Colorful murals bring hope of revitalization to south Minneapolis

An empty dirt lot on E. Lake Street near the light rail station used to be Express Payday Loans and Money Express stores. But on a steamy Tuesday afternoon in early July, a garden started to grow on an exterior wall of the future Atlas Staffing building and rental spaces. Muralists spray-painted thick green leaves, milkweed plants, honeycomb patterns, pink flowers and monarch butterflies onto a bright blue wall.

Oglala Lakota muralist Nick Jumping Eagle eyed two pink spray paint tones in the makeshift artist tent, grabbed them, then raced back over to focus on a flower petal.

The night before, the team of self-taught Santee Dakota and Oglala Lakota muralist Thomasina Topbear, Jumping Eagle, Levi EagleFeather and Seth Blewett stayed till 2 a.m., painting the 90-foot-wide by 17-foot-tall mural.

“Originally this was Dakota land, this is my ancestral homeland, and now you have people coming in from all over the world and we have to learn how to live together and sustain,” said Topbear, a founder of the mural collective City Mischief Murals. “I think the monarch butterfly definitely represents being able to migrate like that, and also help the land.”

This bright spot in the neighborhood is one of 33 murals that have gone up on Lake Street this summer, a $1 million project of the Lake Street Council’s Lake Street Lift, with funding from the state.

Another five murals went up this summer on the Midtown Greenway, thanks to a $100,000 grant from the Minnesota Humanities Center, $10,000 from the Minneapolis Foundation and some individual donations. Murals of this size and scale seek to bring color, hope and care into the neighborhoods and are essential to revitalization efforts.

“Doing so many murals at a time I think makes a really great visual impact and just this feeling of community care in disinvested spaces,” said Joan Vorderbruggen, a consultant for the Lake Street Council who was brought on to manage the massive mural project.

Wearing red sunglasses and a hat with LAKE STREET stitched onto it, Vorderbruggen admired Topbear and crew’s mural. In addition to bringing in muralists, the Lake Street Council also primed the walls of businesses receiving murals.

A couple of guys milled around in the parking lot. Some homeless folks lingered nearby; other people waited at the bus stop.

“I want people to feel happy and joyful when they walk by,” Topbear said. “And I think that all these people around here that you know are in this space, they deserve something beautiful to look at. You know, they deserve hope.”

On a Planet Fitness exterior wall — by Lake Street and Hiawatha Avenue — several murals took shape on one long wall facing a low-income housing complex that has a day care.

A black unicorn. A majestic woman with pink eye shadow and red eyes, surrounded by yin-yang symbols and golden jewelry, gazes from the wall. A young Black boy smiles, his cheeks rosy. A green-tinted dog leaps through the air, a bird flies over bubbles, a cat flashes an enchanting look.

There is some drug use nearby. While a mural won’t completely change a public space, its presence indicates care for the place.

A woman stopped her car, gazed at the mural and said, “It will be much nicer coming home now; this is beautiful.”

Vorderbruggen said she thinks the mural “provides a feeling of care and creativity and imagination, and … a reframing of what felt like it was a neglected space is suddenly a sacred space.”

Five new murals popped up in mid-June along the Midtown Greenway, the bike path and walking trail that used to be a railway across Minneapolis.

They weren’t the first seen on the Greenway. In 2017, muralist Melodee Strong, artist interns and youth from Little Earth painted a mural under the 13th Avenue bridge. Allina Health paid for a mural on the façade of Venture Bikes Midtown, painted by Topbear and a crew of muralists. And that’s just a few that cover the underpasses of the Greenway.

Midtown Greenway Coalition paid for the five new murals by four Twin Cities artists and one Chicago-based artist. Executive Director Soren Jensen saw them as crucial to the Greenway’s development.

“How can we make the Midtown Greenway as welcoming as possible to everyone so that everyone — regardless of their culture, regardless of their race, or wherever they are from, we want them to feel like they’re welcome in the Greenway.”

The new murals were painted over the course of about 10 days in May and June. Sometimes when muralists arrived at their walls, they found used needles or human feces. That meant taking extra care.

Strong’s mural under the 12th Avenue bridge represents many diverse communities: a family of bikers, a Hmong woman with flowers in a basket, a Black man focused on a speedy ride, a monarch butterfly, purple flowers and more flora and fauna.

In the painting, a Somali woman wearing an orange abaya, pink hijab and pink socks rides a bike, with waves of red, yellow and gold colors flowing behind her as she pedals. African, European, Hmong and Mexican communities are also represented.

Strong said the community wished to see multicultural families biking and enjoying themselves.

“The other thing that was mentioned in one of the first [community] pop-up sessions was these communities of color, these communities of immigrants, coming and leaving their legacy and leaving their story behind,” Strong said. “So that’s why I have the bikes moving with patterns following their ethnicity.”

At the 15th Avenue bridge, muralists Constanza Carballo and Marco Aguero were coming to the end of a long, hot day of painting. Aguero’s black clothes were covered in slashes of colorful paint as he put the finishing touches on a blue, red and purple dog, created in the mystical alebrije folk art style.

The mural includes cycles of life, the four elements, flowers and the lifecycle of the Greenway.

In the middle of it, there was a painting of artist Natchez Beaulieu, a member of the White Earth Band of Ojibwe. She and Carballo met when Carballo and her family moved to the Twin Cities from her native Argentina. Beaulieu made Carballo feel welcome.

“When I moved to Minneapolis, 15th Avenue and 26th Street was my home,” Carballo said. “This is the neighborhood where my art career and community public art took off as a youth artist. … It’s a very special place for me to be able to come back as an adult and do a mural.”