The Northeast Portland mural was supposed to be a subtle nod to Black communities in the aftermath of Portland’s 2020 racial justice protests. “We’re still here,” it said, set against a minimalist color palette.

It invited contemplation.

It also invited waves of graffiti and then a not-so-subtle response from the building owner who lent his wall to the artwork.

He bolted a sign in the corner that declared: “This mural honors Black residents that are still here. Tagging it is racist.”

Then things got more complicated.

It became a Portland story — one about a city grappling with its history of displacing Black residents from their neighborhoods. A city imprinted with so much graffiti that it recently assigned police to track down taggers and ramped up prosecution efforts. A city with a reputation for celebrating creativity.

Here’s how the story began.

A TENDER TIME

The artwork on Northeast Russell Street and Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard was part of the 2021 Black Portland Matters Art and Placemaking Initiative, a city project connecting local organizations with Black artists to commission public art, mainly in the North and Northeast Albina District and East Portland.

When Sharita Towne’s mural design was selected, the artist felt keenly aware of Portland’s recent history.

The city had just emerged from the COVID-19 lockdowns and a summer of turbulent protests after George Floyd’s murder. Tensions were high, talks of equity and justice hung in the air and some looked to public art as a way to reignite hope in isolated communities.

Towne, now 40, painted a simple landscape with blocks of different shades of green topped with an orange, yellow and blue sky and the words “still here.”

It was meant to be a “breathy and airy homage” to the resilience of Portland’s Black communities, she said, and it was purposely placed in the Eliot neighborhood of the Albina District, the heart of Black Portland destroyed by urban renewal.

She wanted the mural to honor Portlanders who, like herself, are descendants of the Great Migration of Black people north and westward from the South in the 1900s.

A quote encapsulates Towne’s research on Black migration and racial displacement, she said: A footnote in the author Richard Wright’s 1945 autobiography “Black Boy,” excerpted in Isabel Wilkerson’s bestselling book about the Great Migration, “The Warmth of Other Suns.”

“I was leaving the South to fling myself into the unknown,” Wright wrote. “I was taking a part of the South to transplant in alien soil, to see if it could grow differently, if it could drink of new and cool rains, bend in strange winds, respond to the warmth of other suns and, perhaps, to bloom.”

Towne wanted the mural, its sprawling greens stretching to a horizon, to reflect those words. She wanted it to celebrate the persistence of Black people, but also wanted its message to extend to anyone after the isolation of the pandemic. She wanted it to provoke thought, but not more destruction.

In the months before, just up the street from the “still here” mural, someone had sprayed the web address for a white supremacist group on a mural depicting George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery, three Black people killed by police or vigilantes. That same year, vandals had also defaced a separate mural depicting Floyd and a canvas with Taylor’s image.

“It felt very important to me, at a tender time, to not create something that would attract white supremacists,” Towne said recently. “I wanted it to be a very subtle nod to the people that are still here, even through losing family members, through different public and private disinvestment in Black life, even after the long trip from the Black South to this place — we are still here.”

AN ENDLESS CYCLE

But that didn’t stop the graffiti.

Who knows if the people wielding spray paint canisters thought about the message or what it meant or if they simply saw an inviting canvas for graffiti.

As soon as the mural went up in 2021, “it started getting hit,” said Salvador Mayoral IV, the deputy director of public art for the Regional Arts and Culture Council. “We were really shocked by how much graffiti it was getting that first year.”

The Regional Arts and Culture Council, along with the city’s Bureau of Transportation, led the Black art initiative behind Towne’s project. The council helped manage the contracts, permitting and payment for the $11,000 mural, Mayoral said, and was also responsible for maintenance within its first two years.

Council officials sent anti-graffiti crews to power wash the tags off, but that quickly proved futile: The wall would get cleaned, “then it would get hit again,” Mayoral said.

Towne characterized the tags as graffiti but not vandalism. They didn’t promote white supremacy or other hateful messages, as far as she could tell. Instead, they were loopy bubble letters spelling out names and acronyms, sometimes in green shades she thought actually complemented the mural’s landscape.

She didn’t mind that kind of stuff, but Mike Warwick did.

He owns the building where Towne painted the mural and several others in Portland, so he knows that repainting can be a headache, removal services expensive and taggers tough to deter. The city, which has struggled to rein in rampant graffiti, requires property owners to remove tags on their buildings within 10 days of notification from its graffiti abatement program or else face fines.

Although the arts council covered removal services at least once or twice for the “still here” mural, Warwick said, he had to handle it on his own other times, at one point shelling out nearly $5,000 to a local graffiti removal company.

He found himself trapped in the endless cycle that vexes many building owners: Getting rid of graffiti on a wall one day just to find someone has scrawled on it again overnight.

CUTTING TO THE CHASE

By February 2023, more than a year after the mural was finished, it was clear that removal services weren’t enough.

Towne and Warwick decided to paint over the bottom half of the mural with a single green color, replacing the multishaded green blocks, to make it easier for Warwick to paint over tags.

The green layer helped some, Warwick said, but the graffiti continued. He decided to take matters into his own hands. He emailed Towne and regional arts council officials that May to let them know he was planning to install a sign.

Towne asked to see a photo.

“Let’s see what makes sense,” she wrote in response. “I’m open to signage being attached to the artwork, but would like input on how it’s written and fabricated.”

But then, Towne said, she “never heard from him again.”

Warwick said he thought he replied to Towne but now acknowledges that he didn’t.

He said he had a more explanatory message in mind for the sign at first. Something about honoring the sentiment of the artwork, asking people not to tag it, describing the mural’s purpose.

But “sentiment is a long word,” he said. It wouldn’t fit on a small sign.

“It was just too many words,” Warwick, 75, said. “So I said, ‘Let’s just cut to the chase.’”

That’s how he landed on the admonishment in capital red letters that proclaims, in the lower right corner of the mural, “Tagging it is racist.”

“I wanted people to understand what the point of the mural was and … that if they were trying to damage it, that was a comment on the message, which was essentially a racist comment,” said Warwick, who is white and has lived in Eliot for more than half his life.

“The fact that people are defacing it with the knowledge, per the sign, that that’s what it’s about certainly suggests racism to me,” he said.

The sign is the opposite of subtle. It certainly can’t be described as “breathy and airy,” like Towne’s original intention for the mural. But Warwick was pleased to find that it worked: The graffiti slowed.

“It did prove to be effective,” said Mayoral of the Regional Arts and Culture Council. The council no longer received calls about graffiti at that location, he said.

“As abrasive as the sign is … we didn’t hear any more from it,” Mayoral said.

ONLINE BUZZ

Towne learned about the sign not from Warwick, but from a friend who drove by and saw it that summer.

“There is no world in which I would put that sign on that mural,” Towne said in an interview earlier this month.

She emailed Mayoral and others at the arts council with her concerns in September 2023. She found the sign inappropriate, threatening and inaccurate — she didn’t believe the graffiti was inherently racist, she said. She figured some taggers might not understand what “still here” meant and she couldn’t judge what could be another art form.

“I made an uncontroversial mural that was supposed to acknowledge … people that are serially displaced,” Towne said. “And he took that, through putting that sign up without my permission.”

The arts council offered to facilitate a meeting between Towne and Warwick and pay for a new, less aggressive sign.

Mayoral, the deputy public art director, said he emailed Warwick about it but never heard back.

When the building owner didn’t respond to them, Towne and Mayoral said they moved on.

Towne was busy with other projects and she knew the arts council was busy, too.

“It just kind of got lost,” she said, “and we just let it go.”

But then, nearly two years later this past May, an Instagram video of the graffiti sign gained attention online.

Friends sent Towne the clip, which shows the sign against the bright green wall. Another video circulated in July.

The first video, posted by the account @keepportlandwicked, is barebones — a 21-second reel panning from the sign to the mural and back again, with the caption “Today on NE MLK & Russell in #Portland.”

It racked up more than 18,000 likes and 600-plus comments, some calling the sign “childish” and “performative,” others criticizing the mural itself and still others taking the opportunity to disparage Black Lives Matter, white liberalism and much more.

“This feels like a Portlandia skit,” one commenter wrote.

The second video, posted by the same account, showed that after the original post, someone had tagged the graffiti sign itself.

STILL THERE

The sudden attention spurred Towne to set up a meeting with Warwick earlier this month, finally expressing her concern to him directly and asking him to take the graffiti sign down.

Warwick thought he had initially gotten the OK from Towne on the sign’s wording, he said, but now has realized that it must have slipped his mind.

He agreed to remove it. It was time to order new signs anyway; he had four made in the first place and by this point, they had all been tagged.

“People were offended by it,” Warwick said. “It was so direct, it raised people’s hackles.”

Warwick said he doesn’t use social media, so he hadn’t heard about the videos.

Neither had John Washington, the board chair for the Soul District Business Association, one of the nonprofits that, along with Albina Vision Trust and Self Enhancement, Inc., commissioned the mural. Washington said he can’t believe the graffiti sign got so much attention online.

“I think just the word ‘racist’ out loud creates some kind of stimulation,” said Washington, who is Black. “Sometimes when things become tangible in words it can create a response.”

The more important thing, Washington said, is the mural’s original message: “The fact that we’re still here.”

Towne said she’s tossing around ideas for a new sign that might explain that focus. But it’ll take her some time to get around to drafting the description as she works on several other art projects, she said.

In the meantime, the graffiti sign has left its own mark.

To Warwick, the sign reflects what it is to live and work in what he called the “new Portland” — graffiti everywhere and “racist assholes” targeting his building.

To Washington, Warwick is an “old school” guy who was earnestly trying to protect the mural, its message and his wall.

And to Towne, it’s about an inflammatory — and unapproved — appendage to a carefully crafted celebration of Black life, even if well-meaning.

In the end, however you view it, the memorial endures, a nod to resilience in the face of displacement.

If you drive down MLK, you’ll notice: The mural is still here.

— Maddie Khaw covers breaking news, public safety and more for The Oregonian/OregonLive. Reach her at maddiekhaw@gmail.com