As demonstrators gather on the National Mall next Friday for the March on Washington, a timely new outdoor art exhibition will open outside the National Building Museum in Judiciary Square.

The exhibition, Murals That Matter: Activism Through Public Art, will showcase public art created during this summer’s protests against police brutality. The exhibition will remain on display through late November.

Alongside the exhibit’s opening next weekend, six artists will create new works inspired by the leaders of the 1963 March on Washington. The live mural painting will take place on National Building Museum’s west lawn on 5th Street NW, between F and G Streets NW on Aug. 28-29 from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m.

“Protest murals reflect the intersection of art and politics, a tradition as old as prehistoric cave drawings and as current as Banksy’s graffiti,” said Brent Glass, the museum’s interim executive director, in a press release.

Public art has played a central role in this summer’s protest movement. At the height of the June protests, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser’s office painted the words “Black Lives Matter” on 16th Street near the White House, drawing both international recognition and criticism. Meanwhile, protesters covered the black fence that temporarily surrounded the White House with homemade protest art. Smithsonian curators collected some of it for a future exhibition.

The National Building Museum selected 18 preexisting works for its exhibition, all created during this year’s June protests. Artists created murals on the plywood covering boarded-up storefronts featuring messages of community connection and support for the protesters. They were commissioned by the DowntownDC Business Improvement District, in conjunction with the P.A.I.N.T.S. Institute, an arts education nonprofit.

The six new works will honor the members of the “Big Six,” the organizers of the original 1963 March on Washington: the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., A. Philip Randolph, Whitney Young, Roy Wilkins, James Farmer, and Rep. John Lewis, who passed away last month.

The museum is inviting visitors out on Friday and Saturday to meet the muralists, register to vote or volunteer at a polling place, and eat “‘Good Trouble’-themed cuisine from local vendors” (a play on Lewis’s famous plea for Americans to get “good trouble, necessary trouble” for causes they believe in).

Then in September, the museum will host a discussion on the protest murals and the role of public art.

The exhibition comes on the heels of a particularly difficult spring and summer for the Building Museum. Much of its staff was furloughed in April in response to the pandemic and the city’s stay-at-home order. Less than a month later, it permanently cut two-thirds of its staff.

The museum itself remains closed due to the coronavirus pandemic.