About
Street art in times of crisis
Artists and writers producing work in the streets – including tags, graffiti, murals, stickers, and other installations on walls, pavement, and signs – are in a unique position to respond quickly and effectively in a moment of crisis. Street art’s ephemeral nature serves to reveal very immediate and sometimes fleeting responses, often in a manner that can be raw and direct. At the same time, in the context of a crisis, street art also has the potential to transform urban space and foster a sustained political dialogue, reaching a wide audience and making change possible. This archive focuses on art that was produced in the 2020 uprising and in the context of ongoing demands for racial justice and societal transformation.
The Urban Art Mapping team archives everything from small stickers and quickly written graffiti to large, commissioned murals. Street art is often very ephemeral—sometimes graffiti is removed in just a matter of hours. At the same time, some works of art in the street are protected and preserved in the streets. Additionally, plywood boards have been removed, stored, and exhibited in different contexts. Together these works serve as nuanced expressions of this very complex movement and moment in history.
Urban Art Mapping is a multi-disciplinary group of faculty and students (undergraduate and graduate) at the University of St. Thomas in Saint Paul, Minnesota. The faculty co-directors are Dr. Heather Shirey (art history), Dr. Todd Lawrence (English and Cultural Studies), and Dr. Paul Lorah (Geography). Our student research collaborators (past and present) for our databases include Liz Allie, Tiaryn Daniels, Amber Delgado, Summer Erickson, Malaki Jackson, Owen Larson, Rita Morgan, Shakira Mwakitawa, Shukrani Nangwala, Ellie Patronas, Adem Ojulu, Frederica Simmons, Olivia Tjokrosetio, Diana Tewelde, Chioma Uwagwu, Eve Wasylik, Rachel Weiher, and Sovann-Jahlee White.
We’ve been studying street art in St. Paul, Minnesota as a research team since 2018. We are dedicated to identifying, documenting, and mapping street art, by which we mean everything from graffiti and tags to stickers, throw-ups, wheat pastes, murals, projections, and more. Geographic information systems analysis and ethnographic interviews are an important part of our work as well. We started the COVID-19 street art archive in April of 2020 when our in-person interviewing had to be shut down because of COVID. Then, when George Floyd was killed just over a month later, we created an archive for street art that appeared as part of the racial justice movement. The neighborhood where we had already been doing work, Midway in St. Paul, turned out the be the epicenter of the uprising in St. Paul. We were suddenly seeing art everywhere and it was telling a story that we felt needed to be preserved.
Building a collection
The Urban Art Mapping project is exclusively in the digital realm. We made the decision early on not to collect any physical artifacts. Our archive contains only images of street art, and we define that quite broadly – we consider graffiti and stickers to be of equal significance and value to the archive as commissioned murals, for example. Each record has at least one photograph (but sometimes more) and metadata that provides as much information as we have about the piece. We include the name of the artist if we know it and if the artist chooses to be identified, as well as the name of the person who documented it and submitted it to us (also according to their wishes). We identify key themes and we write detailed descriptions, providing as much context as we can. This often requires research, so it is slow work, and the database is always a work in progress.
The majority of the pieces in our database were documented by crowdsourcing. People have taken pictures and then submitted them to us. One of our goals is to decenter authority of the archive. Street art matters because it represents the voices of the community, often providing a counter-institutional perspective, and so a crowd-sourced archive is in keeping with the goals of this art form itself.
We intend for the archive to be used for educational and research purposes and use of the images for any other purposes is not permitted. We hope that the images and metadata will be of interest to a broad, international audience, since the issues addressed are of concern around the world.
Analysis of street art
One focus of our project is to analyze the relationship between street art and place, and we explore how art shapes, and is shaped by unique neighborhoods. Early on, we surveyed and mapped the locations of graffiti and tags in a Saint Paul neighborhood. Then, we used a geographic information system to analyze how the location of street art is shaped by a neighborhood’s cultural geography. In areas we studied, it turned out that clusters of street art tend to be located near intersections, mass transit stops and commercial real estate.
We also explore the geography of street art inspired by George Floyd. The killing of George Floyd inspired protests in the Twin Cities and beyond. When we mapped the locations of property damage associated with the protests, we found several concentrated areas of conflict. We mapped these hot spots using a geographic information system and then overlaid the locations of street art in our database. As a result, we were able calculate whether a piece was located in a hot spot or located farther away from conflict. One finding that came out of this was that the street art near the center of conflict tended to be more visceral and confrontational, with messages like “Cops are murders,” “Stop killing us,” and “Killa cop save a life.” As distance from sites of conflict increased, it became more common to find art promoting change, expressing messages of unity, and displaying messages from property owners with messages like “Change must come,” “One Love,” “Justice for George,” and “We are open Floyd Justice.” These findings line up with what we would have predicted, and it is important to have data to confirm what we are observing anecdotally.
Reflections on Art and Social Justice: A Digital Archive of Street Art & Protest
Three days after George Floyd’s murder, Twin Cities artists Cadex Herrera, Xena Goldman, and Greta McLain created a now-iconic mural on the side wall of Cup Foods at 38th St and Chicago in Minneapolis. This piece was intended to transform a location that was a tragic marker of an extrajudicial antiblack murder into an important community space for memorialization, organizing, fellowship, and healing. Over time, this mural also became the focus of conflict and negotiation as members of the community sought to define the space in a way that recognized the need to mourn and prioritize the voices and experiences of BIPOC artists.
In the months that have followed, the mural was vandalized and restored. It also became a recognizable image far beyond the Twin Cities, and it is likely to endure over the course of time. Across the river in Saint Paul, the Midway neighborhood became the site of intense conflict between protesters and the police in early June, about a week and a half after George Floyd’s murder. In this context, graffiti reading "Mama" was spray painted on a wall of the former Walmart, located in the epicenter of this conflict. While simple in form and quick in its execution, we’d argue that this simple piece of text, a reference to George Floyd’s desperate plea for help, is as powerful as any larger, more enduring mural in its call for transformational change. However, given local responses to graffiti, “Mama” was bound to be short-lived. Within just a few days the piece was removed and its call for change was silenced.
Artworks created in the streets are by nature ephemeral and have the ability to capture raw and immediate individual and community responses; the meaning of these pieces is negotiated and shifts over time. Starting with works such as the George Floyd Mural and the Mama graffiti, the Urban Art Mapping research team, an interdisciplinary group of faculty and students based at the University of St. Thomas in Saint Paul, Minnesota, began working in early June 2020 to collect digital documentation of street art that emerged in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder, ranging from monumental murals to small stickers, and including commissioned art as well as unsanctioned pieces.
We argue that visual responses to this act of injustice are an expression of the anger, frustration, and pain felt in communities across this country and around the world. The work is ongoing. As the uprising continues, these expressions need to be preserved. Beyond serving as a repository for this art, the archive was created as a resource for students, activists, scholars and artists by way of metadata, including a description of key themes, geolocations, and dates of documentation.
While our project has its roots in the Twin Cities, as the work has progressed we have received submissions from around the world, evidence that this call for equity and justice has a global resonance. Images of Floyd accompanied by the text “I can’t breathe” appeared on walls from Brazil to Syria, joined as well by pieces criticizing the militarization of police around the world and the names of the many other victims of racially-motivated violence.
The protests in the Twin Cities appear smaller and quieter than they were in the summer of 2020, and many restaurants and shops have removed the plywood panels that were installed to protect glass during the uprising. Many works that expressed the raw justified anger that emerged in immediate aftermath of Floyd’s death are erased. But the calls for change must be continuous, and in some cases more permanent murals serve to amplify this message. Preserving a wide range of artistic responses over the course of time and around the world is crucial, as this allows us to understand the complexity of the movement.
A special thank you all of the students who have participated in the project, as well as the following individuals and groups who have guided our conceptualization of this project:
- Dr. Ann Graf, Assistant Professor, College of Organizational, Computational, and Information Sciences, Simmons University for guidance in developing a core list of terminology for describing works of art
- Christy Dent, Visual Resources Curator at the University of St. Thomas
- Erik Moore, Head, University Archives & Co-Director, University Digital Conservancy University of Minnesota Archives