On a spring afternoon in late March, Jeanelle Austin and I sat in an early-education art classroom at Pillsbury House Theatre in south Minneapolis, waiting for a Zoom call to begin. We’re surrounded by towering stacks of blue and gray archival boxes filled with protest objects found at the intersection of 38th Street and Chicago Avenue, now known to the world as George Floyd Square.
The week after George Floyd was killed, Austin began tending to the budding memorial, where hundreds of offerings were left in his memory. It started on the asphalt right in front of Cup Foods, the small corner grocery where an employee phoned for police and unwittingly set into motion the racial reckoning that sparked a global uprising.
For Austin, the act of gathering flowers into neat piles and tidying objects like teddy bears, paintings, candles, rosaries, and framed prayers was an attempt at personal healing during a period of heavy turmoil. Sweeping the streets and clearing trash became “an act of social resistance and self-care,” she says. One night, someone tried and failed to burn the memorial down. Austin was able to find refuge for singed items at Pillsbury House.
Last summer, Pillsbury was closed due to the pandemic, making it an available home for other weathered and waterlogged objects from the memorial that Austin sought to protect from damage. Soon she had assembled a team of fellow caretakers to help relocate and store these items, repurposing one of the classrooms into an archive. She also aligned with local professional art conservators. The first rule of this work, Austin has often told me in the six months I’ve been following her for a documentary that I’m working on, is that “everything is somebody’s offering, and therefore nothing is thrown away.” Almost a year into the Minneapolis uprising, she has become the lead caretaker of the Square, guiding a group of fellow volunteers and collaborating with Floyd’s family to institute an official George Floyd Global Memorial.