Minneapolis Murals

Minneapolis has accumulated one of the densest concentrations of public murals of any American city its size, spread across neighborhoods from the North Loop warehouse district to the Lake Street corridor, the Midtown Greenway, and the blocks surrounding George Floyd Square at 38th Street and Chicago Avenue.

The murals documented here reflect several distinct threads running through the city's recent history. The longest-running is civic pride expressed through portraits of Minneapolis-born artists: Prince appears repeatedly, from the Rock Martinez memorial at West 26th Street and Hennepin Avenue, painted shortly after his death in 2016, to works at First Avenue, on Broadway Avenue in North Minneapolis, and in the North Loop. Eduardo Kobra's Bob Dylan portrait on Hennepin Avenue downtown, completed in 2015, belongs to the same tradition of honoring the city's musical legacy in paint.

A second and more urgent wave followed the murder of George Floyd on May 25, 2020. Murals appeared across the city within days, many of them on boarded storefronts along Lake Street and Nicollet Avenue after civil unrest left stretches of both corridors damaged. The boards themselves became a medium, and the organization Memorialize The Movement later preserved them as artifacts, periodically exhibiting them at Phelps Park. George Floyd Square has continued to accumulate memorials and murals, and the site remains active as a community gathering place.

By the mid-2020s, the Midtown Greenway had developed its own mural corridor running the length of the trail's retaining walls and bridge abutments, with works ranging from tenant-rights advocacy by Cori Nakamura Lin and Tori Hong to cycling figures by Cadex and Ethan Herrera. Neighborhood institutions have also been marked before and after closure: the 4th St Saloon on West Broadway, which shut after 37 years, carried a mural celebrating North Minneapolis's jazz and blues heritage to its final day, while Palmer's Bar in Cedar-Riverside drew crowds to its closing nights in 2025.