Night and Day: Murals, Memory and Movement
Presented by Memorialize The Movement
Curated by Leesa Kelly and Amira McLendon
September 6th, 5:00 pm to 8:00 pm
Opening Events: Saturday, September 6, 5–8pm
Curatorial Talk: 5–6pm in the Catherine G. Murphy Gallery lecture hall | Leesa Kelly, MTM Executive Director, and Amira McLendon, MTM Collections Manager, discuss the ideas, themes and questions behind the exhibition.
Reception with Interactive Mural Painting: 6–8pm
The 2025-2026 exhibition season begins with a partnership with Memorialize The Movement (MTM), a Minneapolis organization that collects, preserves, and makes accessible the plywood protest murals created during the Minneapolis Uprising of 2020.
MTM utilizes two distinct spaces on campus—the art gallery and The Frey Theater (a black box theater)—as storytelling devices to share the living history of the murals in their collection. The curators explain:
“Night and Day: Murals, Memory, and Movement "explores the duality of protest and protection, grief and joy, destruction and creation during the Minneapolis uprising of 2020. Through a curated collection of plywood protest murals and archival materials, this exhibition captures a pivotal moment in the city’s history—one defined not only by resistance, but also by community care and collective action.
These murals are more than just artifacts of a turbulent time; they are living testaments to how communities organized, expressed grief, demanded justice, and protected one another when official systems failed. This exhibit invites viewers to reflect on the layered realities of that summer—what it meant to show up, hold space, and fight for a future rooted in justice.”
This exhibition and accompanying programming is sponsored by the St. Catherine University Mission Chairs and presented in partnership with The Frey Theater at The O’Shaughnessy and the St. Catherine University Amy Marie Sears Memorial Visiting Artist and Curator Series.
RESOURCES
This guide is designed as a resource for all visitors, especially college educators and their students, who are eager to engage meaningfully with the artwork on view in the gallery. The content in this guide offers a range of learning opportunities and styles, with the goals of building observational skills, encouraging dialogue, cultivating critical thinking and personal reflection, and ultimately, appreciating art as a form of learning, understanding, and creating a pathway for building empathy, relationships and community at St. Kate’s and beyond. View guide here.
EXHIBITION EVENTS
Panel Discussion with Mural Artists: October 14, 6:30pm in the Recital Hall.
Film Screening and Talk Back: October 21, 6pm in the Catherine G. Murphy Gallery lecture hall | More info forthcoming.
St. Kate’s One Read for Racial Justice Book Discussion and Paint to Express Workshop: November 1, 12–4pm in the Catherine G. Murphy Gallery (RSVP here) | Join MTM and the St. Kate’s library for a discussion about Ta-Nehisi Coates’s 2024 book, The Message, while painting miniature murals. The Message is St. Catherine University’s selection for the 2025-2026 One Read for Racial Justice. (Don’t miss A Conversation with Ta-Nehisi Coates at The O’Shaughnessy on October 23!)
All events are in-person. Note: For ASL Interpreting and other accommodations, please contact Gallery Director Nicole Watson (nmwatson@stkate.edu) at least one week prior to each event.
RELATED PROGRAMMING
The O’Shaughnessy presents Aftermath: November 14, 6:30pm (purchase tickets here) | Join us for a performance and conversation. What happens in communities after an incident of police violence? How do we heal and move forward?
Led by nationally recognized director and choreographer Dominic Moore-Dunson, Aftermath brings together voices of St. Catherine’s student body and local Twin Cities artists to explore healing, resilience, and collective action through movement and storytelling.
This project is informed by Night and Day, and features a dynamic discussion panel, in partnership with Katie Leadership Impact, that brings together artists, activists, and cultural leaders who are using their voices and their work to challenge injustice, amplify marginalized stories, and imagine a more equitable world.
Virtual Tours
CURATORIAL STATEMENT
We curated Night and Day with the understanding that memory is political, and murals are a form of storytelling that resists erasure. These artworks—created in the immediate aftermath of George Floyd’s murder—document a movement that carried profound emotional depth. They emerged in moments of chaos and clarity, grief and love, trauma and triumph. Each mural carries the urgency of the moment it was created in, while also offering us a map of what community care and resistance can look like.
As curators, we were intentional about highlighting the breadth of experiences across the uprising—from bold demands for justice to tender affirmations of Black life. The themes of night and day represent the duality of this movement: how it unfolded in darkness and in light, and how people came together to create something lasting in the face of overwhelming loss.
As you move through the three exhibit spaces, we invite you to reflect on the following interconnected themes:
Darkness and light, not as binaries, but as coexistences—reminding us that grief and joy, rage and hope, all live side by side.
Mutual aid and community care, as survival strategies in the face of state neglect—how people fed, healed, and held each other when systems failed us.
Relationships and rootedness, using the metaphor of tending the land—plowing, sowing, growing—as a framework for how communities cultivate trust, build power, and deepen resilience over time.
Night and Day is not just about what happened in the streets—it’s about how we responded, how we remembered, and how we continue to move. We invite you to witness the creativity and courage that rose from the asphalt, and to honor the people who made space for each other when there was none.
— Amira McLendon, Collections Manager and Leesa Kelly, Executive Director and Founder, Memorialize The Movement
AMY MARIE SEARS MEMORIAL VISITING CURATORS IN RESIDENCE
Leesa Kelly is an activist, writer, public speaker, and curator. Leesa is the Founder and Executive Director of Memorialize the Movement (MTM), a living archive located in Minneapolis dedicated to the preservation and activation of over 1,000 plywood murals that emerged following George Floyd’s murder and the Minneapolis uprising in 2020. Through her work with Memorialize the Movement, Leesa has spoken at over 20 conferences and universities, organized 10 large-scale exhibitions in the Twin Cities and New York, published a catalog of the murals titled Art and Artifact: Murals from the Minneapolis Uprising, and led workshops on cultivating BIPOC representation and visibility in the museum and conservation industries. She believes in dismantling oppressive systems and rebuilding new systems that work for ALL people.
In the winter of 2022, Leesa became a McWatt Fellow, where she worked to strengthen Black history research and community engagement with the Ramsey County Historical Society, Hennepin History Museum, Anoka County Historical Society, and the Dakota County Historical Society. Leesa is currently serving as a New Suns Fellow through the Black Collective foundation. She will begin her master’s program in Heritage Studies and Public History at the University of Minnesota this fall.
Amira McLendon is a visual artist and emerging curator based in Minneapolis. She holds a BA in Art from the University of Minnesota. Her artistic practice focuses on digital illustration and her curatorial lens explores the intricacies of diverse storytelling. McLendon sees art and curation as mediums for calling upon social change, justice, and a catalyst for shaping collective memory.
Through the medium of curation, McLendon aims to unearth untold stories and amplify the voices of people that have often been overlooked by traditional institutions and museums.
Currently, she is the Collections Manager for Memorialize The Movement, where she continues to blend her artistic visions with her commitment to preserving, honoring, and uplifting forgotten and undervalued communities and narratives.
The annual Amy Marie Sears Memorial Visiting Artist and Curator Series invites distinguished artists and curators to St. Catherine University for a residency that includes public programming and engagement with students. This series was established in honor of Amy Marie Sears, a promising 1995 studio art major who passed away in 1997.
Image Gallery
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