Artists, activists rush to save Black Lives Matter murals
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 artists began painting intricate murals, but many spray-painted raw messages of anguish. Zellner-Smith started with the simple pieces.
“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.
“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, Minnesota, 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.
Similar work is going on across the country as groups take measures to keep the art alive.
In New York City, the Soho Broadway Initiative worked with local arts groups to get permission for murals and provide artists with materials. As murals started coming down, the organization returned 22 artworks to artists and collected 20 more waiting to be returned.
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. More than 1,000 shirts have been sold.