After years of preservation, Portland's George Floyd mural is now in storage

PORTLAND, Ore. (KOIN) — About five years ago, Portland artists created a mural that memorialized Black people who had been killed by police. The art now lives in a storage space downtown.

Volunteers with social justice organization Don’t Shoot PDX — and its new subsidiary The Black Memory and Preservation Lab — stored all 96 panels of the artwork earlier this week.

The mural first appeared outside of Downtown Portland’s Apple store in June 2020, the month after a Minneapolis police officer murdered George Floyd and sparked racial justice protests across the globe.

Emma Berger started the mural and is believed to have painted its biggest pieces, but others contributed to the work that also memorializes Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery and Deontae Keller. Later in 2021, KOIN 6 reported that Apple had donated the massive mural to Don’t Shoot PDX.

Founder Teressa Raiford revealed the nonprofit was originally in “crisis mode” because it wasn’t prepared to hold the large materials. Then, the owner of a local storage facility offered the nonprofit one free year of storage.

“We're lucky here in Portland that our community is committed to keeping these materials, and I do think that they will hold, you know, space for educating future generations,” Raiford said in an interview on Wednesday.

Before moving the mural into storage, volunteers spent the last several years preserving the artwork. Raiford told KOIN 6 it was a “very intensive process” that included a conservator report highlighting the look of each panel. She said some panels still feature the “white supremacist rhetoric” spray-painted onto them soon after their inception.

Volunteers have also created replicas of the mural in different formats. According to Raiford, the original pieces would only be suitable for public viewing if they were displayed on a building of the same size and scope of Apple. As a result, she expects them to be in storage for the next several years as the organization seeks another entity that could store them permanently for future generations.

“I think that when we get to that point, where we're understanding that we are in the resistance, we need to document and we need to research who we are in our space and in our world — so that things can come together a little easier for us,” she said.

In addition to The Black Memory and Preservation Lab, Don’t Shoot PDX previously launched The Black Gallery in the Pearl District. The organization has a generational mission to “use community education to empower people,” according to Raiford’s daughter Taishona Carpenter.

She serves as Don’t Shoot PDX’s board president and the gallery’s co-director.

“Using creativity to feel that has really been the best way to get messages out," Carpenter told KOIN 6 News. "Not just of what people know, but deeper histories and understandings of Black American history and what has happened here in this state and how it became a blueprint all over this country."