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On Art and Artifact: Murals from the Minneapolis Uprising
Brooks Turner
These complicated and contradictory relationships between art, institutions, and radicalism are at the forefront of Art and Artifact: Murals from the Minneapolis Uprising currently on display at the Katherine E. Nash Gallery at the University of Minnesota. The exhibition presents a selection of murals from the living archive of the grassroots organization Memorialize the Movement, which formed following the murder of George Floyd to collect and conserve the abundance of murals made during the Uprising. Most of the exhibited objects were made by unknown hands, and even though a number of established artists have made contributions, the exhibition as a whole is uncommon within both art and academic institutions. A statement on Memorialize the Movement’s website illustrates the importance of engaging this fraught institutional context: “Art has always been an important tool for sparking conversations around social movements. MTM aims to continue that tradition by challenging the witnesses of these murals as well as challenging museum and conservation institutions.”1 Thus the exhibition unfolds, aware of its complicated, contradictory presence within the institution, yet simultaneously pushing us as viewers to rethink our relationship to art and academia, to notions of community and the public, to hierarchy and to resistance.
Prominently placed at the start of the exhibition, Seitu Jones’ Blues for George captures many aspects of the aesthetic language of art and activism in 2020. On top of white paint, rolled with urgency over the underlying plywood, Jones painted in blue a stencil he made of George Floyd’s face, adding to the left “SAY HIS NAME” in large block letters. Along the right side of the panel, where white paint reveals the plywood underneath, text in different handwriting annotates Jones’ message, adding “Blm!” “JUSTICE 4 RYAN G” and “Long Live.” Within this work there is a kind of call and response, amplified to the scale of the show as the blue stencil, which Jones made freely available through his website, repeats in works attributed to other artists. The call and response pattern is commonly used in protest chants in order to build group cohesion and solidarity, but as an aesthetic phenomenon, it connects the murder of George Floyd and the Minneapolis Uprising to slavery in the United States, as it was enslaved West Africans who brought this compositional structure to the Americas. Call and Response since its arrival on this continent has shaped resistance and mourning for centuries; Blues for George shows its sustained relevance, a reminder that it has always been Black Americans at the forefront of movements for justice.
A plywood fist painted brown stands at the center of the first gallery, a symbol referencing struggles for Black and Brown liberation as well as the international labor movement which has used the raised fist for over a century. Layered graffiti tattoos the plywood skin in handwritten messages, prayers of love, hope, and resistance for Duane Wright, murdered by police officer Kimberly Potter. Recognizable as one of the sculptures that marked George Floyd Square as an autonomous zone, the object relocated here has shed its use as a revolutionary signpost, becoming more like a memorial, illustrating history and existing for posterity disconnected from its place of genesis. This encounter between an object's aesthetics and use engages the exhibition title. What qualifies as “art” and “artifact” has been debated by academics for decades, but it is inherently an imperialist debate. In “Art on the Frontline: Mandate for a People’s Culture,” Angela Davis calls attention to the way that art, when separated from functionality, affirms bourgeois interests, which have “ always sought to situate art in a transcendent realm, beyond ideology, beyond socioeconomic realities, and certainly beyond class struggle.”2 Transcendance is the language of Empire, establishing a hierarchical order which uses capitalism to determine value by treating artworks as stable investments, predicated on a myth of individual genius. Renaissance and Modern artworks achieve the highest prices at auction, suggesting that the most valuable artworks are those originating from within imperialism, colonialism, and capitalism, and thus justifying these ideologies. “Artifacts”, by contrast, are relegated to the space of anthropology, cultural expressions from a specific time and place, teaching us about a moment in history but lacking in bourgeois artistic value. Despite using these imperialist categories in the exhibition title, Art and Artifact challenges the hierarchical distinction of “art” and “artifact”, instead establishing a language of aesthetics tied to people’s movements against imperialism, colonialism, and capitalism.
Before continuing, I want to clarify what I mean by aesthetics: aesthetics is a language of expression that conveys a worldview through sensorial messaging. Aesthetics includes any experience of sensorial taste, whether we are speaking of billboard advertising or 18th century history painting, a bad smell on the side of the road or the tantalizing aroma of fresh baked bread. We are each of us constantly engaged in and subject to aesthetics. It is one of the essential aspects that make us human and give our lives character. The relationality of an aesthetic experience captures something about the time and place in which one exists. Put another way: aesthetics treats sensorial experience as both art and artifact, rupturing these delineated categories without eschewing their linguistic value.
Aesthetics are an expression of both individual and world, a truth captured beautifully by Art and Artifact, especially by including objects made by unknown artists, student artists, and institutionally recognized professional artists. Each voice is given equal weight in the exhibition, undercutting the artworld status quo which typically presents only professional artists, who's names alone dictate value. I don’t think I have ever seen such a mix of skilled and unskilled, trained and untrained, young and old exhibited in the same place, speaking through the same spontaneously generated aesthetic language. Across numerous murals, anonymous voices declare “Prosecute the police,” “hold police accountable,” “community over cops, “no justice, no peace,” and “Black lives matter.” Know Peace Murals demands we say their names: George Floyd, Hardel Sherrell, Philando Castile, and Cordale Handy. An unknown artist writes the tragic words of so many murdered: “I can’t breathe.” Students, staff, and faculty at Gordon Parks High School incorporate the same phrase into a collaborative mural in which Seitu Jones’ blue stencil of George Floyd appears again. Jordan Roots depicts Gianna Floyd smiling, her arms outstretched as if reaching for a hug, rays of sunshine emanating from behind her, framing hope for the future with the words “Daddy changed the world.”
Change is a complicated word in politics. Most of the time it is theatrical, performative, masking an underlying lack of substance. Obama campaigned on change but pandered to the establishment after he was elected, enacting policies that bolstered neoliberal capitalism and advanced the American military empire. His slogan, “change we can believe in” proved hollow by the end of his eight years in office. George Floyd’s martyrdom inspired people around the world to fight for change, which also provoked reactionary forces seeking an even more restrictive hierarchy of order. It's well known by Minneapolis residents that white supremacists and fascists activated during the Uprising, targeting people and communities of color, exploiting the chaos for their own accelerationist interests. Action is imbued with aesthetics, and aesthetics are the expressions of ideology, the means by which any end is realized. Both leftists and rightists participated in razing of the third precinct, but crucially the action is only justified through one position: the pursuit of state accountability for racist and classist violence. Notably, the exhibition refers to the works presented here as murals, but in some cases they were acts of vandalism. And indeed, the same words and images presented here also appeared on more permanent surfaces than the plywood barriers covering storefronts. Calling these expressions of dissent “murals” elevates them to the category of “art,” allowing us to experience the messages more comfortably in the context of the gallery space. But property destruction was central to the uprising, an expression that the belongings of the ruling class are less valuable in the eyes of the people than the lives of George Floyd, Philando Castile, and all others killed by police violence. While the exhibition text sidesteps the aesthetics of anticapitalism, it still captures the anti-hierarchical militantism of the movement, most prominently through two body shields made from salvaged materials and decorated with text and image. One faces out, displaying a stencil of Martin Luther King, the image that Minneapolis Police would have seen as they fired rubber bullets and tear gas at the protestors behind this shield. This is a strong aesthetic statement connecting the Civil Rights movement to the Minneapolis Uprising: the Minneapolis Police become the forces of Jim Crow, targeting the same enemy, the same message of hope and equality. Further, the image of MLK reminds us that resistance does not mean peaceable inaction. The other shield is displayed to show the inside of this makeshift object. A handle makes it look almost like a cabinet door, pulling in the aesthetics of salvage, of working with one’s surroundings rather than against them. In the top half of the shield, protestors have scribbled notes of encouragement to each other, another moment of call and response, of community support. Here is where aesthetics are particularly interesting: the functionality of the objects is not changed by the image of MLK or of the notes scribbled on the inside of the shield, but, they likely changed the actions of those who saw these images. Aesthetics is the bridge between intention and means, the first phase of theory becoming praxis.
While the demands of the Minneapolis Uprising connect to national and global movements, its aesthetics are ultimately specific to the Twin Cities, and that’s important: as Meridel Le Sueur said, “I don’t see how you are going to be part of an internationalism unless you’re a part [...] of where you are.” After George Floyd’s murder by Minneapolis Police on May 25th, 2020, people from across the Twin Cities poured into the streets, surrounding the third precinct police station and shutting down whole swaths of the city. Outrage led to vandalism, and businesses boarded up storefronts to protect their commercial interests. Most plywood in the United States is imported from Canada, Indonesia, Vietnam, and China. Businesses—how capitalism expresses itself—blanketed the city and its windows with imported, heavily processed wood. This is the poetics of globalization at work: homogenization and material exploitation that benefits the capitalist class of ultra wealthy individuals spread around the world. Internationalism, by contrast, is a celebration of locality, diversity, culture, and people, encouraging entanglement while opposing colonial hierarchies, national borders, and predatory resource extraction. Globalism is hierarchical; internationalism is horizontal. As the people marched, the plywood barriers became blank canvases for messages of dissent, of rage, of mourning, and of hope, alchemical interventions which transformed globalism into internationalism, supplanting the aesthetics of capitalist self interest with the voices of the people, with revolutionary art and agitprop. In the days and weeks following, Floyd’s portrait spread around the world, becoming a symbol for imperialist violence and the need for collective grassroots resistance. Murals depicting Floyd appeared in Gaza, the West Bank, Syriah, Kenya, Pakistan, Venezuela—reminders that these localities are united together with the movement for Black Lives, with the pursuit of horizontally organized communities rather than hierarchically determined ones. The aesthetics of the Minneapolis Uprising traveled the globe because it represents an ethic for an anti-hierarchical, people’s future.
A lot has changed since the Uprising. The ability for people to march day after day was in part supported by pandemic lockdowns, an influx of free time, and stimulus checks. Now, people have been forced back to work, their wages devalued by inflation, their capacity for resistance curtailed by the basic needs of survival under capitalism. The national dialogue that emerged from Floyd’s murder forced institutions to reckon with structural racism, which resulted in various Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion initiatives across public and private spheres. Now, these programs are being cut at disproportionate rates under the cover of inflation. But, the radical potential of the Minneapolis Uprising likely suffered its first blow when the Question 2 ballot measure to replace the Minneapolis Police Department with a Department of Public Safety failed in 2021. In 2022, the University of Minnesota reestablished its contract with the Minneapolis Police Department, which had been suspended following the Uprising. And just this week, the University of Minnesota called dozens of police to a sit-in in Morrill Hall, extracting students and transferring them to Hennepin County jail for processing. How do we make sense of Art and Artifact within the context of an institution that continues to violently suppress dissent? What does it mean to look at two shields quietly hanging on a wall in one part of campus, while in another part of campus student protestors are being called “Muslim terrorists” before being arrested by University and county police? Art and Artifact asks us to consider how we have carried forward the goals of the Uprising, but where is the institution in this mirror?
In “Art on the Frontline,” Davis calls on Marx and Engles, writing, “art is a form of social consciousness—a special form of social consciousness that can potentially awaken an urge in those affected by it to creatively transform their oppressive environments.” On a whole this exhibition does just this, showing us an aesthetics of hope which can “propel people towards social emancipation.” But, in her conclusion, Davis makes an important declaration:
Progressive and revolutionary art is inconceivable outside of the context of political movements for radical change. [...] Cultural workers must thus be concerned not only with the creation of progressive art, but must be actively involved in the organization of people’s political movements.
Memorialize the Movement is clearly involved in this work, but this quote also raises an important point for visitors: these aesthetics are powerful because they are coupled with action, because they were generated as part of a people’s movement against police violence and class hierarchy. What does it mean to collaborate with an institution that consistently resists movements for radical change? What responsibility to action does a cultural worker have when working with these aesthetics? Art and Artifact shows us what radicalism looks like, but it does not challenge the institution, and that risks decoupling the aesthetics of the Minneapolis Uprising and the radical world building it employed. Neoliberalism loves adopting the aesthetics of progressive movements, but its actions ultimately align with money and power—clearly illustrated by the University of Minnesota. And institutions are complicated: they are composed of and by people, workers who need to make a living in order to survive late stage capitalism, radicals who need a structure to support their work, students looking to enhance and expand their understanding of the world and their place in it. Aesthetics, like people, are contradictory. And I say that not as an indictment, but as an acknowledgement of the deeply human truths carried by aesthetics. And in this context of institution, community, and individual, Art and Artifact is incredibly powerful. By re-witnesses these murals, these voices, we can rethink our own aesthetic situatedness, finding inspiration to march forward into a people’s future.
Finally, I conclude with a plea to the institution, to the University of Minnesota, to its Board of Directors and president: divest from Israel, divest from the military industrial complex. Hear the voices of the Minneapolis Uprising echo into the present, and untangle the ouroboros of complicity in imperialism and colonialism.
2 Angela Y. Davis, Art on the Front Line: Mandate for a People’s Culture (London: Afterall Books, 2021), 12.
3 Meridel Le Sueur, “Tape 86,” Meridel Le Sueur: An Inventory of Her Papers at the Minnesota Historical Society, Minnesota Historical Society, 2015, http://www2.mnhs.org/library/findaids/00323/audio/00323-00155.mp3.
4 Davis, 7.
5 Davis, 20.