George Floyd Murals Paint Uptown With Awareness and Hope

At the call of the Uptown Association, artists from all over the Twin Cities and beyond have been pouring into the Minneapolis neighborhood to paint its boarded up businesses—and spread a common message.

by Tess Allen

June 9, 2020

12:33 AM

Tess Allen

As riots, fires, and looting broke out in the Twin Cities following the May 25 death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police, businesses across Minneapolis and St. Paul began tightly boarding up their windows and doors with plywood panels to ward off damage. Within just a few days of Floyd’s death, the Twin Cities looked more like a scene from The Walking Dead than it did the flourishing Cities we all know and love.

But now, Uptown Minneapolis’s plywood storefronts are splashed with more than 50 colorful murals, bringing a vibrance back into the district while also helping spread awareness of Floyd’s death and hope for a more equitable future.

When Jill Osiecki Gleich, interim director of the nonprofit Uptown Association which aims to ensure the vitality of Minneapolis’ Uptown neighborhood, saw the boards start going up the week of Floyd’s death, she saw them as something else altogether: blank canvases.

As the organizer of the popular annual Uptown Art Fair—which drew around 350 displaying artists and 380,000 visitors in a single weekend last summer—the Uptown Association has a rolodex of artists on hand.

“I put out a call immediately within that weekend to see if we had any artists that were interested in coming down and painting some boards,” Osiecki Gleich said. “And I received an overwhelmingly positive response.”

The Uptown Association got to work, pairing responding artists with neighborhood businesses that wanted their storefronts illustrated. Cheryl Shohet, a Waconia-based studio artist, was one of the creatives Osiecki Gleich reached out to.

“Coming here to paint feels like a great way to be able to affect some positive change,” Shohet said during a break from painting panels on a building at the corner of West Lake Street and Hennepin Avenue on Saturday afternoon. She brought her daughter, Morgan, and a couple of friends along to help. Her mural, which stretches across two detached panels, features a woman with an afro that transforms, near the ends, into birds of song taking flight. It also includes lyrics from Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit” and Stevie Wonder’s “I Wish”: ”I hope you hear inside my voice of sorrow / And that it motivates you to make a better tomorrow.”

“As a white woman in this community, I really want other people that look like me to listen—to really, really listen—and to understand that George Floyd was the spark that lit the match. And maybe this time, the spark will make some change.”

Just across West Lake Street, St. Paul artist David Witt was painting a portrait of poet and civil rights activist Maya Angelou, her words boldly scribed next to her: “You may write me down in history / With your bitter, twisted lies, / You may trod me in the very dirt / But still, like dust, I’ll rise.”

“In any kind of troubled times, I find that poets usually have a pretty good thing to say about it,” Witt said.

Kitty-corner to Shohet’s mural, Minneapolis designer, illustrator, and letterer Danielle Clifford was setting up tarps and paint supplies for a group of about 15 volunteers from Sota Letters Co, a collective of artists and calligraphers, who were coming out to paint panels on Juut Salon Spa.

“When the panels come down, we want to be able to split up the boards into pieces that are about the size that people would want in their homes so that they can be taken apart, the edges can be sanded, and they can hopefully be auctioned off to raise money for BIPOC organizations,” Clifford said.

Osiecki Gleich supports the auctioning of the murals, and she also hopes to have some of them preserved by local historical societies. But first, she hopes to display them in the community for a while longer—possibly as part of some mini events (that meet COVID-19 regulations) so that the public can appreciate them.

A block from the bustling Lake and Hennepin intersection sits Landmark’s Uptown Theater, with a large mural signed by Minneapolis illustrator Adam Turman, known for his colorful and iconic Minnesota graphics. The mural emulates an image from Spike Lee’s 1989 movie, “Do the Right Thing,” about a Brooklyn, New York, neighborhood’s heated racial tensions. The movie culminates with the death of the Black protagonist at the hands of police.

“[George Floyd’s death and the subsequent events] have been a real wake-up call for me,” Turman says. “I’ve been thinking everything is cool and everybody’s happy and all, but I’m a middle-aged white guy. I am very much the target audience for this message. So it’s been a really good thing to bring about my self-awareness.”

On Sunday evening, Brooklyn Center-based painter and photographer Darlington Panton was in the early stages of a mural of two Michelangelo-esque hands, one White and one Black, reaching towards each other and touching index fingers, on the front of the Uptown Urban Outfitters store.

“It’s all about: Why are we fighting?” Panton said of his mural. “There is only one species—human—and we’re just fighting over some ideology that someone else has created.”

While Panton wasn’t contacted by the Uptown Association, he found out about the Uptown murals and call for artists via photos posted on Instagram, so he packed his paint supplies in a backpack and came down to help.

Panton’s friend Lissa Karpeh, a Minneapolis artist and a member of Northeast artist collective Studio 400, joined him. Her mural of Floyd and his young daughter was beginning to take shape as the sun set on Sunday.

“I feel like this is the start of something amazing, honestly,” said Karpeh. “I feel like Minnesota was the right place for all of this to happen because there’s such a sense of community here, and although we need to work on some things, at the same time, the fact that everyone is waking up and paying attention to what is going on means that we’re headed in the right direction. And now that we’re headed in the right direction, we just have to keep it up and actually make change, because the whole world is watching us.”

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Tess Allen

Cheryl Shohet's mural

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Tess Allen

Lissa Karpeh, a Minneapolis artist and a member of Northeast artist collective Studio 400 painting a mural of George Floyd and his daughter outside Urban Outfitters.

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