Public art created during the late 1960s and early 1970s responded to the destruction of America’s inner cities. Chicanos painted murals in their neighborhoods to express their cultural pride, to protest injustice, and to celebrate their aesthetic values. While many of the first Chicano murals painted on St. Paul’s West Side are now lost, murals continue to reflect the community’s growth and progress.

In September of 2010, the Minnesota Twins unveiled a memorial to highlight Calvin Griffith, their first owner. While Griffith is credited with bringing professional baseball to Minneapolis, his racist attitudes and actions outshine his accomplishments. In response to increasing public pressure following the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, the statue was removed in June of 2020.

In 1939, a small-town doctor and his wife created a striking amateur film that captured their Minnesota community near the end of the Great Depression. The film is now included in the Library of Congress’s National Film Registry, which recognizes it as a significant documentary of rural life.

On June 6, 2015, a bronze statue of Shaynowishkung (He Who Rattles, commonly known as Chief Bemidji) was erected in Library Park on the shore of Lake Bemidji. Meant to honor the Ojibwe man’s life and bring people together, the statue was the result of a six-year community-driven process.

In October of 1949, the Leif Erikson Memorial was unveiled on the grounds of the Minnesota State Capitol. The memorial was part of the Scandinavian American community’s efforts to credit their ancestors—not Christopher Columbus—with the “discovery” of the Americas.

A cornerstone of the prison labor system for almost eighty years, the binder twine factory at the Minnesota State Prison employed thousands of inmates who produced over a billion pounds of cordage for regional farmers. The twine-manufacturing industry began at the original facility and continued at a custom-built factory on a new site after the prison moved in 1914. The factory closed in 1970.

The Iron Man Memorial in Chisholm stands at eighty-five feet tall as a monument to the miners of Minnesota’s Iron Range. The nearly thirty-year story of its creation reveals northeastern Minnesotans’ commitment to recognizing their history, expanding local heritage tourism, and diversifying their economy beyond the mining industry.

In December of 1928, the Knute Nelson Memorial was unveiled on the grounds of the Minnesota State Capitol. The memorial celebrates the impact of Norwegian immigration in Minnesota by portraying Nelson as a Norwegian American hero.

Dedicated in 1921, the 3.8-mile Victory Memorial Drive in North Minneapolis is part of the Minneapolis Park System’s Grand Rounds, a fifty-mile circuit of the city’s parks and parkways. It features over 500 memorial trees and markers as well as a central monument and flagpole. This parkway section was named in honor of the Allied victory in Europe and in memory of the 568 Hennepin County residents who died while serving in the armed forces during World War I.

On June 15, 1920, a mob of 10,000 people oversaw the lynching of three African American circus workers falsely accused of rape in downtown Duluth. In the face of community silence after the event, the lynchings faded from public memory. Efforts to acknowledge the lynchings, remember the victims, and begin community healing led to the identification of the three workers’ graves in 1991 and the creation of a memorial plaza in Duluth in 2003.