IN THE NEWS
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SOUTHWEST JOURNAL: PRESERVING THE MURALS MADE DURING THE UPRISING
June 26th, 2020
A group called Memorialize the Movement is raising funds to collect murals for an exhibit at the Minnesota African American Heritage Museum & Gallery in North Minneapolis. Organizers of the effort said the art should be memorialized through a “Black-owned and oriented organization.”
NEXT CITY: HOW SHOULD MINNEAPOLIS’S GEORGE FLOYD PLYWOOD MURALS BE PRESERVED?
August 7th, 2020
Memorialize the Movement got its first donation totaling a couple hundred dollars which she’s using to soon move the work she’s collected from her garage to a climate-controlled storage space. She has also teamed up with Kenda Zellner-Smith of Save The Boards Mpls, a similar effort, to join forces in their pursuits.
PIONEER PRESS: AS MEMORIES OF GEORGE FLOYD FADE, ACTIVISTS MAKE SURE HIS LEGACY DOES NOT
September 14, 2020
Leesa Kelly still remembers the energy that permeated about the Twin Cities in the weeks after George Floyd’s death. So does Kenda Zellner-Smith. The civil unrest that followed matched their anger toward a system that they say once again failed the Black community when Floyd died under the knee of a Minneapolis police officer.
UNICORN RIOT: MINNEAPOLIS PROTEST ART COLLECTION BECOMES LARGEST OF ITS KIND
October 28th, 2020
A donation of over 200 plywood protest murals makes the “Save the Boards to Memorialize the Movement” project the largest art collection of its kind. During the height of the civil unrest in the city, following the death of George Floyd, businesses used sheets of plywood to protect their windows from being broken and prevent looters from breaking in. The plywood served as a blank canvas for artists who covered the pale brown boards with art that expressed grief, outrage and hope.
GOOD MORNING AMERICA: 6 MONTHS AFTER GEORGE FLOYD’S DEATH, MINNEAPOLIS ACTIVISTS SCRAMBLE TO SAVE BLACK LIVES MATTER ART
November 25th, 2020
A pair of activists had launched a months-long effort to save the art in hopes of preserving the historic artifacts that tell a story of pain and resistance amid the largest civil rights movement in U.S. history.
HINDUSTAN TIMES: BLACK LIVES MATTER MURALS TO BE PRESERVED AS EXPRESSIONS OF ANGER AND PAIN BORN OF OUTRAGE OVER RACIAL INJUSTICE
December 14th, 2020
“These walls speak. They’re the expressions of communities. We want these feelings, hopes, calls to action to live on”: Two Black women form Save the Boards to Memorialize the Movement, part of a push to preserve the Black Lives Matter murals
NBC NEWS: ARTISTS, ACTIVISTS RUSH TO SAVE BLACK LIVES MATTER MURALS
December 14th, 2020
"There is collective pain and grief in each board, and each one tells a different aspect of this story. And now we get to tell that story to everyone," said Save the Boards to Memorialize the Movement's Kenda Zellner-Smith.
MPR NEWS: RESCUING THE PLYWOOD — AND MEMORIALIZING A MOVEMENT
December 21, 2020
At the far end of a sprawling industrial building in northeast Minneapolis, a small group of volunteers is busy sifting through large paintings. Most are on 4-foot-by-8-foot sheets of plywood. They’re stacked along the walls of two small rooms, and fill the space with the aroma of a lumberyard. Many include the name and image of George Floyd. Some feature poems.
FOX NEWS 9: GROUP PLANS EXHIBIT FOR PRESERVED GEORGE FLOYD MURALS
January 29, 2021
A group of volunteers in Minneapolis is continuing to work to preserve the murals and artworks created in the aftermath of George Floyd's death. In a warehouse in Northeast Minneapolis, hundreds of works of urban art have found a temporary home.
HOW PLYWOOD FROM LAST YEAR’S PROTESTS BECAME ART
May 20th, 2021
"Nothing seemed to quell this feeling inside me: just deep despair and anger,” she said. From that unsettled place emerged an idea that would become Memorialize the Movement, a project to preserve and exhibit the plywood sheets that business owners had affixed to their storefronts out of concern about vandalism by marchers, many of whom instead transformed the sheets into art: murals and other works inspired by the moment, applied in paint, spray paint, pen, pencil, marker and chalk.