It can be easy to walk past thousands of square feet of paint on the side of a building unaware of the time, work, and thought that goes into such monumental artwork.
While the Twin Cities showcase hundreds of public murals, one of its newest can be found along the Midtown Greenway beneath the Hennepin Avenue bridge.
Lead artist George Thompson, also known as EWOK, worked with local artists on the mural during this year’s Street Art Series. The event highlights Minnesota residents’ long history of resilience to the misuse and overreach of government power.
Hennepin Avenue mural
The 15-by-120-foot mural features a scrolling timeline of the state of Minnesota, highlighting scenes of “misuse and injustice of power,” said Esai Luna, founder of the Street Art Series.
From left to right, the mural features Dakota concentration camps at Fort Snelling from the US-Dakota War of 1862, images from Operation Metro Surge, including of Alex Pretti and Renée Good, the murder of George Floyd and the destruction of the Rondo neighborhood from 1956-1968.
These three main scenes are “History repeating itself essentially,” said Luna.
The scenes “Found the common thread in the federal government abusing marginalized people currently with ICE and in the past,” said Thompson.
For Luna, recording the images from Operation Metro Surge, just months after it officially concluded, was important.
“It feels like it got glossed over already,” Luna said.
While residents might want to move past such a painful time, the effects of deportations, chaos and violence are far from over. Similarly, the ripples from the other two scenes, of the lasting effects of the displacement of native peoples and the destruction of Rondo, are similarly still felt to this day.
“This stuff doesn’t just go away because it is out of the news cycle,” Thompson said.
Luna’s takeaway from the mural, despite its dark themes, is positive.
“We’ve always been resilient in times of stress and despair,” Luna said. “We just wanted to give a piece back that felt like the heart of this city.”
Thompson likens the unnamed mural’s recollection of painful moments in Minnesota’s history to hiding medicine in a pet’s treat.
“I want people to just experience it,” Thompson said.
Street Art Series
The Street Art Series was created by Luna in 2024 as an independent street art event, adapted from the LynLake Street Art Series founded in 2017 by Josh Wilken-Simon, founder and owner of Legacy Glassworks.
While the Street Art Series was originally a vehicle to bring murals and public art to the LynLake neighborhood, Luna intends on broadening the series’ reach in the years to come.
Dozens of artists converge on the LynLake/Uptown neighborhoods each year to paint public murals and art. This year’s Street Art Series leaned into the themes of collaboration and mentorship, connecting local muralists and artists with students from Sprayfinger, a local graffiti art school.
Artists worked with students throughout the process from creating the design to application. This provides a “full walkthrough of a full mural experience,” Luna said.
A founding tenant of the Street Art Series was not just to highlight street art, but to pay graffiti writers and muralists for their work. To do that, tools, paint and scaffolding are donated from local businesses so that the series can get them “as cheaply as possible to pay artists as much as possible,” said Morgan Luzier, owner of Balance Fitness and organizer for the Street Art Series from 2021-2024.
Luzier recalls previously paying muralists $500 for their art, not a sizable sum even at that time, but “artists were thrilled at that amount.”
The shift towards public acceptance, celebration and even payment for street art marks a radical change in public opinion even from when the event began.
A history of Uptown street art
What is now the Midtown Greenway has a long history of graffiti and street art dating back to before it was developed into a 5.5-mile bicycling and walking trail. The abandoned railroads stretching from the Hennepin Avenue bridge to what is now the Midtown Exchange was known simply as “the tracks.”
“When it was abandoned, it was essentially a gallery and studio,” said Joe Ellis, founder of Joe Ellis Art, which specializes in Minneapolis graffiti from 1992-2000.
Part of the reason graffiti could flourish there was because of the site’s isolation. “You could go and spend days or hours and paint uninterrupted,” Ellis said.
“The tracks was sort of this no man’s land. It wasn’t a big concern of anybody’s,” Thompson said.
Graffiti artists of this time were mostly high school and college students, like Thompson, who moved to Minneapolis to attend the University of Minnesota in 1991. This group came to have a distinct style of art that is still known to this day.
While graffiti generally has a short life span – shortened by Minnesotan winters– art from this time was almost entirely lost when the railroad tracks were renovated into the Greenway.
“Most of the stuff on the Greenway now has nothing to do with that time,” said Ellis.
For Ellis, the shift from graffiti along abandoned railroad tracks to permitted murals along the Midtown Greenway is representative of a larger shift around the perception of graffiti as art.
What was once considered countercultural, or even harshly prosecuted as gang activity, is now bought and sold in art galleries, commissioned, and paid for through grants.
Thompson recalls that one of the times he was arrested for graffiti occurred just a few blocks away from where the Hennepin Avenue mural now exists.
“It’s kind of a weird irony,” Thompson said. “Getting paid thousands of dollars versus spending three nights in jail for essentially the same thing.”
Ellis cites the murder of George Floyd as a particular inflection point for broad opinions of street art in the Twin Cities, especially official sources within the City of Minneapolis and Hennepin County.
“It’s strange to consider that the City of Minneapolis once considered them gang members, now funds so much public art,” Ellis said.
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