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Todd Lawrence is wedged between a taco truck and a brick wall in Minneapolis.
He pats an electrical box across the alley from the Third Precinct police station that burned in 2020 after the murder of George Floyd.
“This is a super active spot for people to put up stickers — lots of anti-police stickers, anti-Trump stickers, protest stickers,” he says. “We pay close attention to stickers. They're the kind of things that people just sort of pass and don't pay much attention to, but we think they're just as important as murals.”
Tracking art where it’s made
Lawrence is an associate professor of cultural studies at the University of St. Thomas. On this June afternoon, he’s with Heather Shirey, a professor of art history at St. Thomas. They’ve been documenting street art in the Twin Cities since 2018.
A few feet away, on the fence that runs between Hook and Ladder Theater and Solcana Fitness on Minnehaha Avenue, Shirey points out a series of black and white wheat paste posters. (Wheat paste is a method of adhering posters to surfaces typically using a mixture of flour and water.)
“They have the look of stained-glass windows in a way,” Shirey says.
The posters, created by the Minneapolis artist collective Rogue Citizen, feature raised fists, a phoenix rising from flames, an anatomical heart and Philando Castile, who was shot and killed by a St. Anthony police officer in 2016. Shirey first started documenting the set in May 2021.
“The way that people were using protest art in this space was really powerful,” Shirey says. “And it's still happening.”
A growing archive of the streets
In 2018, Lawrence and Shirey co-founded the Urban Art Mapping project at St. Thomas, an interdisciplinary research team that they co-direct with Paul Lorah, an associate professor of geography.
With student researchers, the project “seeks to document, analyze and archive street art responding to moments of friction and crisis” to better understand how art shapes and is shaped by place.
This includes everything from unauthorized stickers, wheat-paste posters and graffiti to large-scale murals sanctioned by cities.
“We want to treat everything the same,” Lawrence says. “All of these are expressions of people whose voices don't get listened to, or whose voices aren't paid attention to, in a larger cultural context. What they have to say, although you might disagree with it, although it might be disturbing to some people, it's stuff that we need to listen to.”
‘Mama’ — the image that started it all
When Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin murdered George Floyd on May 25, 2020, street art exploded with a new purpose worldwide.
On June 2, 2020, Shirey was walking near the old Walmart building in the Midway neighborhood of St. Paul.
“There was a lot of graffiti on that, including the simple text that said ‘Mama,’” Shirey says. “It just felt so raw and it felt so powerful but it was on this building that we knew would be cleaned off right away.”
Shirey took a photo and sent it to Lawrence.
“That was the beginning. That was the first piece that we archived,” Lawrence says.
The photo was the first image in the George Floyd and Anti-Racist Street Art Archive, a project started by the Urban Art Mapping group in response to the proliferation of protest art.
Shirey says “Mama” likely referenced Floyd’s final words, where he called out for his mother.
“It also resonated universally, because I think so many people were able to imagine what it would feel like to be in that situation and to call out to your mother, to feel that sense of desperation,” Shirey says.
“So, we see ‘Mama’ on walls throughout the world.”
Preserving what disappears
The archive not only captures images and locations of street art over time, but also interviews artists and community members impacted by the work.
“One of the things about when you study street art is that it's an ephemeral art form, right?” Lawrence says. “So stuff that's gonna fade away, stuff is gonna get painted over, stuff is gonna get buffed. You see it one day, and you come back a couple of days later and it's gone.”
This is why they return to the same artworks again and again, to see how artists are in conversation with each other in the same spaces and how community reactions evolve.
Across Minnehaha Avenue from the 3rd precinct is a light blue mural of George Floyd painted on a wall overlooking a small parking lot.
Floyd’s face has been scratched out in red spray paint with some undecipherable scrawl.
“I haven’t been able to figure out what that says,” Lawrence says.
Lawrence says the mural was defaced in the last six months.
“That’s what happens in the streets,” Lawrence says.
“There’s general kinds of feelings about what writers and artists will do in the street, generally not tagging each other's work and generally not going up over other pieces, but that's not always followed. When people feel strongly or they don’t abide by those rules, then stuff like this happens.”
From Minneapolis to the world
The team not only documents street art in Minnesota but also across the country and the world.
“We don’t have any sort of proof or way of corroborating this,” Lawrence says. “But we think that this was the largest proliferation of art in public space around one event or one person, one issue, in the history of the world.”
While the Urban Art Mapping team travels the country to capture stories and document street art, from Washington, D.C., to Tulsa, they encourage people worldwide to send in photos from their cities and neighborhoods.
“That just blew up because there was so much art, and it continued, and it continued,” Lawrence says. “We were like, ‘Well, I guess we'll just keep archiving this stuff until people stop sending it to us,’ and they never did.”
The archive now holds about 3,800 images of George-Floyd-related street art, with about 500 images accessible to the public for research, educational and community purposes. Shirey and Lawrence both use the archive to teach some of their classes at St. Thomas. They are catalogued into categories, including “Black Lives Matter Street Murals,” “George Floyd Square,” “Policing” and “Say Their Names.”
Chioma Uwagwu, a substitute teacher in Roseville, worked as a student researcher with Urban Art Mapping from 2018 through 2020. She helped catalog photos and continues to submit images to the archive to this day.
“We were seeing protest art, images of George Floyd, in the Middle East, in Africa,” Uwagwu says. “I recently went to Columbia and I saw a Black Lives Matter mural. To see how wide-reaching it was, was incredible.”
She says the international impact has forever left an impression.
“Something that really stuck with me was other people in war-torn or occupied areas being like, ‘We identify with George Floyd. We feel like we also can’t breathe,’” Uwagwu says.
It puts “things in perspective, that we’re all in the struggle together, all marginalized communities.”
Fading paint, lasting meaning
The group’s current focus is documenting hundreds of Black Lives Matters street murals across the U.S. before they disappear, be that through fading, defacement or destruction.
In late May, Shirey says the National Endowment for the Arts terminated a $80,000 grant for this specific project. The funding cut will affect how many student researchers they can hire, but the project will continue, she says.
“We have studied [Black Lives Matter street murals] in about 10 different cities, and there were over 250 of them,” Lawrence says.
These include the Minneapolis Black Lives Matter mural on Plymouth Avenue North, and multiple murals painted in Chicago, Kansas City, Seattle and Tulsa.
“New York had one in every borough,” says Shirey, including one that is almost gone in front of Trump Tower in Midtown Manhattan.
All that remains
In June, Lawrence and Shirey returned to Washington, D.C., the site of one of the first Black Lives Matter murals. Local artists painted it on the street in June 2020.
It spanned two city blocks, helping create a pedestrian zone known as the Black Lives Matter Plaza just a block north of the White House.
Earlier this year, Mayor Muriel E. Bowser ordered the mural to be removed after a U.S. representative from Georgia, Andrew Clyde, introduced a bill that would withhold federal funds from the city unless it removed the mural and redesignated Black Lives Matter Plaza as Liberty Plaza.
“The one in D.C. is gone,” Lawrence says. “We’re basically out in the middle of the street looking at just bits of paint on pavers while cars are driving by.”
Lawrence says of the 250 Black Lives Murals across the country, most are gone or faded.
“Murals in the street are also ephemeral, but we're trying to think about the way that their presence and impact and all that remains, even when they’re gone,” Lawrence says.
Shirey recalls interviewing a man in Tulsa about a Black Lives Matter mural there. He told her that it felt like his ancestors were speaking to him through the streets.
“There's the risk with the street murals that there’ll be a blip in a way, that people will look at them and say, ‘Oh, well, they’re gone. They must not have worked. They must not have mattered that much,’” Shirey adds.
“But they do matter, and it's the stories that reveal how much they mattered.“
Hundreds of thousands of people
Shirey and Lawrence will travel to Seattle this summer to document the Black Lives Matter street mural again. They also plan to publish a book about the George Floyd and Anti-Racist Street Art Archive.
The archive will live on in definitely, they say, and they encourage people to continue to submit photos.
“I always think that there are still thousands, hundreds of thousands of people walking around with phones in their pockets with pictures of art that we would love to have in our archive,” Lawrence says.
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