Dr. Heather Shirey is a Profssor of Art History at the University of St. Thomas in Saint  Paul, Minnesota. Along with Dr. David Todd Lawrence and  Dr. Paul Lorah, she is co-director of the Urban Art Mapping research team.

Urban Art Mapping is a multi-disciplinary group of faculty and students from the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of St. Thomas. The team has been engaged in the analysis of art in the streets in Saint Paul, Minnesota since 2018. For our research, we document and analyze what we define as “street art” considered rather broadly. This includes everything from very simple graffiti, such as text on a surface in paint or sharpie, to a commissioned mural by a professional artist, as long as it is painted in the street with the explicit purpose of engaging a wide audience.

In the spring of 2020, Urban Art Mapping created a living archive of global street art responding to the COVID-19 pandemic. In June 2020, we launched the George Floyd and Anti-Racist Street Art database, an ongoing project that seeks to create record of anti-racist, activist street art,  amplifying the voices and conversations taking  place on walls throughout the world.