George Floyd Protest Art Minneapolis 2025: From Resistance to Archive
- L'ÉPOQUE USA
- 2 days ago
- 3 min read
Updated: 1 day ago
L'ÉPOQUE - MINNEAPOLIS, MINNESOTA — On May 25, 2025, the city that became the epicenter of a global uprising paused not in silence, but in remembrance — through art. Five years after the murder of George Floyd, Minneapolis is not simply commemorating a tragedy; it is preserving a revolution. More than 1,100 protest murals created during the 2020 unrest are now safeguarded by the Black-led nonprofit Memorialize the Movement, forming one of the most powerful grassroots art archives in American history.
This is not just preservation. This is testimony, pigment-deep and soul-bound.
05.26.2025 © L'ÉPOQUE USA
By Jordan Elias Whitlow
Why George Floyd Protest Art Minneapolis 2025 Matters More Than Ever
In the aftermath of Floyd’s death, plywood covered storefronts across Minneapolis became canvases. Artists — many anonymous, many local, some global — responded with paint, poetry, and portraits. “Justice for George,” “Am I Next?”, and “Say Their Names” filled the streets in color and grief.
Those panels, initially considered disposable, are now at the heart of an effort to transform ephemeral protest art into a permanent civic memory.
“This is not a museum of the past. It’s a living archive of accountability,” says Leesa Kelly, founder of Memorialize the Movement.
Backed by collaborations with the Minnesota African American Heritage Museum, the University of St. Thomas, and the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, the initiative has digitized hundreds of panels, carefully restored damaged works, and mounted exhibitions across the Twin Cities.
An Archive Built by the Community, for the Future
Unlike traditional institutions, this archive is not curated for collectors or filtered through gatekeepers. It is designed as a tool of education, healing, and resistance. The goal is not commodification, but preservation with purpose.
The website hosts an open-access portal where visitors can search murals by neighborhood, theme (grief, resistance, hope), or featured individuals. The entire project centers on community ownership and cultural self-determination.
“This is our history. It belongs to the people who lived it,” says Kelly.
From Streets to Sanctuaries
In 2025, the murals are no longer weathered wood on shopfronts. They appear in schools, libraries, churches, and galleries. One exhibition, We Are the Story, currently on view at Pillsbury House + Theatre, features over 150 original panels alongside oral histories from artists and protestors.
Each piece carries the weight of a collective voice — a cry against police violence, a call for justice, a refusal to be forgotten.
The art speaks not only to what happened, but to what still must.
Legacy Beyond the Frame
What distinguishes this movement is its deliberate rejection of institutional aesthetics. No glossy prints, no branded “wokeness,” no curated silence. The raw wood panels, chipped paint, and urgent brushstrokes remain intact — as they were on the streets of 38th and Chicago in June 2020.
In doing so, Memorialize the Movement challenges not just art history, but American memory.
Who gets remembered?
Who decides what is beautiful, valuable, permanent?
The Art That Refuses to Disappear
The keyword George Floyd protest art Minneapolis 2025 is no longer a search term — it is a cultural axis. An affirmation that art made in crisis, in protest, in pain, deserves to live.
In Minneapolis, it does.
As the city honors five years since Floyd’s murder, it also honors the hands that lifted up brushes when words were no longer enough. The preservation of these murals is not a gesture of closure — it is a continuation.
Of mourning.
Of memory.
Of meaning.
