A Minnesotan woman crucial in the creation and preservation of the George Floyd Memorial emphasized the importance of people being able to tell their own stories in her recent lecture.
As a part of Arizona State University and Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s partnership, the “Navigating Change in Museums” public lecture series, Jeanelle Austin gave a lecture on Zoom titled “Let the People Tell Their Own Story: The Traumatic Legacy of the White Exhibition of Black Death,” on Monday, Jan. 31.
Living three blocks away from where Floyd’s killing took place in May of 2020 at the hands of the Minneapolis Police Department, Austin has seen people come to the memorial to pay their respects, leave offerings, grieve and protest.
Throughout the 20 months since Floyd’s death, museum curators have attempted to collect and preserve artifacts of the memorial, but protesters stopped this removal while demanding to tell their own story of racial victimization.
Austin is the co-founder of the George Floyd Global Memorial and caretaker of the memorials at George Floyd Square in Minnesota. Through her work, Austin aims to give a voice to Black communities, who truly understand the horrors of lynching and the terror of violence that has shaped and formed them.
“As a community of storytellers, as shapers of the memory of the people, we have a historical, moral and ethical responsibility to tell all the horrors of lynching,” Austin said during the lecture. “But in order to do this well, we must allow Black people to do that process. Black people have to be allowed to tell our own story, because we hold the story differently in our bodies, as the targets of this kind of terror.”
She highlighted that Floyd’s memorial is a place of community, public grief and liberation, existing to “conserve and preserve these stories of racial injustice.”
The work of Austin and her team, along with ASU-LACMA, has provided insight into why people should avoid exhibiting Black death.
“The harm is not in the story of Black death,” Austin said. “The harm is in the actual act of exhibiting the narrative.”
Starting in 2018, ASU partnered with LACMA. The university hopes to “culturally diversify the leadership of art museums in the United States,” according to the partnership website.
ASU-LACMA has achieved this through the creation of the Master’s Fellowship in Art History, which is a three-year program combining academics with exposure to museum work. In turn, they created the lecture series, with the most recent rendition being Austin’s lecture, which was followed by a short Q&A session.
A student of the program and employee of LACMA’s Balch Art Research Library, Mariama Salia moderated the Q&A portion of the event. She said as a Black and queer woman, hearing Austin speak was “inspiring” and “righteous.”
“The work they are constructing/maintaining are the reasons why I agreed to do this program, to try and increase awareness of other means of artistic gathering that don’t need to use the traditional methods of museum systems,” Salia said.
“We are all fighting against white supremacy — and once people allow themselves to see that truth, the healing will follow as we come together to learn and create something different,” Salia said. “I think there needs to be a willingness for those used to the comfort afforded to them by the current oppressive systems to see this truth in order for majority reconciliation.”
Likewise, ASU psychology student and attendant of the speech Noah Peralta said he was taken back by the power of Austin’s words. Peralta said he sees the importance of this generation coming together to forge change for those who are marginalized.
“People’s rights aren’t an opinion. I can see why people protested against museums removing the memorial,” Peralta said. “It is more than just history to be preserved for the future. It isn’t a segment of a history book.”
Contact the reporter at emoore24@asu.edu.
