"Mayor Satya Rhodes-Conway came up with the idea for the murals and tasked city arts administrator Karin Wolf with the job."

"Wolf says she reached out to community cultural partners the city already has a relationship with in order to tap local artists. 'We definitely wanted to amplify the voices of people who have been directly impacted by racial injustice,' she says.... Not all the murals are part of the city program, says Wolf. Some store owners arranged for their own art and others artists went rogue. 'People didn’t know better,' says Wolf. 'A lot of people wanted to help and didn’t know how.'" — Isthmus reports on the murals of State Street.

There was a noticeable change from the condition of the plywood 4 days ago, the last time I'd checked. There's an effort to replace harsh graffiti with real murals and, as you can tell from the quote above, a prioritizing of black artists — with spaces marked as "reserved" and this message to white artists that "giving up some white privilege means saving this space for artists of color"...



A space that looked like this 4 days ago...



Is now painted over in yellow and marked "Reserved for a black female artist/Please respect this space":



I think some white artists were painting flowers rather than a "Black Lives Matter" image, and this looks as though someone who'd chalked out her design thought better of it, quit in the middle of things, and requested that a black artist "claim this space":



At the art museum, they were painting out the graffiti, presumably prepping for a nicer mural...




Some of more on-topic images were colorful and optimistic, like this...



And this...



Others had a harder edge, but were, I would say, respectful toward the city:



I wasn't sure which of the art was part of the city's program. This has more of a graffiti quality but it's also pretty positive...



This, I think, is the kind of thing the city is trying get painted over...