Activists rush to save protest murals
Group, database push to preserve Black Lives Matter, Floyd street art
INDIANAPOLIS — Neither woman could bring themselves to watch the video of George Floyd’s final moments, his neck pinned under a Minneapolis police officer’s knee.
But as their city grieved, Leesa Kelly and Kenda Zellner-Smith found much-needed comfort in the messages of anguish and hope that appeared on boarded-up windows as residents turned miles of plywood into canvases. Now, they’re working to save those murals before they vanish.
“These walls speak,” said Zellner-Smith, who said she was too numb to cry after Floyd’s killing. “They’re the expressions of communities. We want these feelings, hopes, calls to action to live on.”
Together, the two Black women formed Save the Boards to Memorialize the Movement, part of a push to preserve the ephemeral expressions of anger and pain born of outrage over racial injustice that triggered weeks of protests across the country.
“Some of these boards aren’t pretty,” she said. “There is collective pain and grief in each board, and each one tells a different aspect of this story. And now we get to tell that story to everyone.”
One is the word “MAMA” scrawled hastily onto the side of an abandoned Walmart. The word was among Floyd’s last. Now it’s part of a database of protest art called the Urban Art Mapping George Floyd and Anti-Racist Street Art database.
‘Multitude of voices’
“The art was changing quickly, and these raw, immediate responses were being erased and painted over,” said Todd Lawrence, an associate professor of English at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minn., and one of the database’s creators. “We want people to see the full range of responses, the complexity, the multitude of voices.”
Lawrence and art history professor Heather Shirey were part of a research team already documenting street art.
When the streets of countless cities became temporary galleries after Floyd’s death, they set out to capture the art before it disappeared.
Although many of the 1,600 artworks in the crowdsourced database come from Minneapolis, Shirey says they hope to expand to pieces from around the world.
“Oppression and racial violence is unfortunately universal, so art is responding to it around the world,” she said.
In Indianapolis, organizer Malina Jeffers is unsure about the future of the Black Lives Matter street mural stretching across Indiana Avenue.
The mural is wearing down from traffic, and with winter will come weather damage and snowplows.
But the mural will live on in prints and T-shirts created by the local Black artists behind the original mural.
“All of us know the mural won’t be there forever,” Jeffers said. “So we all wanted a piece of it to hold onto.”
Losing the art
Street art has been erased in many other cities, including Tulsa, Oklahoma, where workers in October removed a Black Lives Matter painting at the site of the Tulsa Race Massacre where in 1921 a white mob attacked a prosperous African American district, killing an estimated 300 people. Other cities such as Indianapolis and New York City have seen their Black Lives Matter murals vandalized.
Back in Minneapolis, Save the Boards is working with researchers Lawrence and Shirey as well as the Minnesota African American Heritage Museum and Gallery to document, archive and plan an exhibition in May 2021, the anniversary of Floyd’s death.
Museum co-founder Tina Burnside says the initiative hopes to preserve the murals in a way that continues dialogue on systemic racism, provides context and allows for public access.
“It’s an important chapter in the fight for racial justice in this country,” she said.
“We’re documenting history.”