Five years ago, during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, video of then-Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin kneeling on the neck of George Floyd until he died shocked the world and sparked widespread protests. Untold pieces of protest art also were created in public spaces across the U.S. – from murals honoring Floyd, to calls for justice and support for the Black Lives Matter movement, which swelled in the wake of Floyd’s death.
Today, much of that protest art has been taken down. The Black Lives Matter mural painted on 16th Street in Washington, D.C., was removed in March, while other murals, many painted on plywood that boarded up closed businesses during the pandemic shutdown, were removed over the months after Floyd’s death.
Advocates in Minneapolis, however, have been working over the past five years to save hundreds of pieces of public protest art, hoping to ensure that Floyd is never forgotten and that the message behind the art is memorialized, along with the movement it documented.
“Art can be used as a tool in the present to ignite and propel social movements forward, which is what we’re seeing right now with this art,” said Leesa Kelly, the founder of Memorialize the Movement. The group describes itself as “a living archive dedicated to collecting, preserving, and activating the plywood protest murals that were created during the Minneapolis Uprising of 2020 and beyond.”
A photo of a piece of 2020 protest art that has been preserved in Minneapolis by Memorialize the Movement.
Leesa Kelly/Memorialize the Movement
According to Kelly, who began her efforts in the summer of 2020, the group has now collected and preserved over 1,000 pieces of 2020 protest art.
“I felt this enormous weight to be the one to decide to protect these stories and to make sure that the movement continues through the preservation of this art,” Kelly told ABC News, reflecting on her five-year journey. “I feel an enormous sense of pride having the foresight to do this.”
Kelly said that since 2021, Memorialize the Movement has been “activating” the 2020 murals via exhibits to ensure that Floyd’s legacy is not forgotten. Much of that art was displayed at a weekend Justice for George event in Minneapolis.
An art event organized by Memorialize the Movement.
Leesa Kelly/Memorialize the Movement
“We call ourselves a living archive,” she said, explaining that at the events, they not only display the art from 2020 but also commission artists to create new murals on blank panels. There are also workshops to encourage new and continuing art and activism.
“This is a movement where we are empowering people through art to understand that they have a voice, understand their agency, and learn how to protect and preserve their own stories and histories in real time,” Kelly said.
Kelly, who describes herself as an advocate for police reform, said that while there was a “brief period” of progress after 2020 in that regard, she feels that making a change has been slow and in some ways, it has been “one step forward, two steps back.”
“I think that that progress scared people, and that’s how we ended up back here with Trump as president, and in a space where our rights and our freedoms are being threatened right now,” Kelly told ABC News.
The U.S. Department of Justice said on Wednesday that it is moving to drop police reform agreements, known as consent decrees, that the Biden-era department reached with the cities of Louisville, Kentucky and Minneapolis. The court-enforceable agreements were born out of probes launched not only after George Floyd’s death, but also the 2020 police killing of Breonna Taylor.
An exhibit organized by Memorialize the Movement displays 2020 protest art from Minneapolis.
Leesa Kelly/Memorialize the Movement
Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Harmeet Dhillon claimed in announcing the decision on Wednesday that Biden administration officials relied on “faulty legal theories” and “cherry-picked” statistics in order to accuse departments of widespread misconduct. She further claimed that consent decrees can increase bureaucracy for police, which she said makes recruiting and retaining officers more difficult.
“It’s our view at the Department of Justice Civil Rights Division under the Trump administration that federal micromanagement of local police should be a rare exception and not the norm, and certainly not something that we’re seeking to increase in our time here,” Dhillon told reporters in an off-camera briefing.
Plywood boards displaying 2020 protest art are pictured in a collection of art collected by Memorialize the Movement in Minneapolis.
Kelly/Memorialize the Movement
Despite the challenges that advocates are facing, Kelly said that locally, in Minneapolis and St. Paul, “a lot has changed.”
“[The community] has really sort of discovered our agency and our power, and we’ve learned to work together, and we are supporting one another,” she said.
Kelly said that events like Justice for George, which has been held annually since 2021, are huge community efforts and are made possible by a dedicated group of volunteers and funding that Memorialize the Movement obtains through various grants.
“[We want] to focus on our resilience as a community,” Kelly said, “to focus on everything that we’ve been able to accomplish and everything that we can still accomplish within our power, despite what’s going on at the federal level.”
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