Art and Artifact: Murals from the Minneapolis Uprising Leesa Kelly 9781517918989

Picturing and preserving the murals made in Minneapolis following George Floyd's murder

It would be difficult to overstate the local, national, and international impact of the murder of George Floyd by the Minneapolis Police on May 25, 2020, and the Minneapolis uprising that followed. This book shows the reverberations of these events through the prolific and spontaneous appearance of murals in Minneapolis and St. Paul during the subsequent months.

An exhibition companion and collaboration between the Katherine E. Nash Gallery and the grassroots organization Memorialize the Movement (MTM), Art and Artifact features 100 color images of murals that were created in the Twin Cities in 2020. The contributors provide historical and interpretive context for the art, situating the efforts of MTM to collect, save, and display the Twin Cities murals as part of a larger preservation effort that simultaneously occurred nationwide.

Contributors: Leslie Guy, Amira McLendon, Seph Rodney.

Distributed for the University of Minnesota's Katherine E. Nash Gallery.

Leesa Kelly is an activist, writer, public speaker, and curator. She is founder and executive director of Memorialize the Movement, a grassroots organization that preserves, displays, and educates the public on the protest plywood murals that emerged after George Floyd's death in Minneapolis in 2020.

Howard Oransky is director of the Katherine E. Nash Gallery. He is curator of A Tender Spirit, A Vital Form: Arlene Burke Morgan and Clarence Morgan and, with Brenda J. Child, Dreaming Our Futures: Ojibwe and Ochethi Sakowin Artists and Knowledge Keepers. Both exhibition catalogs are distributed by the University of Minnesota Press.