“Facing the Fire” is an ongoing public art project, devised by Minneapolis artist Paul Herwig, to reflect on the murder of George Floyd, police brutality, and the civil unrest of 2020. Originally presented in the fall of 2022 on Lake Street East, east of Hiawatha Avenue in the Longfellow Neighborhood of Minneapolis, “Facing the Fire” was composed of seven performances of projection art and sound conducted on abandoned and damaged properties all along Lake Street.

Local music and sound artist Queen Drea participated in two of those performances, and is the composer and curator of the music in this iteration of Facing the Fire. It was at that first performance here at the ruins of the former 3rd Precinct where Paul met Chris Mozena, board member of Longfellow Rising, who then pitched the idea of remounting Facing the Fire, with a deeper focus on social justice, and the municipal neglect of the property, which is a persistent reminder of the horrible events of that summer and an ever-present eyesore that magnifies the City’s longstanding inability to address the community’s needs.

The projection art in Facing the Fire is composed of hundreds of images sourced from local and international media, street art from around the nation, graphs whose statistics chart the violence perpetrated onto local communities by outside radical fascist groups, archival images from the history of civil unrest along last Street since the 1900’s, and many recent images of the destroyed buildings in the neighborhood, images of citizens protesting during the summer of 2020, and children, for whom we need to build a better future.

This temporary art installation of projection and sound will be installed and run in a loop for 2 hours between 8pm and 10pm each evening twice weekly in April starting Friday April 7th (with an additional performance on Tuesday April 11th). That is: April 7-11-13-14-20-21-27-29.

For more information about Paul Herwig (the artist) can be found at: https://www.futureprojections.net/facing-the-fire.html. For more information about Longfellow Rising, contact LR Board Chair: Jamie Schwesnedl at 

Paul is immensely grateful for the support of Longfellow Rising’s funding of this project.

*Images of the projection art to be projected on the property are courtesy of artist Paul Herwig.