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Paint is the first thing most people notice about Roosevelt Row. Muralists and painters turned blank walls into the reason a lot of people walk this street at all.
The Painter's Residence is named for all of them.
Of those painters, we recognize Antoinette Cauley, the Phoenix-born painter behind the nine-story James Baldwin mural downtown, because her work puts people who have usually been left off the wall somewhere you cannot miss them.1
Antoinette Cauley was born in Phoenix, and has built a body of work that is unmistakably from here.1
Beyond the landscape of her home city here in Phoenix, Antoinette spent three years living and working in Berlin, Germany where she completed an artist residency with coGalleries Berlin, an artist residency program in east Berlin, and went on to open her own studio.
Her paintings bring together portraiture, saturated color, Black American culture, personal history and social commentary. The subjects are people who have usually been left off the wall, put somewhere you cannot walk past without looking up.
She is best known for a mural of the writer and civil rights activist James Baldwin, nine stories tall, in downtown Phoenix.1
She took first place at Artlink's 19th Annual Juried Exhibition in 2019, and her work has been carried by PBS, NPR, Forbes and JAVA Magazine. Phoenix Magazine named her one of the Great 48 most influential people in Arizona the same year.1
A mural that size is not decoration. It is a claim about who belongs in the middle of a city.
Most of what gets painted on a downtown wall is designed to be photographed. Baldwin, nine stories up, is designed to be met. You look up and something looks back at you, and the building it is painted on stops being neutral.
That is the argument her whole practice makes, at every scale: put the people who have been edited out back at the center, in color, at a size that cannot be ignored.
We could have called it Unit 4.
Instead it is The Painter's Residence, named for the painters who put this neighborhood on its walls, and recognizing a Phoenix-born painter whose work made this city more visible, more colorful and considerably more honest about itself.
Roosevelt is full of painted walls. Very few of them are asking anything of you. Hers are.
When you support local artists, you are supporting your neighbors and your neighborhood.
A Storied Series by Bri Roche, founder of Roche Home Co.