptures
The collective turned the mural’s letters into freestanding sculptures placed in neighborhoods around the city. The first went up in Roselawn in May 2024, and the second, a 10-foot “A,” went up at 3535 Reading Road in Avondale. Each sculpture is based on the original artwork from its letter of the mural.
The Funk Glasses at Elm Street Plaza
Cincinnati’s funk history is not subtle. Bootsy Collins grew up here, played bass for James Brown, moved on to Parliament-Funkadelic, and started Bootsy’s Rubber Band in 1976. Whatever you think of funk, the man is the reason a pair of star-shaped sunglasses reads as a person.
The glasses sit in Elm Street Plaza, next to the First Financial Center convention center (formerly the Duke Energy Convention Center). The plaza opened in November 2025 and has outdoor seating, a stage for live music, and ice skating in winter. It also holds sculptures by the artist collective AGAR and Black Art Speaks that honor King Records, the Cincinnati label tied to James Brown and a long list of funk and soul artists.
Catch the full vibe of the installation here: Bootsy Collins Inspired Funk Glasses Sculpture
If you’re in Cincinnati, go to Plum Street, then walk over to Elm Street Plaza and stand in front of the glasses.
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