How Protest Art Preserved Last Summer’s Protests

In the weeks after a police officer killed George Floyd in Minneapolis, plywood originally put up to protect glass windows during protests became the city’s artistic canvas. Colorful murals and paintings depicting Floyd and phrases like “Know Justice Know Peace, No Justice No Peace” and “Black Lives Matter” covered the city. When the demonstrations abated, the plywood art was removed. 

Some Twin City residents, however, wanted to save the art, to memorialize the protests and Floyd’s life. In June 2020, Kenda Zellner-Smith founded Save The Boards Minneapolis, and has so far rescued over a thousand pieces of art from auctions and trash dumps. “The boards don’t belong to any one person,” said Zellner-Smith. “I think a lot of people really understand the significance of these boards beyond just these wood pieces that plastered our city last summer. I think people really see the value in where they were created out of, who created them, and the stories behind them.”

Similarly, the Urban Art Mapping George Floyd and Anti-Racist Street Art database, a University of Saint Thomas project run by professors Todd Lawrence, Heather Shirey, and Paul Lorah, documents street art in Minnesota and around the world that was created in the aftermath of Floyd’s death and Black Lives Matter protests. The publicly accessible archive functions as a virtual museum, and preserves everything from graffiti tags to expansive murals. 

Beyond just saving the art, organizers have also strived to keep it in the hands of the community. Along with the African American Heritage Museum and Memorialize the Movement, an art preservation project that works with Save the Boards, Zellner-Smith displayed many of the saved boards at an exhibition last week. 

While ownership of the physical art itself has been, at times, contentious, the university database has created a different and more accessible option. Featuring over 2,000 pieces of art, the database also captures the ephemeral nature of the work. “We want multiple images of pieces, different days, you know, different months so that we can see how the pieces change over time,” said Lawrence. In the space outside of Cup Foods, where George Floyd was murdered, the database shows how the art has continued to change, as new murals, signs, and paintings have been added, rendering the area a living and breathing memorial; the project hopes to capture and preserve that. “It’s like a spontaneous shrine,” said Lawrence. “The art has activated this space as a spiritual node.”

While collecting these boards, Zellner-Smith said that she noticed the kind of street art change based on its location in the city: “In predominantly white neighborhoods,” she said, “that’s where we get a lot of colorful uplifting boards expressing solidarity and hope, and there’s a better tomorrow.” Further down Lake Street in Minneapolis, “where you get into more neighborhoods of color, you see less color and you see more straight to the point messages saying ‘Please Don’t Hurt Us’ or ‘I Can’t Breathe.’ These boards just represent so much about our city and about our neighborhoods, about the people that created them,” Zellner-Smith added. 

The art itself over the past year has evolved too, even for the artists themselves. “The George Floyd murder happened, and that’s when things really really changed,” said Reggie LeFlore, a visual artist and muralist in Minneapolis. “For me, at least mentally, it’s changed the kind of work I want to put out there.” His pieces include colorful, sweeping portraits and murals that include messages like ‘Black Lives Matter All Year Round.’

But while there has been a lot of emphasis on protests and Black artists over the past year, LeFlore is concerned that interest could end. “I’m curious to see in almost a cynical sense, when people will stop supporting Black artists,” he said. “Black folks are consistently being murdered by law enforcement…I get very anxious when I think about, when’s the moment when people stop writing about us, when is the time people will stop caring about us?” 

Preserving this art then, LeFlore said, will continue to help capture the feeling of the protests last summer, while also informing current work and movements. 

“Preserving these shows that these boards were a temporary fix to a problem that was not fixed. And we see that, we’re living breathing proof of that,” said Zellner-Smith. She also hopes that people seeing and engaging with these boards and preserved art will reignite a sense of urgency for the Black Lives Matter movement. Last summer, she said, “it became a trend. It was almost like if you post a Black Instagram square on your Instagram you stand with Black Lives Matter, but what are you doing outside of social media? A lot of it is just online allyship.” Preserving these boards, she said, also represents the movement in motion: “This work has been done, these have been preserved, but now what? What’s next? Where’s the actual change that’s going to come?”

And Zellner-Smith doesn’t plan to stop this preservation work anytime soon. “We’re still mourning George. And there’s Dante. And other names in between,” she said. “I’m still going to be collecting.” 

“The thing we didn’t sort of anticipate is that the art would continue,” said Lawrence. Even as the numbers of protests have lessened, different artwork memorializing and documenting the movement has continued to appear all over the city. “I definitely never expected that almost a year later we would still be working on this at the clip that we’re working right now and that people would still be putting up art and sending us art,” added Lawrence. “I never imagined that, and I guess it both speaks to people’s understanding of the power of art as a part of the movement. It also speaks to the difficult project people are engaged in; it doesn’t get fixed in a couple of months. We don’t just go out into the streets and protest and everything’s ok, that’s it. It’s a constant struggle.”

But by preserving the boards—the things that weren’t supposed to be preserved, or even exist at all—the art acts as a witness that refuses to go away. “Who would have thought that a whole city would paint up these wooden boards meant to protect and keep people out of these businesses with different messages and pictures,” Zellner-Smith. “These boards weren’t meant to necessarily be painted on. It was the pain and the trauma that our community has faced so many times again that led to this outcry of visual expression.”