HealthPartners is committed to creating spaces where everyone feels welcome, included and valued. As part of that commitment, Park Nicollet Methodist Hospital in St. Louis Park, Minnesota, is proud to host the George Floyd Memorial Art Exhibit, “I Am Not You. You Are Not Me. Healing Begins with Acceptance.” The exhibit, displayed from Jan. 6 through March 4, showcases more than 100 pieces of art and offerings left at George Floyd Square near the intersection of East 38th Street and Chicago Avenue South in Minneapolis by people from around the world. On this special episode and premiere of the third season, Jeanelle Austin, executive director of George Floyd Global Memorial, and Methodist President Jennifer Myster share how and why the exhibit came to the hospital, racism’s connection to health and the importance of curiosity as part of the journey to expanding our perspectives. The exhibit is made possible by the partnership of the George Floyd Global Memorial and Park Nicollet Foundation.
HealthPartners is committed to creating spaces where everyone feels welcome, included and valued. As part of that commitment, Park Nicollet Methodist Hospital in St. Louis Park, Minnesota, is proud to host the George Floyd Memorial Art Exhibit, “I Am Not You. You Are Not Me. Healing Begins with Acceptance.” The exhibit, displayed from Jan. 6 through March 4, showcases more than 100 pieces of art and offerings left at George Floyd Square near the intersection of East 38th Street and Chicago Avenue South in Minneapolis by people from around the world.
On this special episode and premiere of the third season, Jeanelle Austin, executive director of George Floyd Global Memorial, and Methodist President Jennifer Myster share how and why the exhibit came to the hospital, racism’s connection to health and the importance of curiosity as part of the journey to expanding our perspectives.
The exhibit is made possible by the partnership of the George Floyd Global Memorial and Park Nicollet Foundation.
Hosts: Kari Haley, MD, and Steven Jackson, MD
Guests: Jeanelle Austin and Jennifer Myster
HealthPartners website: Off the Charts podcast
Got an idea? Have thoughts to share? We want to hear from you. Email us at offthecharts@healthpartners.com.
Kari Haley:
He's a rehab doctor from Chicago.
Steven Jackson:
She's an emergency medicine doctor from the Twin Cities.
Kari Haley:
Together we're examining the health equity emergency.
Steven Jackson:
Inviting voices for change without the cue cards.
Kari Haley:
I'm Dr. Kari Haley.
Steven Jackson:
I'm Dr. Steven Jackson.
Both, together:
And this is Off the Charts.
Steven Jackson:
We want to welcome everybody to our show today and thank you just for your undying support with our podcast and preaching the message of examining the health equity emergency that is at hand. And as we celebrate Black History Month, we have a special episode. And we are joined by Jeanelle Austin, who's the executive director of the George Floyd Global Memorial. And we have Jennifer Myster, who's the president and CEO of Methodist Hospital. Welcome, welcome and welcome.
Kari Haley:
Thank you both for being here today.
Jeanelle Austin:
Thank you.
Kari Haley:
On this very special episode.
Steven Jackson:
Wow. May of 2020 happened.
Jeanelle Austin:
It happened.
Steven Jackson:
And here we are in 2023. And are we better? Are we further along?
Jeanelle Austin:
That's a big question.
Steven Jackson:
That's a very big question.
Jeanelle Austin:
I think that we still have a distance to go. I think that we as a nation had an awakening in May of 2020 as the world marched for George Floyd on all seven continents and in all 50 states and in major cities in all 50 states. However, since the lynching of George Floyd, we still saw more lynchings across the country of Black people. And it tells us that there is more work to do and it is systemic, and we need to put a little bit more thought into the kind of community, the kind of nation, the kind of society that we are trying to build for all people to thrive.
George Floyd Square was birthed out of people coming together to mourn, to heal, to pay their respects, to protest, and to imagine a world where we could all actually thrive. And during the year when the streets of 38th and Chicago Avenue South in Minneapolis were closed, what we saw was a community being extremely intentional in caring for a space that I like to call the memorial that the people built.
The community came together to heal, and the center of the intersection was first and foremost a place where people were holding healing circles, and they were laying flowers, and indigenous women had come in and cleansed the space. And artists were coming in and creating art as protests. And people, children, elders, and everyone in between were marching and protesting and coming back to the intersection of 38th Street East and Chicago Avenue South and laying down their protest signs as a point of respects.
Now, in the Black community, we always say that whenever there's a memorial built for someone who dies it first and foremost goes to the family. And there was this season as the memorial was growing larger and larger and larger, and it was getting bigger, people were attempting to take things, to auction it off, to make money. And we were literally having to fight people off and go and-
Steven Jackson:
Oh, wow.
Jeanelle Austin:
... reclaim pieces that people were laying as offerings. Because we say as caretakers of the memorial, that one, everything is somebody's offering, therefore nothing is thrown away. And two, that the people are more sacred than the memorial itself. We practice people over property all day, every day.
And so to care for this memorial and to care for everything, we had to go dumpster diving.
Steven Jackson:
Oh, wow.
Jeanelle Austin:
We had to do all kinds of things. We had to create standard rules and regulations on how we were going to care for the memorial in terms of when would things get composted, how would we save everything? If we're saying that nothing is thrown away, what that would look like. And so this daily caretaking of the memorial as it grew, eventually it got so big that we had to say, "It is time to reach out to the family." Because we didn't want to bother the family with the memorial while they were navigating all of the courts and all the legal stuff.
And I googled, I googled who's the real family, because y'all know how it is. Somebody dies and everybody's a cousin.
Kari Haley:
Yes.
Jeanelle Austin:
And so I literally had to rely on journalism to figure out who is the real family. And I sent emails and I called every contact that I could find, and one person replied back, and that was Miss Angela Harrelson, George Floyd's aunt, who actually lives here in Minnesota. She's his only blood relative that lives here in Minnesota and works here at HealthPartners in Regions Hospital.
And she replied back and she said, "I want to come see." So her and her husband came and we showed her the entire operations that we had created with the help of the Midwest Arts Conservation Center, so that way we could conserve and preserve our own story. And we asked them, "What do you want to do?"
Because there are two options. One, you can split everything up and we could send them to different institutions across the Twin Cities or across the country. But we had already talked to various institutions and they said, "It's too much for us to take on all of it." And so the second option was for them to create a new organization, a new institution that would govern everything. And they went back and they discussed and they talked with their family and they came back to us and said, "We want to create a new organization, and we want it to be called the George Floyd Global Memorial."
And so that is how we were born. And we launched on October 14th, 2020, and received our 501(c)(3) status in December of 2020. And so we have been doing the preservation, archiving, art conservation work really since June of 2020. Since we've become an organization or an institution, we've really expanded our work. We also offer pilgrimage journeys. So people want to come to George Floyd Square and have a community member walk them through and guide them through, we also offer that service.
There are installations that have great magnitude in size, but then there are also smaller offerings that are extremely intimate and extremely personal to people who have come to George Floyd Square from around the world to pay their respects and to express their own pain and express their own hope. It's really taken the community, it has taken neighbors, it has taken people taking a stand to say, "This is the kind of neighborhood we want to be," and we want to be intentional. To this day, neighbors still meet every morning at 8 a.m. and every evening at 7 p.m. to practice community, because we really believe that community is the antidote to racism. And so out of that context, the George Floyd Global Memorial was birthed as an institution to govern and care for all of the offerings that were laid in the intersection.
To date, we have an estimated over 5,000 offerings, and more offerings continue to come, and we continue to care in the cultural heritage preservation tradition and industry. And so it is a lot of work, but it is good work and important work because the way in which racism works, it has historically erased story and erased memory. And so this work to fight to keep the memory and to keep the story is anti-racist work.
Kari Haley:
Those words just themselves are beautiful. You touched on community and the importance of community. Can you expand for me a little bit, what is community to you? What is your definition of community?
Jeanelle Austin:
That is an important question, because the word community gets thrown around a lot. And it can sometimes be exhausting when someone says, "Well, I talked to the community," I said, "No, you didn't. You talked to one person."
And so really thinking about what does it mean to actually show up for each other? What does it mean to practice mutual aid? And that word oftentimes, or that phrase oftentimes is thought of as a phrase where people who are in need or who are poor practice mutual aid. And one of the things that I've learned over this past two to three years is that there is power in mutual aid because it is a great equalizer. And that is to say that regardless of your socioeconomic status in life, the practice of giving and receiving, the practice of being able to say, "I am your neighbor. You are my neighbor. When I am in need, I am not so proud that I can't ask you to help me. And when you are in need, I am not so proud that I can't extend of my resources to help you."
And in that work, in living together and doing life together and caring for each other's humanity, and then caring for each other's wellness, that is where we see the seeds of community being birthed and flourishing and starting to grow. Community is more than just a designation. It's more than just a block. It's more than just a geographical neighborhood. Community is truly about the people that you've chosen to be in relationship with one another.
Steven Jackson:
Can you talk a little bit about I guess the process? I know this was a vision of the people, and I appreciate you saying that. And just the logistics of the planning, allocating the resources, the brainstorming sessions, opposition even, getting it to Methodist Hospital. Talk a little bit about the logistics of getting things up and going.
Jeanelle Austin:
So you're speaking of the exhibit-
Steven Jackson:
Yes.
Jeanelle Austin:
... that is currently at Methodist Hospital entitled "I Am Not You, You Are Not Me, Healing Begins with Acceptance."
So the George Floyd Global Memorial, when we were preserving and conserving these offerings that were laid in George Floyd Square, one of our priorities was to be able to get the offerings back out to the public, back out to the people, because this is the memorial that the people built, and we deeply believe that these stories were meant to be heard and not just be stored away. And so our priority was to be able to share the memorial in such a way where every exhibit that we do is an extension of the memorial that one could come and see at 38th & Chicago.
It was HealthPartners organization that had during our first annual gala bid on hosting an exhibit. So that was one of the ways that we were trying to reach out is to say, "Hey, who wants to bid on having an exhibit in their space?" The one requirement was it had to be a public space. It couldn't be a space where people would have to pay a fee and be charged to go and see it. And so when HealthPartners had bid on it and then decided that it would be at Methodist Hospital, the steps then were taken to explore the space and to see, well, what is the space that we're working with? And that's when we also encountered the people at Methodist Hospital, they were planning in their own world about what does it look like for us to have more than just an exhibit, but to have deep conversations and reflections on racial equity and racial justice, and where are we in the context of the hospital, and what does that mean for our current status of relationships and relations?
And the exhibit that we initially were going to bring was the exhibit that we had had up in Orchestra Hall. It was supposed to be 25 pieces of that exhibit. And then we came and the people of Methodist Hospital and HealthPartners were like, "But we have all of this space." And so we went back to this drawing board and we said, "OK, we can design a brand new exhibit that works for this story, that works for this context." And we offered a new imagination and we pitched it to President Jen. And she said, "Yes."
Jennifer Myster:
I love saying yes to big ideas.
Jeanelle Austin:
And it was a big idea.
Jennifer Myster:
Was a big idea.
Jeanelle Austin:
It was a big idea. And so we went to work, but one of the key pieces was we really wanted the community of HealthPartners in Methodist Hospital to be a part of the installation process and to be a part of the selection process in a way that still worked for our process behind the scenes.
And so we brought together several pieces, and then during installation day we had several volunteers come in, and they got to choose which ones went up. They got to choose the order of the boards. And it was a collaboration that I thought was healthy in a sense that people within the HealthPartners community got to be a part of installing this exhibit.
And the last thing I'll say is that Miss Angela Harrelson, who is co-chair of the board of the George Floyd Global Memorial, played an extremely important role in selecting the pieces. Because this was really her world coming together, both her worlds coming together and converging. And so every piece that was in that exhibit she said yes to. And there are pieces that she said no to that are not in the exhibit.
Steven Jackson:
Yeah, I had the pleasure of meeting her the other day, and she's awesome. Looking forward to speaking with her more. So Jen, here at HealthPartners, the HealthPartners family of care, something that we stand on, we don't just say it and put it on nice plaques, but we want everyone to be welcomed, included and valued, not just the patients and families that we serve, but also each other. I want you to speak a little bit about that, particularly in relationship to the memorial and the exhibit. What does this mean for our efforts to do just that?
Jennifer Myster:
Yeah, we want everybody who comes to work every day, who comes to care for us or comes to visit a patient to feel welcomed, valued and included for any reason. Their race, their ability, skin color, who they love, whatever it is. And so this is just part of our journey to do that. We have several teams working on this at Methodist, and they come to us with ideas like this one, this was a big idea, to have this George Floyd Global Memorial at Methodist for two months. And so this was part of that. We want to help people understand what happened, how do we stop that from happening, the same systemic racism and policing happens in health care, and how do we recognize that and how do we stop it? So it's just part of our effort there.
Steven Jackson:
Obviously, we're talking about our fight for racial justice and for equity, and we talk often on this podcast about building trust with the community and what that looks like and how that plays out in the community, but also when on the walls of our health care facilities, what is the relationship between race and health as you guys see it? And feel free to jump in. Jeanelle looked up like, oh, so glad you asked.
Jennifer Myster:
We think we know, but I don't think we know, right? Because we are in the early stages, I think. And I give HealthPartners, we give ourselves a lot of credit for the work we're doing and how deep we dig on understanding our data and making changes. But I think we're just still at the early stages of learning. We really are getting into the community, understanding what people need, and how to better serve them. But I still think it's the tip of the iceberg.
Jeanelle Austin:
This was a question that I explored back in 2019. I used to work at Fuller Theological Seminary and I was the director of the Center for African American Church Studies, or the director of operations for the Pannell Center for African American Church Studies. And I had burned out in that role. I was the director during the time of Michael Brown, Alton Sterling, Philando Castile, Sandra Bland, and just really working with students to try to figure out how do you continue to be a student when there's an assault on your Blackness taking place.
And with media and phones, it was right there in front of you. And the trauma was so deep amongst our Black students across all eight campuses. And that work, and even working locally in the city of Pasadena and working locally in Los Angeles, it was exhausting. And I burned out and I ended up moving to Austin, Texas in 2018, slept for six months, and then woke up in 2019 asking myself this question of is it possible to pursue racial justice and not burn out?
And so I joined Austin Health Commons, which was a space where they were looking at the intersection between health and race. I got connected with Dell Medical School at the University of Austin, Texas and started connecting with Dr. Jewel Mullen, who was at the time their new associate Dean for Public Health, and she had just come from the CDC. And really engaging these questions around health and wellness and race.
We know that there are stats. We know that there's statistics. We know that there's a disproportionate impact on people of color when it comes to race and health. And I deeply believe that it is possible to close that gap. Again, this is something that is also systemic. So when we hear the cry "Black lives matter," it is more than just about policing. We are really talking about a holistic approach to the wellness of Black people in this country, which has been set back due to the discrimination, the systemic discrimination that has happened over centuries in this country.
And we have to peel back the layers like an onion. We have to study our history. The Sankofa bird in the African American tradition is an image, it's a symbol that we borrowed from West Africa, and its feet are facing forward and its head is looking back. And it stands for simply that we cannot understand where we are going until we've taken the time to look back. And if we in this country take the time to look back at the kinds of discriminations that has taken place against Black bodies in this country, when we look back at the way in which Black bodies have been experimented on for the advancement of modern medicine, if we take the time to look back for the ways in which there was food inequities within the Black community of Black slaves being fed scraps and intestines and chitlins, which we still love as a delicacy in our community, but it's not the prime part of the animal. And so more health risk came with the kinds of foods that we were eating.
So if we take the time to look back to say, how did we get here? We will have right in front of us our recipe for undoing the mistakes and the harm done to the Black community when it comes to intersection of health and race.
Steven Jackson:
That's powerful.
Kari Haley:
It is very powerful. And both Jeanelle and Jennifer, what does having the memorial in Methodist Hospital where our patients, their families are able to see it, are able to experience it while they're in a health care setting, what does that mean to you in contribution to that intersection between race and health, and what is your hope and what do you want people to be thinking about and getting from that? And what does it mean for you?
Jennifer Myster:
That's a big question, but I think for me it's been really a chance for me to stand up for what I believe in by making this happen at Methodist. So we've had overwhelmingly positive feedback from the exhibit people, particularly from our colleagues, have felt like, "Thank you for having this. Thank you for taking a stand." Thank you for seeing that intersection, like you talked about, between racism and health care, racism and policing and other areas in our country. So people have been very positive about it.
Now, we've had a few folks that haven't been, right? And those are of course the ones we all remember because the negative sticks in our brain, how we're wired. And that for me has been just a powerful reminder of my privilege, and my obligation because of that, to be able to stand up and speak for what I believe in, and have those conversations with people that just say, "Here's why we're doing this and here's why it's important, and here's the curiosity I hope you find in this, to understand what you see here and what you can learn from it." How you have those conversations with others. So I think it's really opened the door for many people, but most importantly it's shown support for people having it there.
Kari Haley:
And Jeanelle, for you, what does it mean to have this work in a hospital, in a setting that is not traditionally part of your community necessarily at Methodist?
Jeanelle Austin:
Absolutely. I define protest as a disruption of business as usual to signal that there is something wrong that needs to be made right. And in so many ways, this exhibit has lived up to its protest. And it's been disruptive in a subversive way because it's offerings, it's art just hanging on walls, but people are drawn to pay attention to it, and people are drawn to ask questions. And some people are even pushed to a point of feeling extremely uncomfortable, or even to the point of being angry.
In our didactic, we use the term of lynching. We say on May 25th, George Floyd was lynched by the Minneapolis Police Department, and that has been a point of conflict for so many people. Someone had asked me, "Well, can we change the language to murder?" because the courts proved that Derek Chauvin had murdered George Floyd, and so that wouldn't give anybody a leg to stand on if they were complaining about the term lynching.
And my response to that was, it wasn't until 2022 that the U.S. legal system had any kind of legislation that even allowed lynching to be a crime. And so when Derek Chauvin was tried, there was no way to even charge him with lynching. And so when we even look at those kinds of systemic barriers that have been brought against the Black community, the kinds of harms that we feel that have been put upon our community, haven't even been legislated in a way where we can seek out justice. And so I was asked to define lynching, and one of the key pieces in understanding the term lynching historically is that it really is about social control. And so there's the element of lynching where someone is not given a chance to have due process through the court system, but there's also the element of lynching where it is about social control.
Somebody's killed by another person, typically in history it's been either a mob or an individual, but it's always to prove a point. It's always to send this kind of dog whistle language to the Black community to say, "Step out of line, and this could happen to you."
Steven Jackson:
This will happen.
Jeanelle Austin:
Yes, exactly. It really is more about the living than it is about the dead. To be able to control society in that way. And someone had responded and said, "I had always thought that lynching was associated with ropes," right? So there's that element. And I was talking to a friend about it, and she kind of laughed and giggled and said, "Do we declare war by throwing down gauntlets still?" And so is it possible for technology to evolve even in the way that Black bodies continue to be harmed in this country?
And so being able to just even understand this language of lynching and how it's been used to harm and destroy the Black community, it's really important for us to study language. And so I think that this exhibit has really surfaced a lot of spaces where people are uncomfortable to go, often because they do not have buckets to put the language that we're dealing with when it comes to racial equity and racial justice. And so in a space like a hospital setting, it's just as important to talk about as anywhere else.
Jennifer Myster:
I could just add to that. I love that you called it a protest. It's absolutely a protest. So let's celebrate that. Just the lynching word too, because I've been in many conversations. I remember walking out the hospital on January 6th after we had this fabulous opening of the exhibit and walking out and looking at the posters and taking it in and thinking, oh, lynching, that's going to raise some eyebrows, thinking it's going to ruffle a few feathers. Really had no idea that it would have that impact. Even that weekend, we started to get the few letters. And again, the majority are positive, but few of those letters.
That's where I had to get uncomfortable too and ask questions and learn more. And Jeanelle, you've been a great teacher in that, so I appreciate all that you've done to teach me about that. And the other thing I would add is that a portion of the exhibit says, "Remember their names." It's on the lower level and it lists many of the folks who've died at the hands of police officers, and at least three that I'm aware of have been added since the exhibit opened. We didn't add them, but they've died at the hands of police. They've been lynched. So it's very powerful. Thank you.
Jeanelle Austin:
When you said January 6th, it just triggered in my mind that that is also the anniversary of the insurrection. And I remember that day, and I remember standing in front of the TV and looking at all of the symbols of the confederate flag, looking at the symbols, someone had brought a gallows to the capitol. And looking at those symbols, I remember just the terror I felt in my body. And so to fast forward, now be installing this exhibit on that anniversary date, and being able to hold the conversation in a different way that's saying, how do we take this story, take this narrative of our past and guide people toward a place where we can heal, guide people toward a place where we can love, guide people toward a place where we can hold the pain and hold the hope and hold the truth of our past and say, "What does it mean for us to actually go forward collectively together here in the Twin Cities?"
Steven Jackson:
Well, for some forgetting the past is most comfortable. And that's why sometimes there's an outcry or opposition, if you want to call it that, or anger because it incites something on the inside of people that they don't want to feel. I told somebody earlier today, you can't grow while you're comfortable. You usually grow when you're uncomfortable. That's usually when you grow.
Talk about bodybuilding or lifting weights. You're not growing... Well, I guess you can grow when you're resting, but it's still a result of ripping muscle tissue and lifting things that are heavy. And I think sometimes we'd rather be comfortable. So thank you for giving us the opportunity to be uncomfortable and to grow, because I think that's what's needed in the season that we're in. And we talk about as an organization and as a society, as a world, we need to be more comfortable with the uncomfortable. Because it's in that dissonance, if you would, that we grow and we get to where we need to get to, hopefully. And so if we get angry, we get angry. If we face some stuff we don't want to face, maybe that's where we need to be to get to where we want to go. So with the success and the ongoing protest that is brought about by the memorial and by the exhibit, which is good, we've already established this is a good thing, where do we go from here? What are our next steps? What does the future look like?
Jeanelle Austin:
So we continue to partner with community organizations to be able to exhibit offerings at various institutions and gallery settings. So on May 1st, we will have an exhibit at Chicago Avenue Fire Arts Center which is located at 38th & Chicago. It is going to be called "Voices of the Unheard," and we are going to have youth help us install that.
We know as well that in January of 2024, we will be at Central Library downtown, and we will have an exhibit at the Cargill Gallery there. And we are constantly looking for new spaces to be able to exhibit and to help tell the story. So if anybody is interested, they're more than welcome to reach out. You can reach out to us at www.georgefloydglobalmemorial.org, or if that is too much to write out, gfgmemorial.org, you can reach out to our website. As well we have coming up the anniversary of George Floyd, May 25th is coming up, and every year we do Rise and Remember, which is a festival. We will be going for three days, May 25th through the 27th, we will have a conference that will be hosted at Best Buy campus, and really looking at where do we go from here as a nation, what does it look like for us to actually do the work of racial justice?
On the evening of May 25th, we'll have our annual candlelight vigil at George Floyd Square. The evening of May 26th will be our second annual George Floyd Global Memorial Gala, which we are extremely excited about. And finally, on the 27th, the festival that we do every year, that brings back the memories of how we do community, the kind of community that we saw during the uprising at George Floyd Square, and taking the best of that and bringing it back to the community. And so May 25th to the 27th, again, all the information will be on our website, gfgmemorial.org.
Kari Haley:
I just thank you both for your time, for being here today, for your work that you are doing. It is so important, and I am so glad that you were able to hear the stories a little bit more behind it, and that we have the opportunity to view it still at Methodist as of this recording. Honestly, after this conversation, I mean, I am celebrating the controversy. I'm celebrating the protest. Because really that means, like Dr. Jackson just said, we're growing.
Jeanelle Austin:
Yes. Thank you. Thank you so much for having us here. We really appreciate it.
Jennifer Myster:
Absolutely. And I'd invite you to visit anytime, any day between 10 a.m. and 8 p.m. at Methodist Hospital until March 4th.
Steven Jackson:
March 4th. OK. Thank you guys so much for your time, and onward and upward, let's make it a little better than it was yesterday.
Jeanelle Austin:
Amen.
Jennifer Myster:
Thank you.
Steven Jackson:
Off the Charts is a production of HealthPartners and Park Nicollet.
Kari Haley:
It is recorded by Jimmy Bellamy, with creative by Peggy Arnson, Tina Long, Tim Myers and Jeff Jondahl.
Steven Jackson:
Production services provided by Matriarch Digital Media.
Kari Haley:
Our theme music is by Ryan Ike.