urbanMSP

https://www.bizjournals.com/twincities/ ... pment.html

Proposal for 26th and Bloomington. Most units will be 2-3 bed room units

There is a community meeting planned for Saturday, October 22nd, to discuss the future design of George Floyd Square.

It is not my place to decide, but I am very interested in what comes out of this process. Something that stirred my mind on this topic recently was a visit to Richmond, VA, where the city has been grappling with a legacy of racism and injustice that is probably deeper than anywhere else in the United States. The city has a street called Monument Avenue where there used to be a series of equestrian statues celebrating some of the most prominent loser-heroes of the Confederacy. They were only taken down after the murder of George Floyd.

But before that, the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts found a way to artistically respond to and criticize those statues by commissioning Kehinde Wiley to design an equestrian statue for their grounds. The result, Rumors of War takes the form of the statues of Lee, Jackson, etc., except the rider is instead a young black man. From afar, the statue may look like all of the others, which makes the clear contrast up close even more jarring. Appropriately the VMFA put the statue between their building and the neighboring headquarters of (you can't make this up) the United Daughters of the Confederacy.

Anyway, all of this to say that I don't know what people envision for George Floyd Square and it's certainly not up to me what should go there. But the statue of the fist that has remained at the center of that intersection since the summer of 2020 clearly resonates with many people, and what has been happening in Richmond certainly has been inspirational. I wonder if the commission of Wiley or another great artist to design a permanent centerpiece for that intersection might mark the location and its significance appropriately.