Cedric "Vise1" Douglas
Douglas’s recent public art project, entitled “Street Memorials” is taking a national contemporary view of the killing of black people in our country. This new work takes a hard look at racial injustice and its deadly impact on the black community, alongside projects aimed at memorializing those from the black community who have been killed by police. These recent works addressing the policeʼs use of deadly force, rather than making judgements, try to bring to the surface “that everyone deserves a fair trial and every life has value.” Douglas also seeks to raise larger questions: How as a community and as fellow Americans can we work to end the use of deadly force by police? How do we all come together to stop institutional racism? How as a nation do we work to ensure that everyone has a fair trial? And how do we learn to see those we label as “others” as our neighbors and members of our communities? Together with his partner, Julia Roth Ritchie, Douglas created The Up Truck, a creative art lab for community engagement. They have engaged thousands of Greater Boston residents using their mobile art truck to tap into the creativity of underserved Boston communities. Through the Up Truck and his personal projects Douglasʼ has partnered with an eclectic group of organizations, galleries around the country. such as Harvard University, The The city of Boston, TEDx Springfield, Boston Globe, Take Magazine, WCVB Chronicle TV Ch 5, Pepsi, Arlington Public Art, Google Inc, Dudley Neighborhood Initiative, Boston Medical Center, Arnold WorldWide Advertising, Zumix, and HubWeek, to name a few.
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Cedric “Vise1” Douglas is a Boston-based visual artist, public artist, designer, street artist and social interventionist, who has created work in the Boston community for over 20 years. He holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Graphic Design from Massachusetts College of Art and Design. Douglas’s introduction to public art began in the early 1990s where he creatively inscribed his artistic name “Vise1” in unique letterforms and throughout the city, on neglected surfaces. He is highly recognized for his Street Memorial Project and for his large-scale “Social Realism” murals. His murals can be found in Boston, Cali Colombia, Tel Aviv Israel, and Port Au Prince, Haiti.
