Street art tribute to George Floyd. Murals around the world remember man killed during police stop

From Germany to Syria, from Spain to the United States, from Belgium to Palestine: all over the world, street art has paid tribute to George Floyd, the 46-year-old man killed during a police stop last Monday, May 25, in Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States: video footage taken by passersby shows how Floyd was restrained by a police officer, Derek Chauvin (later arrested), who for more than eight minutes pressed his knee into the neck of the African-American man, who was desperately, and in a whisper, begging for breath until he lost consciousness. An independent autopsy, ordered by Floyd’s family members, later determined (in the last few hours) that the man died of asphyxiation.

George Floyd’s death in the hands of the police (the arrest, in addition to Chauvin, was attended by three other officers, who did not act to prevent the tragic outcome of the arrest: they were all fired) set off a devastating wave of protest across the country, but it also aroused the interest of urban artists around the world. The murals mostly feature George Floyd’s portrait, along with the phrase “I can’t breathe,” the one the man uttered to ask for a modicum of humanity from the officers.

The phrase #icantbreathe has since become a hashtag and a rallying cry against police violence against African-American citizens, which in the U.S. is unfortunately commonplace: according to data released by the website Mapping Police Violence, an observatory that monitors these kinds of incidents, 1099 people died at the hands of U.S. police in 2019, 24 percent of whom were black (despite being 13 percent of the U.S. population), and there were only 27 days during which no person died in situations involving police.

Below are some of the murals that have begun to appear on walls around the world.

Minneapolis, at the site where George Floyd was killed

Palestine (work by Walid Ayyoub)

Barcelona, Spain (work of TvBoy)

Berlin

Belgium

Idlib, Syria

Pensacola, Florida

Mannheim, Germany

Birmingham, England

Bremen, Germany

Los Angeles

Street art tribute to George Floyd. Murals around the world remember man killed during police stop

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