Time is so strange. 

The year 2015 seems like a lifetime ago, and it also feels like yesterday. That was the year marriage equality became law of the land after the U.S. Supreme Court case Obergefell v. Hodges ruled that same-sex marriage was legal in all 50 states. I remember that moment so vividly, and yet the time before it seems so distantly far away. 

In “Sanctuary City,” a play by Martyna Majok, the characters can’t even imagine what national marriage equality might look like. It’s set in a post-9/11 landscape. Toward the end of the play, the characters mention that gay couples can now marry in Massachusetts after that state’s Supreme Court decision in 2004. But they can’t even conceive of a time when marriage would be legal in all 50 states. 

The characters also don’t talk about the Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors (DREAM) Act, a never-passed law that would have granted temporary residency to undocumented immigrants who entered the U.S. as minors. And the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), which has protected 500,000 undocumented people from getting deported and provided them legal work authorization since Barack Obama first initiated the program by executive order in 2012, hadn’t happened yet. 

I was feeling upset when I went to go see Frank Theatre’s production of the play. There’s just been a lot in the news that has been stressful, and the particular news article I read before heading to Open Eye Theater happened to be about the University of Minnesota saying that it will comply with court-backed ICE immigration orders. This, despite the U’s statement on its website saying, “we encourage and welcome all students to apply, regardless of immigration status.” (In response, University students, faculty, staff, and community members have started a petition). 

Because “Sanctuary City” is a period piece, I began to remember what it was like back in the aughts, before Obama became president, before DACA, before the Affordable Care Act, and before marriage equality. And yet while the play’s historical context is a key part of its framework, its resonance to our current political climate felt exceedingly present.

Majok’s play was set to have its world premiere off-Broadway in 2020, but was cancelled during previews because of the COVID-19 pandemic. It eventually opened at the Lucelle Lortel Theatre in 2021, and more recently had a run at Steppenwolf in Chicago in 2023. Now, Frank Theatre’s production at Open Eye takes place as the Trump administration unleashes executive orders targeting undocumented immigrants. 

I don’t know how to really talk about this play without letting one or two spoilers slip through, so please proceed reading with caution if that will irritate you. 

At the heart of the story are two people whose parents immigrated to the United States when they were young. With a bit of luck, one of them becomes a citizen before they turn 18 after their parent’s successful naturalization process. The other does not. If fate had taken a different turn, they might have fallen in love. Maybe they could have gotten married, which would have provided perhaps an easier pathway to citizenship for the friend who was undocumented. 

As I watched the first half of the story, I thought that was what was going to happen. The two characters plan a marriage of convenience, and for a moment I thought the narrative might turn into a plot like the 1990 Gérard Depardieu and Andie MacDowell movie “Green Card,” which I’m embarrassed to admit I’ve seen many times. As you may recall, in the movie, the two leads have a fake marriage in order to aid Gérard Depardieu’s immigration process, only to actually fall in love with each other. “Sanctuary City” is not that story though.

Majok constructs the play in two acts that are starkly different from each other in tone and structure. The first half of the play features two actors – Stephanie Anne Bertumen as G, and Clay Man Soo as B. The scenes are very short and go back and forth in time. We see very little furniture, and the actors employ miming to indicate the objects they interact with and the world that surrounds them. 

The lighting design, by Tony Stoeri, is stark, and Dan Dukich’s moody sound design creates a sense of urgency in Brechtian episodic mini-scenes. 

The scenes mostly take place in the apartment where B lives at first with his mother and then alone. Escaping the chaos of her mother’s abusive relationships, G becomes a frequent visitor, often entering B’s room through the fire escape. The audience watches a growing intimacy between the two friends, though something (it’s not revealed what, at first) prevents them from becoming romantic. 

In contrast to the minimalism of the first act, the play’s second act looks a lot more like realism. It takes place in the same apartment as the first act, but now the audience can see the furniture, and the whole set is lit. Instead of short scenes that employ repetition and time experimentation, Majok develops one longer scene with an Aristotelian arc and climax. The audience also gets introduced to a third character – a gay law student named Henry, played by Keivin Yang, who is B’s boyfriend. 

I’m not exactly sure why Majok divides the play into such structurally divergent halves. The only thing I can think of is that the first act’s episodic, experimental structure adds to a feeling of confusion the characters both feel. The uncertainty of their futures and of their relationships with each other is mirrored in a script that is at times difficult to follow. In contrast, everything is made clear and apparent in the second act, and the three people have nothing to do but hash things out between the three of them.

Honestly, I strongly disliked all three of the characters by the end of the play. While I could understand each of their grievances – with the world and with each other – I wasn’t able to root for any of them because of their rotating list of character flaws – whether that be bigotry and manipulation, dishonesty and insecurity, or bullying, depending on the character.

That’s not to say the actors weren’t good in the roles. I found each of them very believable, both before and after the structural break halfway through. 

At some point as I was watching the second act unfold, getting angrier and angrier at the three characters, I realized these people are all behaving badly because their situation is so impossible and ugly. In the world in which these characters lived, there were no good options for undocumented people who were brought to this country as children. There also weren’t good options for LGBTQ people who loved each other and wanted to marry. 

The one thing I did miss in their development was any cultural references or language. Majok, who immigrated to the U.S. from Poland herself, intentionally doesn’t specify in the script what country the characters are from, and doesn’t include any signifiers about their ethnicity. I understand why she might do this, but I also wondered about what we didn’t understand about  the characters with these layers unexplored.

In any case, the play, and Knox’s direction of it, did get me riled up enough to want to talk about the play afterwards, and has had me thinking about it since. As it has in the past, Frank Theatre has chosen a play that engages with a pressing issue at large, and asks its audience to grapple with ideas through the art of theater.

“Sanctuary City” runs Thursday, Feb. 6 (sold out), Friday, Feb. 7 and Saturday, Feb. 8 at 7:30 p.m., Sunday, Feb. 9 at 2 p.m., through Feb. 23 at Open Eye Theater, 506 E. 24th St., #3732, Minneapolis, $30. More information here.

Sheila Regan

Sheila Regan is a Twin Cities-based arts journalist. She writes MinnPost’s twice-weekly Artscape column. She can be reached at sregan@minnpost.com.

The post Exploring the life of the undocumented and gay in ‘Sanctuary City’ appeared first on MinnPost.

About 13,000 years ago the melting glaciers that covered Minnesota and Canada created a vast lake, bigger than all the Great Lakes of today combined. Geologists later named this Lake Agassiz (AH-ga-see), for the Swiss geologist Louis Agassiz. The lake drained twice: first to the south, to form the channel of the Minnesota River and the Upper Mississippi in the Twin Cities, and then, 1,600 years later, to form the course of the Red River of the North.

Between 17,000 and 21,000 years ago the last North American glacier reached its maximum depth and extent, covering all but the southeast corner of Minnesota. Its slow melting and retreat then began. Some 13,000 years ago its meltwater formed Glacial Lake Agassiz, which covered most of what is now Saskatchewan and Alberta, plus a sliver of northwest Minnesota and eastern North Dakota. Its waters were contained by the ice sheet to the north and a natural dam to the south, since named the Big Stone Moraine. (A moraine is a ridge of debris formed by a glacier.)

About 11,700 years ago the lake breached the moraine near present-day Browns Valley at a place now called Traverse Gap. The flow of water and debris surged south, then southeast, with unimaginable force, creating what geologists later named the Glacial River Warren. This river carved a wide, deep valley — now the Minnesota River valley — which turned north at Mankato, because it hit bedrock, joined the much smaller Mississippi River at Fort Snelling, and joined the St. Croix at Hastings. It thus formed the river network around which all human habitation in southern Minnesota has since been organized.

When River Warren’s surge reached what is now downtown St. Paul, about 10,000 years ago, it flowed atop the shelf of limestone upon which the city now stands. When it reached the edge of that shelf it met much softer rock — shale, with sandstone beneath. It then proceeded to cut deeply into that material, forming the basin still visible south of downtown. In time the flow dug a deep chasm, and the water cascading over the limestone edge formed a waterfall 175 feet tall and 2,700 feet across (later named River Warren Falls) spanning the entire basin from downtown to Cherokee Heights.

The force of falling water ate away at the sandstone under the limestone shelf, and little by little the edges of the shelf broke off, again and again and again. Thus the falls marched slowly upstream to the west, progressively diminishing in height and force, until they reached the Mississippi at the site of Fort Snelling. It then followed the Mississippi north, split off at Minnehaha Creek to form Minnehaha Falls (where the shelf and softer rock below can still be seen), and continued north to what became Minneapolis. Dakota people called the water feature Owamniyomni: Turbulent Waters. After 1680, when Father Louis Hennepin saw the site and named it for the patron saint of Padua, Italy, it became known to Euro-Americans as St. Anthony Falls.

While Glacial River Warren worked its way east, then north, the glacier, far to the north in Canada, continued to melt. Lake Agassiz re-formed, though smaller. About 7,400 years ago it broke through the weakening ice to the north and east, and flowed toward Hudson’s Bay, creating the shallow valley of the Red River of the North, which extends from Lake Traverse to the south to Winnipeg, and beyond, in a shallow, gently sloping valley. The breakthrough eventually drained all the accumulated melt water, and this marked the end of Lake Agassiz. In time the valley of the Red River proved to be fertile farmland, thus attracting European immigration and forming the population centers of western Minnesota and eastern North and South Dakota. The two successive drainings of Lake Agassiz created two of modern Minnesota’s three great river corridors: the Minnesota and the Red, along with the Mississippi.

For more information on this topic, check out the original entry on MNopedia.

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The inaugural Black Europe Film Festival of Minneapolis / Saint Paul, a showcase of Afrodescendant cinema from across Europe, debuts tomorrow through Sunday at various locations in Minneapolis. 

With feature films, shorts, documentaries and a 1930 silent Russian film called “Black Skin” about racism, accompanied by a live soundscape created by Dameun Strange, plus workshops and discussions, the festival spotlights diverse stories from Black European filmmakers. 

Lorenzo Fabbri, a professor at the University of Minnesota and founding director and curator of the festival, said he met founding and artistic director Kudjo Kuwornu 20 years ago, and the two have collaborated on a series of projects since, most recently Kuwornu’s film, “We Were Here,” which will have its U.S. premiere at the festival. 

Kuwornu first began organizing a traveling Black Italian Film Showcase. 

“In our conversations, we realized it would be compelling to expand the scope beyond Italy to provide a more comprehensive perspective on the Black diaspora in Europe and its cinema,” Fabbri told me in an email. 

They decided to focus the festival in Minneapolis, in part because the murder of George Floyd resonated deeply in Europe among Black communities. 

“It became an important moment of reckoning and connection between Black Europeans and Black Americans, especially between Black Europe and the Black Twin Cities,” Fabbri wrote. “So we wanted to do justice to that connection and further the conversations that are already happening between local and global Blackness.” 

My colleague Deanna Pistono interviewed four of the directors featured in the festival, including founding and artistic director Kuwornu, Daniela Yohannes and Julien Beramis, directors of the experimental film “Atopias,” and Adura Onashile, who wrote and directed the film “Girl.” 

Related: Writers and directors show show the diversity and complexity of Black Europeans through the medium of film

Meanwhile, read on to see my responses to four other films in the festival – romantic comedy “The Black Sea,” a coming of age film, “After the Long Rains,” psychological thriller and science fiction fantasy, “The Gravity” and the performative documentary “Edelweiss.”  

U.S. premiere of “Edelweiss” followed by Q&A with director Anna Gaberscik (U.S./Austria)

Part documentary, part spoken word performance, part experimental film, “Edelweiss,” by Anna Gaberscik takes its name from the white flower found in the alps, as well as the song about that flower in the musical “The Sound of Music.” The film follows various people of color living in Vienna as they talk about their experiences with micro-aggressions and racism. In an opening sequence, spoken word poetry is heard as a voiceover as the cast pose and move in studio and outdoor settings. There are dance sequences, a dramatized nightclub scene, and a scene where several of the group gather at the Alps and take in the immense beauty of the setting.

I found myself most drawn to the interview portions of the film and hearing some of the stories and experiences of folks who live and make their lives in Austria. As I watched, it struck me that some of their experiences resonated with what I’ve heard from people here in Minnesota. Racism and anti-Blackness may look different depending on geography and context, but there’s a lot likely is similar in different settings. 

Thursday, Jan. 30 at 7:30 p.m. at The Main 3, 115 S.E. Main St., Minneapolis ($12). More information here. 

Minnesota Premiere of “After the Long Rains” plus Q&A with director Damien Hauser (Switzerland/Kenya)

Zurich-based filmmaker Damien Hauser sets his third feature film in Watamu, a coastal town in Kenya, and focuses the story on a young girl named Aisha, played by Eletricer Kache Hamisi. A bit dreamy, and a bit contrary, Aisha has an independent streak, and can’t seem to help following her curiosity wherever it happens to lead. When her school teacher gives the class an assignment to find out what they want to be when they grow up, it sparks a journey of both self-discovery and intergenerational connection for the young protagonist. 

In the story, Aisha befriends a fisherman named Hassan (played by Bosco Baraka Karisa,) and he helps nurture her dreams of becoming a fisherwoman herself. The two develop an unlikely and tender relationship, but there are a couple of problems. One is her parents disapprove of both the relationship and her choice of extra-curricular activity. The other related problem is that Hassan is an alcoholic.

Hauser handles the nuances of the relationship between the two characters with care. He doesn’t shy away from potential dangers such a relationship might face. There’s one scene where Aisha sits with Hassan and his friend late into the night while they drink. Thankfully, nothing bad happens in that scene, but it also doesn’t seem like a good situation. 

At the same time, Hauser explores the positives of their growing admiration for each other, and their capacity to impact each other deeply. The tragedy of the film is the way in which Hassan’s addiction gets in the way of his desire to be a mentor to his new friend. 

It’s a beautifully shot film, with a compelling soundtrack and intriguing characters. Really what makes this film is Hamisi herself, who is so captivating as a performer you can’t take your eyes off of her. 

Friday, Jan. 31 at 5 p.m. at the Main 3, 115 S.E. Main St., Minneapolis ($12). More information here. 

Minnesota premiere of “The Gravity” plus Q&A with director Cedric Ido (France/Burkina Faso)

Burkinabe-French director Cédric Ido came out with “The Gravity” in 2022, but in a stroke of coincidence, the film happens to use a planetary alignment as a central event in the story, which is the same astrological phenomenon that is currently taking place in our night skies. 

The story takes place in a crime-ridden Parisian suburb, and involves a clash between an older generation of criminals and a new younger gang that has taken over a housing project. The new group is very well organized, they wear matching outfits, exhibit cult-like behavior and hold the upcoming planetary alignment with religious fervor. I found them to be terrifying.

Daniel (Max Gomis), is a competitive track and field runner, and is doing his best to escape the ghetto and start fresh in North American with his wife and daughter. But emotional ties to his drug dealing disabled brother, Joshua, (Steve Tientcheu), make leaving difficult. Meanwhile, their former childhood friend Christophe (Jean-Baptiste Anoumon), whose own brother died when Joshua was injured, arrives following a stint in prison to complicate Daniel’s exit. 

The earth’s gravitational pull, somehow strongly impacted by the planetary parade, proves to be the metaphorical focal point for the film, in addition to being a main supernatural element. I was biting my nails for much of the story, and found myself satisfyingly surprised by the twists Ido takes along the way. 

Friday, Jan. 31 at 7:30 p.m. at The Main 3, 115 S.E. Main St., Minneapolis ($12). More information here.

Minnesota Premiere of “The Black Sea” plus Q&A with director/lead actor Derrick B. Hardin (U.S.)

I found “The Black Sea” by Crystal Moselle and Derrick B. Harden to be so charming, and a lot of it had to do with the chemistry of the two leads – Harden – who plays Khalid, an African American from Brooklyn who in a twist of fate finds himself in Bulgaria, and Irmena Chichikova as Ina, a world-weary travel agent who hasn’t quite given up on her dreams. 

Khalid quits his coffee shop job in Brooklyn and heads to Bulgaria with the promises of an all-expenses paid vacation courtesy of an older woman who found him on Facebook. Unfortunately things don’t turn out as planned when he loses his passport and the would-be romantic transaction gets thwarted by fate. Suddenly, he finds himself in a country where he doesn’t speak the language, he has no money, and he’s the only Black person in the entire town. 

Moselle and Harden use the premise to explore dynamics of race and class in the European setting of the movie, while also exploring Khalid’s search for meaning and fulfillment far away from what he knows. Of course you can tell the romance developing from a mile away, but that’s part of the fun. Watching Khalid and Ina learn to trust each other and discover what they each want out of life is a joy to watch because the two actors have such an easy presence together. 

Pre-show reception featuring Southern comfort food from Tap In Kitchen & Cocktails.

Saturday, Feb. 1 at 7:30 p.m. at Capri Theater, 2027 W. Broadway, Minneapolis ($11.63). More information here. 

Other not-to-miss events during the festival: 

THURSDAY Jan. 30 | 4:30 p.m. | Main Cinema | More Info/Tickets
Free Short Film Program on the Black Caribbeans plus Q&A with “Atopias” director/lead actress Daniela Yohannes (Eritrea/Ethiopia/France) and director Julien Beramis (France/Guadalupe)

SUNDAY Feb. 2 | 11a.m. | Cedar Cultural Center | More Info/Tickets
Short Film Program on Somali diaspora + Q&A with directors Salad Hilowle (Sweden), Warda Mohamed (UK), and Abdulkadir Ahmed Said (Somalia)

SUNDAY Feb. 2 | 2 p.m. | Minneapolis Institute of Art | More Info/Tickets
Free Film Program on Black Lives in Painting plus Q&A with directors Salad Hilowle and Fred Kuwornu (Italy)

Free receptions: 
Thursday, 6:30 p.m. | Main Cinema | Afro-fusion catering (Afro Deli)
Friday, 6:30 p.m. | Main Cinema | Pizza happy hour (Tommie’s Pizza)
Saturday, 6:30 p.m. | Capri Theater | Soul food (Tap In Kitchen & Cocktails)
Sunday, 6 p.m. | Main Cinema | East African food (The Red Sea)

The post Black Europe Film Festival debuts in Minneapolis appeared first on MinnPost.

While European life and identity is often associated with whiteness, the Black Europe Film Festival is set to share a different set of experiences. 

Screenings of various films from Thursday to Sunday in the Twin Cities will offer Minnesota audiences windows into Black European life – from historical presence to modern reality. Prior to the festival’s opening, I spoke with four directors about their films and what audiences can expect to see. 

An untold history 

While Fred Kudjo Kuwornu, founding director of the film festival, is an Italian filmmaker, his piece “We Were Here: The Untold History of Black Africans in Renaissance Europe” focuses on an entire continent. The documentary examines the lives of historical Africans and people of African descent living or traveling through Renaissance Europe, including nobility, artists, a diplomat and a saint. This festival marks the film’s U.S. premier; its European debut having taken place during the 2024 Venice Biennale. 

During the documentary, historical reenactments put actors in the roles of various Black figures during the Renaissance depicted in art, such as Duke Lorenzo de Medici and Juan de Pareja. Ninety percent of the historical reenactment cast, Kuwornu estimates, are migrants who attend a theater workshop in Bologna.

Related: Black Europe Film Festival debuts in Minneapolis

As migration from West Africa to Sicily involves traversing a desert and potentially working “as (a) slave for two (or) three months to repay the last mile of travel from Libya to Sicily,” the acting workshops provide a way for participants to familiarize themselves with the Italian language, along with an avenue to heal from their journeys to Italy, said Kuwornu.

“For me, (this film) is a way to challenge those who (claim) European roots in terms of whiteness (and) not in terms of continent,” said Kuwornu, whose father is from Ghana and whose mother is Italian. “I want to challenge (that and) say, ‘Yeah, you have European roots, but there are a lot of people who are not white that have the same.” 

A healing journey 

While Daniela Yohannes is quick to say she’s not a filmmaker, Julien Beramis, her partner and co-director, cheerfully contradicts her each time – “She is.”

Their short film, “Atopias: The Homeless Wanderer” is the second “Atopias” film the couple have made together. Yohannes, a painter whose series of paintings on diaspora and migration, “I Surrender My Body to Water and Fire” lent its colors to the film, said making the film was healing. Through the film, Yohannes was able to explore diasporic “tensions that (she felt) internally”, while also creating a space to “exist without boundaries (or) limitations.” 

Filmed on the Caribbean islands of Guadeloupe and Martinique, the work features Yohannes wandering through natural landscapes. She is covered in a mixture of cane sugar molasses and charcoal. This mixture – a pitch-black substance – was said to have been used by enslaved people as camouflage during escapes from slavery in the Caribbean. Yohannes said while a historian told Yohannes there was no record of this occurring, the way the tale has persisted in Caribbean culture indicates that the story is true “within the people.” 

“The molasses felt like a shield,” said Yohannes, “Even though there’s hardship, by the end of filming, I felt I could just live out here (in nature) forever.” 

A quiet rebellion

“Girl,” writer and director Adura Onashile said the film is “quietly subversive” in its focus.

“How far are we prepared to watch a Black woman do nothing (and) just be?,” said Onashile, who noted that there is a tendency to have Black characters’ on-screen and on-stage existences “justified by (their) trauma,” as though “suffering entitles them to be on screen.”

“Although there is trauma in this film, I started calling it halfway through the process of writing it a kind of meditation on (the) relationship (between mother and daughter),” said Onashile. “What I wanted to really hone in on was a kind of intimacy that is a world all of itself. It might be affected by trauma but isn’t necessarily solely defined by it.” 

Set in Glasgow and focusing on the lives of single mother, Grace, and her daughter, Ama, the film is about the inevitable “growing up and growing apart” of a child from her mother. Onashile, who is based in Glasgow, is excited to be part of the film festival, noting that the United Kingdom does not have a festival with a particular focus on Black European filmmakers. 

“Obviously, it goes without saying that Black European film is not a monolith,” added Onashile.

“What’s wonderful is that although we’ve all come together under the banner of this film festival, it’s so diverse. It’s important to remember that our stories are as diverse and as interesting and as dynamic as any other peoples’ making film.”

A program of screenings and director Q&As can be found here for the Black Europe Film Festival.

Deanna Pistono

Deanna Pistono is MinnPost’s Race & Health Equity fellow. Follow her on Twitter @deannapistono or email her at dpistono@minnpost.com.

The post Writers and directors show the diversity and complexity of Black Europeans through the medium of film appeared first on MinnPost.

Toussaint Francois Battiste has accomplished quite a lot for being only 12 years old. 

The talented youngster has acted on Broadway, co-starting with his father, Francois Battiste. He’s performed in “Waiting for Godot” along with Michael Shannon and Paul Sparks, and he’s acting in the upcoming Apple TV series “The Savant” with Jessica Chastain. This month, he stars in “Milo Imagines the World,” a musical adaptation of the children’s book by writer Matt de la Peña and illustrator Christian Robinson. 

Co-commissioned by Children’s Theatre Company (CTC) and two other theaters, the musical features a book by Terry Guest, lyrics by Christian Albright, and music by Christian Magby. The story follows a boy named Milo, who imagines the lives of people he meets on a subway train, and realizes people are not always what they seem.  

I met with Battiste and his mom, Shevawn Nicole Battiste (and two siblings), recently at CTC for an interview. They live in Sacramento with their large extended family on Beacham’s side, and travel depending on the elder Francois’ acting calendar. 

As I walked into the dance studio, Battiste was playing an Adele tune on the piano. I asked him if he took lessons, he said he just learned to play on his own. Beacham told me when her son was about three or four, he started tinkering at the keyboard, and learned to play “Happy Birthday” and “Mary Had a Little Lamb.” 

“He has a natural ear,” she told me. “We just made sure he had the tools he needed to explore that.” 

He’s also a gifted artist, and has a penchant for science experiments. I had a great time chatting with him, and I hope you’ll enjoy the conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity. 

Sheila Regan: I’d love to ask you about your theater history. Do you remember the first play you saw? 

Touissant Francois Battiste: “The Gruffalo.” I was four years old, and we were running late to see the show. 

SR: Where did you see it? 

TFB: In London. Near … what type of square was it? 

Shevawn Nicole Battiste: Trafalgar Square 

TFB: We passed by a toy store. Mom said since we were late to see the show we would probably see it when we got back. I didn’t want to wait, so the second we got to a stop light, I took off across two streets, all the way back to the toy store. 

SR: Wow, that sounds like an ordeal. What did you like about the play? 

TFB: Honestly, I don’t remember. 

SR: When did you decide you wanted to act yourself? 

TFB: When I saw my dad do it. I said, I want to be like my dad. 

SR: When did you first see your dad on stage? 

TFB: It was “Raisin in the Sun.” I saw it the first time, and then I was in it with him. There’s a part in the play where the person my dad plays gets called a toothless rat. I yelled out to the crowd when I heard that. “My daddy is not a toothless rat!” 

SR: So how did you get the part when you acted in the play? 

TFB: So, my dad got the audition for the play to play the exact same person he played the first time, Walter Lee Younger. And they were still looking for Travis Younger, Walter’s son. They contacted my dad and asked him if there was anybody he knew that wanted to try it, so he asked me, and I said yes. So I put myself on tape, and I got it. 

SR: What was that experience like? 

TFB: It was the best. 

SR: What made it so awesome? 

TFB: Well, partly because my dad was playing my dad in the play, and it was just super cool. The cast was really, really fun to work with.

SR: And have you done many plays since then? 

TFB: I’ve only done one other play since then, which is “Waiting  for Godot.”

SR: How do you manage school and being in plays? 

TFB: It’s really tough. Mom and Dad help out with that, because I’m homeschooled. They’re my teachers as well.

SR: Now you’re playing Milo. Did you read the book before you read the script? 

TFB: Guess what? 

SR: What? 

TFB: I got the book for Christmas. It was really cool. 

SR: Can you tell me the story?

TFB:  Basically, Milo – he and his older sister, Adrian, are getting ready to hop on the subway. They’re on the subway to go visit their mom who is incarcerated. While they’re on the subway, it’s Milo imagining the lives of other people, and he expresses what he thinks their lives are like through his drawings. Because he loves to draw.

SR: That’s pretty cool. Do you draw yourself?

TFB: I do. I like to draw dinosaurs. I think I brought my sketchbook. 

SR: I would love to see it. 

TFB: It’s not my best one. It’s still a work in progress.

SR: Is Milo kind of a different person than you? 

TFB: Actually, we’re kind of the same, because we both are imaginative. We both have a sister who’s annoying. In this case, I have a brother and a sister (who) can be a little annoying. And yeah, we both like to draw. We both have very imaginative minds, and we both like to cause mischief.

SR: If you were gonna tell someone a few tips to being a good actor, what would you tell them?

TFB: Don’t go completely out of your way to try to fit into a character, just try your best. Don’t try to become somebody completely different. It’s OK to mess up, because I’ve messed up countless times, and it always turns out OK. 

SR: How do they create the magic of the play? 

TFB: Well, they’re gonna have an actual subway car, and they’re gonna put it on a track, and so the train can go off stage to the left, or off stage to the right.   

SR: What’s your favorite part in the play? 

TFB: I don’t have a favorite, I like them all, but if I had to choose one, I’d say maybe the opening scene because I turn into a superhero in my imagination, and I have to fight this big old T-Rex. 

SR: Do you have to do stage combat? 

TFB: Yeah. 

SR: Have you ever done stage combat before? 

TFB: We’ve had fight scenes, but not really combat. This is another level. But it’s fairly easy compared with what I had to do in a TV show that’s coming out – it’s called “Savant” and stars Jessica Chastain. I was playing her son, and I had to have a fight scene. 

SR: What’s the plot of the movie? 

TFB: The plot in the movie is the person who Jessica plays; she infiltrates online chat groups to seek out  domestic terrorists. 

SR: What’s your character like? 

TFB: He is kind of my age, and he’s like everything you would expect from a 12-year-old kid.

SR: What’s the most significant thing that’s happened in your life so far? 

TFB: Being an actor. 

SR: Does your dad help you with your acting? 

TFB: Yes, he helps me with vocal warm ups. And helps me to get in mind states and get prepared for a show. 

SR: What does that mean? 

TFB: If you’re supposed to feel really sad, he helps me get into a sad state. If you’re supposed to be really, really overjoyed or mad, he helps me get into some of those mind states. 

SR: How do you like working with the people at the Children’s Theatre? 

TFB: Words just can’t explain how cool it is to work with these people. They’re just so fun to work with, and we have the best time together. 

SR: I imagine, often you’re working with adults. Do you have folks that are your age? 

TFB: Well, my understudy for this play, his name is Cortlan. He’s a year older than me, but he and I hang out, like a lot together. And when I was doing “Raisin in the Sun,” I split the role between myself and another boy named Camden. He was so fun. We both liked to draw. We got puzzles that we would do backstage.

“Milo Imagines the World” begins previews Feb. 4 through Feb. 11 at 7 p.m. Opening night is Feb. 12 at 7 p.m., with the run through March 9 ($15-$25 previews, $15-$68 run) at the Children’s Theatre Company, 2400 3rd Ave. S., Minneapolis. More information here.

Editor’s Note: Shevawn Nicole Battiste was incorrectly referred to as Shevawn Nicole Beacham in an earlier version.

Sheila Regan

Sheila Regan is a Twin Cities-based arts journalist. She writes MinnPost’s twice-weekly Artscape column. She can be reached at sregan@minnpost.com.

The post Toussaint Francois Battiste stars in CTC’s ‘Milo Imagines the World’ appeared first on MinnPost.

The history of Jewish immigration to Minnesota involved two distinct periods in the nineteenth century.

The first wave: German Jews

St. Croix Valley fur trader Maurice Mordecai Samuel was among the first Jews to arrive in Minnesota in the late 1840s. Other German and Central European Jews who had earned their living as peddlers elsewhere in the United States soon followed, attracted by commercial opportunities in the growing Minnesota Territory. German Jewish peddlers-turned-merchants could be found in market towns throughout the state by the 1880s.

In the 1850s, the German Jewish migrants who had accumulated capital started businesses and lived in St. Paul’s Lowertown district. Dry goods, liquor, and furs were among the commodities they sold. Two of their shops, Mannheimer Brothers and the Golden Rule, grew into large department stores. In 1856, eight St. Paul families founded the first Jewish organization in Minnesota, Mount Zion Temple.

Jewish people began to settle in Minneapolis around 1865. The shops they founded along Washington Avenue supplied workers in the city’s thriving lumber industry with ready-made clothing and dry goods. As they had in St. Paul, Minneapolis Jews lived and worshipped near their places of business. The small Minneapolis Jewish community consisted of fewer than two hundred people by 1877.

The Montefiore Burial Association — the first Jewish institution in Minneapolis — was founded in 1876 by German Jews. Two years later, the same group founded a synagogue, Shaarai Tov (later renamed Temple Israel).

The second wave: refugees from Eastern Europe

The earliest Eastern European immigrants in the Twin Cities initially settled in the same neighborhoods as their German coreligionists. They spoke a different language, Yiddish, and followed different religious and social practices. The Eastern European peddlers and small merchants set up their own synagogues: Sons of Jacob (1869) in St. Paul and Adath Jeshurun (1884) in Minneapolis.

On July 14, 1882, 200 impoverished Eastern European Jews arrived unexpectedly at the St. Paul train station. Their appearance marked the beginning of the second, and largest, wave of Jewish migration to Minnesota, consisting of émigrés from the Russian Empire, Austria-Hungary, and Romania.

The established German Jewish community immediately came to the newcomers’ aid. There were only 1,000 or so Jewish people living in the entire state in 1882, so caring for the refugees, who numbered 600 by the year’s end, was a major task.

There was an ambivalent quality to this aid. On one hand, the German Jews were motivated by genuine benevolence and long-standing religious tradition. A key example is Neighborhood House, a settlement house founded by the women of Mount Zion in 1897 on the West Side Flats, where many of the Russian Jewish immigrants first settled. On the other hand, the established German Jewish community feared that the foreign dress and customs of the Eastern Europeans would cause an antisemitic backlash that would transfer to them.

As immigrants from Eastern Europe continued to arrive, they formed their own Jewish community, parallel to that of the established German Jewish community. As some emerged from economic dependency, they created their own social welfare groups, including the Jewish Home for the Aged (1907); Sholom Residence (1918); and the Jewish Sheltering Home for Children (1918). By the end of World War II, Minneapolis, St. Paul, and Duluth each maintained a community-wide social service agency and federated community-fundraising organization.

Outside the Twin Cities

Jewish individuals also settled outside the Twin Cities. The largest community was in Duluth, where the first permanent Jewish settlers arrived in 1869. Another decade passed before a significant number joined them. German and Central European Jews came first, followed a decade later by the Eastern Europeans. The small size of Duluth’s Jewish population helped prevent a community split.

Duluth (and its sister community, Superior, Wisc.) thrived as a commercial center after the Mesabi Iron Range opened in the 1890s. Those originally from Lithuania founded Adas Israel Congregation in 1885. Hungarian and German Jews formed a Reform synagogue, Temple Emmanuel, in 1891. Duluth’s West End, between Twelfth and Twenty-fourth Avenues (later the Central Hillside neighborhood), became home to the Eastern European group.

Jewish Duluthians were integrated into the economic and public life of the city. By the end of World War I, the Jewish population of Duluth was 2,300. It reached its height in the 1930s, with about 3,500 people. During this era, Duluth supported four synagogues, two cemeteries, charitable organizations, a Talmud Torah, three social clubs, and four lodges. By 1940, Duluth’s Jewish population had declined to 2,633.

In the 1890s, some Duluth–Superior Jews moved to the Iron Range to found retail and other businesses that served the booming region’s mining towns. Though small in numbers (1,112 at their peak in 1920), Iron Range Jews supported a vibrant Jewish community for decades. Synagogues were founded in Eveleth, Hibbing, Virginia, and Chisholm.

Small Jewish communities arose at the turn of the twentieth century in several southern Minnesota towns, including Faribault, Mankato, Albert Lea, and Austin. Only in Rochester, where the founding of the Mayo Clinic in 1905 created a need for a local congregation that could serve Jewish patients, was a synagogue (B’nai Israel), established.

The dispersion of Jews throughout the state reached a peak in the 1920s. Some four thousand were counted in 145 small towns outside of Minneapolis, St. Paul, and Duluth at the end of World War I.

Twin Cities neighborhoods

By 1910, St. Paul’s three major Jewish residential areas were home to between 4,500 and 5,000 of Minnesota’s total Jewish population of 13,000. The older, more prosperous, and largely German families lived in the downtown area; some had begun to move to the Summit Hill neighborhood.

The Eastern Europeans lived in two areas of St. Paul. One enclave was east of the state capitol and the home of the Sons of Jacob synagogue, founded by Polish Jews. The other was the 10-block-square West Side Flats. By end of 1880s, the Flats had three small Orthodox synagogues; by 1900, there were three more.

As their economic standing improved, the Eastern Europeans left the flood-prone Flats for the Selby–Dale neighborhood. From the remnants of the small Flats congregations arose Temple of Aaron (1911). The temple’s first home at Ashland Avenue and Grotto Street was two blocks from Mount Zion, which had left Lowertown in 1901 for a new home at Holly Avenue and Avon Street, just off Summit Avenue.

Three Hebrew schools were founded in St. Paul between 1880 and 1920. Each had its own constituency and neighborhood. Not until 1956 did they merge to become the Talmud Torah of St. Paul.

Early on, Neighborhood House and other settlement houses deemphasized their Jewish focus. The St. Paul Jewish community recognized the need for a Jewish community center as early as 1916. After years of fundraising, the Jewish Education Center, forerunner of the Jewish Community Center of St. Paul (JCC), opened in 1930 in the Summit Hill neighborhood.

As Minneapolis boomed and overtook St. Paul in overall population, so did the Jewish population of Minneapolis. From a small group of five hundred individuals in 1880, the community grew tenfold to approximately five thousand by 1900.

By 1915, the earliest settlers and their synagogues, Temple Israel and Adath Jeshurun, were moving west from their original downtown neighborhood toward Lyndale and Hennepin Avenues and the Chain of Lakes. Newer arrivals primarily from Romania concentrated in the Elliot Park area of South Minneapolis. The neighborhood contained a handful of synagogues and religious schools, the South Side Neighborhood House, and Jewish-owned stores. The South Side’s population remained stable until the 1940s.

The largest and best-known Jewish neighborhood was Minneapolis’ Northside. Through World War II, North Minneapolis had the largest concentration of Jews in the Upper Midwest between Chicago and Denver. Eleven Orthodox synagogues, including Kenesseth Israel, Mikro Kodesh, Tifereth B’nai Jacob, Sharai Zedeck, and Gemelus Chesed, were founded there between 1884 and 1905.

Northside children came together in one institution to learn their Jewish heritage. The Talmud Torah of Minneapolis evolved from Old World-style methods into a modern, coeducational school.

Jewish institutions continued to grow on the Northside, including the Emmanuel Cohen Center (forerunner of the Sabes Jewish Community Center, the Labor Lyceum, and Beth El Synagogue). By the 1920s, however, the immigrant-era neighborhood had become less habitable. First-generation synagogues and the homes of 126 poor Jewish families were among the structures razed between 1936 and 1938 to create the New Deal-funded Sumner Field housing development.

Community integration and the challenge of antisemitism

Efforts by community leaders coupled with sociological forces began to break down the German–Eastern European divide within the Twin Cities Jewish communities by the time of World War I. Among the efforts was the Anglo-Jewish newspaper the Jewish Weekly (forerunner of the American Jewish World), founded in 1912 by Rabbi Samuel Deinard.

The Zionist movement, which affirmed the need for a Jewish homeland in Palestine, was another mechanism for community integration. Initially, support for Zionism in the Jewish community was split along Orthodox-Reform lines. Deinard’s advocacy of Zionism in the pages of the American Jewish World and from the pulpit of his Reform congregation helped bridge the divide. By the end of World War I, virtually all Minnesota Jews supported Zionism and enthusiastically joined local and national Zionist organizations. The largest of these was the national women’s group Hadassah, which had chapters in Minneapolis, St. Paul, Duluth, and Chisholm. Generations of Minnesota youth attended the Zionist Herzl Camp, near Webster, Wisconsin, after its founding in 1946.

Antisemitism, racism, and anti-Catholicism were on the rise throughout the United States in the 1920s. The advent of the Great Depression began a decade of intense discrimination in employment, housing, and public accommodations for Minnesota’s Jewish population. The situation was most acute in Minneapolis, where Jews were almost totally excluded from civic and social organizations. In St. Paul, circumstances were less dire.

The roots of the contrast between the two cities can be found in their early histories. Jewish individuals arrived in St. Paul simultaneously with other settlers. From the outset, Jewish people were knit into the fabric of the city’s economic and civic life. In Minneapolis, they were among those groups who arrived after its major industries were established by self-sufficient New Englanders, who set the tone of exclusivity and discrimination that was perpetuated by other non-Jewish residents of Minneapolis.

Antisemitism was used as a political weapon during the 1930s. Many Jewish people supported and advised governors Floyd B. Olson and Elmer A. Benson of the Farmer Labor Party. In the 1938 governor’s race, opponents conducted an organized antisemitic campaign to defeat Benson, the incumbent.

The 1938 campaign prompted statewide anti-defamation groups to merge into the Anti-Defamation Council of Minnesota. (In 1959 the group was renamed the Jewish Community Relations Council.) Mount Sinai Hospital in Minneapolis, which opened in 1951, was a Jewish-sponsored, non-sectarian hospital founded as a direct result of Jewish doctors’ exclusion from the staffs of Twin Cities private hospitals.

Journalist Carey McWilliams’s 1946 investigation of antisemitism in the Twin Cities coined a phrase that stuck to describe Minneapolis: “the capital of antisemitism in the United States.” The unfavorable publicity that followed pressured Minneapolis officials, goaded by newly elected mayor Hubert Humphrey, to enact antidiscrimination ordinances. State measures followed.

Ordinances and laws, educational efforts, and Jewish community vigilance led to a decline in overt acts of public antisemitism. One measure of declining prejudice was Jewish success at the polls. Arthur Naftalin was elected as Minneapolis’ first Jewish mayor (1961–1969), and Lawrence Cohen was St. Paul’s first Jewish mayor (1972–1976). Private attitudes persisted, however, and individual Jews continued to experience more “discreet” expressions of antisemitism for decades. (Minnesota was not represented by a Jewish politician in the US Senate until Rudy Boschwitz’s first term, in 1978. Paul Wellstone and Al Franken followed him in 1991 and 2009, respectively.)

Upward mobility and the move to suburbia

Hard work, acculturation, and a focus on education as a means of uplift for the second generation led to a decline in blue-collar employment in the Jewish community in the postwar era. As late as 1947, almost half of Minneapolis Jewish people worked blue-collar jobs. By 1971, only 8.8% were classified as working class. Educational levels and median incomes were higher than their Hennepin County neighbors.

Some of the post-war blue-collar workers were recently arrived displaced persons (DPs) —survivors of the Nazi Holocaust who began arriving in Minnesota in the late 1940s. By 1952, 269 families, consisting of about 800 individuals, had settled in Minneapolis, 168 families (365 people) in St. Paul, 28 families in Duluth, and a smaller number in other parts of the state. Many prospered.

Like other middle class Americans, Jewish GIs and their new families aspired to move to the suburbs. The gradual lifting of restrictive housing covenants and socio-economic upward mobility meant the end, within two decades, of the self-contained, cohesive Jewish immigrant neighborhoods.

For example, as late as 1949, 60% of Minneapolis’s roughly 23,000 Jewish residents lived on the Northside. Ten years later, it was home to only 38% of Minneapolis’ Jewish population, while 28% had moved to suburban St. Louis Park.

The first congregation to make the move from Minneapolis to St. Louis Park was south Minneapolis’ B’nai Abraham, in 1956. In the early 1960s, others followed. Volatile summers of racial unrest on Plymouth Avenue in 1967 and 1968 spurred the remaining Jewish institutions in north Minneapolis to close or move. Two Northside synagogues joined with B’nai Abraham in 1972 to form a new congregation, B’nai Emet.

In the postwar era, young St. Paul families moved from the Summit Hill neighborhood to the newly developed Highland Park neighborhood. As they did, the community’s center of gravity shifted. Temple of Aaron Synagogue, the St. Paul JCC, and Talmud Torah moved to Highland Park in the mid-1950s. When the time came for the venerable Mount Zion Temple to construct a new building after World War II, however, it did not choose to move to Highland Park. Instead, the congregation erected a new facility on Summit Avenue, just blocks from its old one, in 1954.

In Duluth, upward mobility led to outmigration to larger cities and other states. The Jewish Education Center in 1951 at the corner of East Second Street and Sixteenth Avenue was built. The Center was the home to the Ida Cook Hebrew School and social activities. In 1970, Duluth’s Jewish population was 1,100 – less than half of what it was 30 years earlier. In 1973, the city’s Jewish federation recommended that all of Duluth’s Jewish groups consolidate in the Center. Temple Israel, one of two synagogues remaining in Duluth, did so. The other, Adas Israel, stayed put.

Immigration, identity, and continuity

Jewish communal and fraternal organizations saw high rates of participation in the 1950s and 1960s. Synagogue membership was widespread. As late as 1971–1972, 88 percent of Jewish adults in Minneapolis identified themselves with one of three movements: Orthodox, Conservative, or Reform.

A third phase of Jewish immigration to Minnesota began in 1971 and continued into the late 1980s. This group, from the Soviet Union, was permitted to emigrate after years of refusal. The breakup of the Soviet Union in 1989 brought more immigrants. By 2000, Jewish people from the former Soviet Union made up approximately 10% of Minnesota’s Jewish population.

At the same time the Jewish community worked to integrate Russian Jews, it also struggled to retain the American-born. Population studies conducted in 1995 and 2004 showed declining levels of synagogue membership and increasing rates of intermarriage. In 1994, the Minneapolis Jewish Federation created the Commission on Jewish Identity and Continuity to ensure that the next generation of Jewish people would maintain a commitment to the Jewish community.

Reform and Conservative synagogues strove to become more inclusive for women, intermarried couples, and, eventually, gays and lesbians. The path was not always smooth. The genesis of Shir Tikvah Congregation (1988) was a dispute at Mount Zion Temple over Associate Rabbi Stacy Offner, the first woman rabbi in Minnesota, when it became publicly known that she was gay. New non-Orthodox congregations founded in the 1980s and 1990s included Bet Shalom (Reform), Beth Jacob (Conservative), Or Emet (Humanistic), and Mayim Rabim (Reconstructionist).

The era’s trend toward liberalism and secularization was countered by new energy in the small Orthodox community. Two new St. Louis Park congregations, Bais Yisroel and Darchei Noam (2000), provided alternatives to Kenesseth Israel (Minneapolis’ oldest Orthodox synagogue) and Adath Israel (St. Paul). About 200 Minnesota families belonged to the Chabad-Lubavitcher Hasidic movement in the early 2000s. Hasidism is a branch of Orthodox Judaism whose spirituality is based in Jewish mysticism. In 2015, Chabad maintained six centers in the Twin Cities, Duluth, Rochester, and Fargo, North Dakota.

The 2004 population study of Twin Cities Jewish people portrayed a relatively stable community of 40,000. Almost half were locally born — well above the average for American cities. Significant levels of poverty coexisted with wealth, particularly among immigrants from the former Soviet Union. One finding — that 36% of Jewish people surveyed declined to identify with a movement and selected “just Jewish” — attracted much attention within the community. Twin Cities results for this answer ranked seventh highest among 50 comparison American Jewish communities.

Twenty-first-century unaffiliated Jewish people, as well as those already firmly identified, have new options beyond the synagogue. Organizations such as Jewish Community Action, Rimon, and TCJewfolk.com empower Jewish individuals to maintain their identity through social action, arts and entertainment, adult education, and spirituality. At the same time, Minnesota Jewish individuals are firmly integrated into the economic, civic, and cultural life of the state.

For more information on this topic, check out the original entry on MNopedia.

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Mirror Lab, the unassuming storefront gallery in South Minneapolis on Cedar Avenue, is the kind of place where anything can happen. From music shows to gallery exhibitions plus performance art, cinema, puppetry and more, it’s a gathering space for offbeat, non-mainstream offerings. 

This past weekend, I was delighted to encounter Munir Kahar’s surrealist paintings and drawings before he heads to Indonesia for an artist residency. Kahar has been returning more often to his home country of late, first in 2019 for the first time since he moved to the United States in 2000, and again for 18 months beginning in 2022. Here in Minnesota, his creativity spans a number of spheres, from curating his “Beyond Wednesdays” experimental performance and music series to his work with Barebones, projects with the Art Shanty Projects, music performances and more. 

Mysterious creatures from the land and sea populate Kahar’s imaginative worlds, as do marvelous plants, floating eyeballs, fantastical architecture and forms that make a kind of dream sense. Lovingly deliberate in his mark-making, Kahar invites the viewer into a higher plane of existence, perhaps, or at least a place where things look quite strange and extraordinary. 

You can see the work through Jan. 25 at Mirror Lab, 3400 Cedar Ave. S., Mpls. (free). More information here.

After that, watch out for the next cool thing at Mirror Lab, “Tristan Tzara Was My Best Friend in Junior High” — an immersive dinner party/ritual designed by the avant garde poet Tristan Tzara. It was written by Savannah Reich, who is based in West Philadelphia but has ties here in the Twin Cities, in collaboration with Jon Cole and Lauren Anderson.

The original iteration of the show was developed at the former Bedlam Theater and now comes to life re-envisioned with a slightly different title. Reich has a sly sense of humor in her writing, finding the magic in both the mundane and the preposterous. Her frequent collaborator Jon Cole, one of Twin Cities’ most understated comic actors, performs with Sulia Altenberg in the show.

Thursday, Jan. 30, at 7 p.m. with light meal ($25) and Friday, Jan. 31, at 7:30 p.m. with full meal ($40) at Mirror Lab, plus two sold-out performances. 3400 Cedar Ave. S., Mpls. More information here.

Sheila Regan

Sheila Regan is a Twin Cities-based arts journalist. She writes MinnPost’s twice-weekly Artscape column. She can be reached at sregan@minnpost.com.

The post Step into the Mirror Lab with artists Munir Kahar and Savannah Reich appeared first on MinnPost.

In “Dearest Earth, Darkest Sky” at Dreamsong Gallery, artist David Goldes gives us stark, harrowing landscapes that seem like they could be views of the apocalypse if they weren’t drawn from the horrors of the world today. 

Layering molding paste, acrylic and graphite onto paper, Goldes’ sculptural mixed media works evoke images we see on the news of wars around the world and speak to the cavalcade of global pandemics, fascism and environmental disaster we face. This is work that leans into the bleak state of things. 

I stopped into the exhibit on a blistery cold night last Friday. It was the weekend before the inauguration, and Israel had just agreed to a ceasefire in Gaza. I felt a sense of looming change in the air. 

In one piece, “Telling Surfaces” (2024), Goldes uses textured scratch marks to create the earth with giant craters opening up in two places. The sky above is foreboding with splotchy, misty black clouds. Goldes drew on images of Gaza’s landscape after an Israeli bombing attack.“I thought it was time to move away from abstraction,” he told me. “I mean, there’s so much in the world.” 

Goldes’ previous solo show at Dreamsong featured his graphite drawings through which he ran electrical currents, creating singe marks. “Dearest Earth, Darkest Sky” features two drawings with burnt edges of that earlier body of work, but for the most part the show veers into an entirely new direction. “I’m not a painter,” Goldes told me. “I’m not coming from painting. So this was a big surprise for me, and it was exciting to try.”

Starting with a piece of paper, Goldes uses a spatula to layer on molding paste and acrylic, and eventually adds graphite to the surface. 

I’ve often wondered when an artist decides when it’s time to move on from a particular set of techniques to something new. He told me that in this case for him, the beginnings of the change were when he was in Paris in 2023 and went to see a retrospective of Mark Rothko paintings at the Fondation Louis Vuitton. He was struck by the last paintings in particular, in a room that featured black and white paintings Rothko created at the end of his life before his death by suicide. To Goldes, the paintings looked like landscapes. 

In “Earth Memory” (2024), a plume erupts from the ground, spewing jaggedy lines into the gray sky. It’s somewhat more ambiguous than the bomb site pieces. The image could be an explosion, but it also could be oil shooting out of the earth.

Other paintings are even more elusive in their meaning. “From Above” features a floating object that looks like it could be the shape of a tooth. Goldes told me people who visited the gallery thought it looked like anything from a meteor to a tooth, or perhaps a life form from another place. Whatever the thing is, it’s quite ominous, floating in wait in the air. 

I think my favorite piece in the show is one of the two that used Goldes’ electrical current technique. In “From Sky to Earth” (2024), Goldes paints a landscape that is ripped right through the paper with a burned out chasm. This portal could go anywhere- perhaps to some hellish place, or maybe an alternate reality that doesn’t look quite so stark. I’d like to go there if I could.

“Dearest Earth, Darkest Sky” runs through March 1 at Dreamsong Gallery, 1237 4th St. NE, Mpls. Regular hours are Wed.-Sat., 12-5 p.m. (free). More information here.

Sheila Regan

Sheila Regan is a Twin Cities-based arts journalist. She writes MinnPost’s twice-weekly Artscape column. She can be reached at sregan@minnpost.com.

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Mary Prescott’s formal training was strictly as a classical pianist, but somewhere along the way, her practice became much more expansive than that one particular form. Skilled in piano improvisation and experimentation, Prescott’s art form has grown to incorporate movement, video work, and writing. She used all of those forms for a piece she performed at Public Functionary in 2023 called “Tida,” creating an immersive, dreamlike space of music, movement and projections. Last February, Prescott held her audience at Icehouse rapt for her wistfully erratic impromptu pieces. 

Based in New York and Minnesota, the Thai-American artist will be returning to Public Functionary on Jan. 30 for a sold-out event that’s a part of The Great Northern, called “Mother Tongue.” It’s a screening of a short documentary the artist created that explores cultural narratives around food, followed by a conversation and culinary samples. Before that, she’s performing “Lucent Ground” on Friday, Jan. 24 at Berlin, weaving folklore and music with collaborator Kengchakaj. For “Lucent Ground,” Prescott’s work in voice, piano, percussion, found sounds and video comes together with Kengchakaj’s electronic processing, and Thai-tuned Moog synthesizer. 

Prescott’s interdisciplinary impulses started early. She never trained as a dancer, but always wanted to, until she was 14 and was told she was too old to train in ballet. But she did write outside of music, and took writing classes during college. “I think the rigidity of the classical music world made me want to rebel, I guess you could say,” she told me in an interview.

During her college years, earning piano performance degrees from the University of Minnesota – Twin Cities, and Manhattan School of Music, Prescott began realizing a life as a classical pianist wasn’t exactly the right path. “Everybody’s playing the same music, and they’re all judging each other on how well or not well they play that same music,” she said. “It’s full of judgment, and I was kind of not interested in that anymore.” 

A new path revealed itself after Prescott founded a summer music program in Vermont with her friend Akiko Sasaki. Through the experience, Prescott got to know Sasaki’s husband, jazz pianist and composer Jesse Stacken, who grew up in Hopkins. “Jesse and I were always talking about music, and he had an improvisation a day project, and I was inspired by that,” she said. 

She decided to do an improvisation a day project herself, except from the perspective as a classical, rather than a jazz pianist. “I’m gonna just forget everything that I know as best as I can, and I’m gonna try to just let go of my preconceptions about what good is and then get into it that way,” she said. 

Every day, Prescott recorded herself improvising, and posted it online. “Doing that project made me think so differently about what I had done with my whole life and my whole creative process, and just what music was or could be,” she said. 

Eventually, Prescott realized she wanted to move away from classical music altogether, including her teaching work. She began performing improvised piano, and then she was awarded a residency at Arts, Letters & Numbers in upstate New York where instead of devoting her time to music, she began to make videos, and taught herself video editing using Final Cut Pro. She’s found ways to bring dance into her work as well, without formal training. 

“I think being a musician helps, because there’s already a natural rhythm in the body,” she said. Piano playing is a kind of choreography of the hands, with detailed, micro movements, she reasoned. “Maybe it’s just a translation to the larger body.” 

For her performance this week, Prescott is bringing New York-based Thai musician Kengchakaj for a one-night show. The two performed “Lucent Ground” a year ago in New York, and are giving it another go. “I just really wanted to bring Kengchakaj here,” Prescott said. 

Then on January 30, Prescott is featured in the Great Northern Festival, which opens this weekend. The festival takes place over 10 days and is chock full of performances, dining pop-ups, dialogues around issues like climate change and outdoor activities, including a sauna village. 

Prescott’s event, “Mother Tongue,” is a kind of precursor to a large-scale performance piece coming to the festival in 2026, “Ancestral Table.” The future work will explore the connections between climate, migration, and cultural legacy through Thai family recipes, and will feature performance and video as well as a shared family meal. 

This year, “Mother Tongue,” brought together a number of artists and community leaders who shared dishes from their cultural inheritance with each other last fall. Prescott is cooking Thai dishes for the project, with help from her mother. “She is not going to be on stage, but she is gonna be cooking with me to prepare the food,” she said.

In September, Prescott invited 5 guests to join her for a special dinner. Among them were dancer/choreographer José Luis,  theater and visual artist Ifrah Mansour, museum leader Kate Beane, writer Kao Kalia Yang, and visual artist Eyenga Bokamba. Each person brought a dish that represented their cultural heritage, and told a story about it. “There’s so many stories that are told through food,” Prescott said. 

At the dinner, Mansour told a story about her refugee Somali family, and how they packed the press that made canjeero (a kind of Somali pancake) first and foremost. Beane made an indigenized version of the Minnesota classic tater tot hot dish with wild rice and buffalo, Bokamba made a Congolese dish made with chicken, tomato and spinach over rice, while Luis made shredded chicken on tostadas. Yang made Hmong egg rolls, and Prescott made curry puffs, her mom’s specialty. 

“Everybody who came to this meal was so sweet and so generous with their story and their food and about sharing and tasting and asking questions,” Prescott said. She documented the dinner, and will be screening the film followed by a discussion with some of the participants.  

Prescott’s performance at Berlin takes place Friday, Jan. 24 at 8 p.m. at Berlin, 204 North First St., Mpls. ($15-$25). More information here. While “Mother Tongue” is sold out, you can peruse the other happenings as part of the Great Northern here. Among the events are a performance by two-spirit singer and composer Jeremy Dutcher called “Motewolonuwok” on Friday Jan. 24 at 7 p.m., and a screening of “The Last of the Sea Women,” a documentary about the haenyeo divers of South Korea’s Jeju Island who, in their 60s, 70s, and 80s, are doing their part to protect the ocean floor. It screens Saturday, Feb. 1 at 7 p.m. at The Main Cinema, 115 SE Main St., Mpls. ($15). More information here.

Editor’s note: An earlier edition of this article indicated Prescott’s Jan. 30 show is at the Icehouse. It is at the Public Functionary.

Sheila Regan

Sheila Regan is a Twin Cities-based arts journalist. She writes MinnPost’s twice-weekly Artscape column. She can be reached at sregan@minnpost.com.

The post With ‘Mother Tongue,’ artist Mary Prescott will give her audience a taste of cultural narratives about food appeared first on MinnPost.

Anna Arnold Hedgeman was born in 1899 in Marshalltown, Iowa. Her family later moved to Anoka, where they were the only African American family. Hedgeman’s father stressed religion, education, and hard work.

In 1918, Hedgeman graduated from high school and was the first African American to attend Hamline University. In 1922, she was the first African American to graduate from Hamline. In college, she attended a lecture by W. E. B. Du Bois and was inspired to be a teacher. However, after graduation, Hedgeman was unable to find a teaching job in St. Paul public schools because she was black. She accepted a teaching position at a historically black school: Rust College in Holly Springs, Mississippi.

Hedgeman’s experience in the South was a rude awakening to racism. Her first encounter with the South’s Jim Crow segregation laws occurred on her train ride to Mississippi. From St. Paul to Chicago, Hedgeman rode in the dining car, which was open to blacks and whites. However, the conductor told her that when the train reached Cairo, Illinois, she had to sit in the “colored” car behind the train’s engine, which was dirty and overcrowded, and she was banned from the dining car.

Hedgeman taught at Rust College for two years. Upon her return to Minnesota, she was still unable to find a teaching job because of discrimination, so she changed careers. In 1924, Hedgeman became an executive director of the black branch of the YWCA in Springfield, Ohio. The Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA) at the time maintained segregated facilities for blacks and whites. From 1924 to 1938, Hedgeman worked in several positions with the YWCA in Ohio, New Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania. In 1933, she married Merritt A. Hedgeman, an opera and folk musician.

In 1944, Hedgeman was appointed executive director of the National Council for a Permanent Fair Employment Practices Committee (FEPC), where she led the fight against employment discrimination and lobbied for a permanent FEPC agency. From 1954 to 1958, she served in the cabinet of New York Mayor Robert F. Wagner, Jr., where she was the first black woman to hold such a position. Hedgeman left after becoming frustrated with gender discrimination and the mayor’s inaction on progressive housing policies. In 1959, she was an associate editor and columnist for the New York Age newspaper. In 1960, she unsuccessfully ran for congress, and in 1965 for city council president (both in New York City).

In 1963, A. Philip Randolph, Dr. Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., and Bayard Rustin organized the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. The planning committee consisted of the “Big Six” — leaders from civil rights organizations, which included King, Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC); Randolph, Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters; Roy Wilkins, National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP); James Farmer, Congress of Racial Equality (CORE); John Lewis, Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC); and Whitney Young, Urban League.

Hedgeman was the only woman on the committee. She urged the men to include women in the planning, but they ignored her. Women were also not included as speakers at the march, but instead, Randolph planned to say a few words about women activists. Hedgeman was furious, so at the next meeting, she read a statement to the men:

“In light of the role of the Negro women in the struggle for freedom and especially in light of the extra burden they have carried because of the castration of the Negro man in this culture, it is incredible that no woman should appear as a speaker at the historic March on Washington Meeting at the Lincoln Memorial.”

Hedgeman suggested Myrlie Evers or Diane Nash as speakers. The committee selected Evers, but she was stuck in traffic, so Daisy Bates spoke. Despite these struggles, the march was a success, and Hedgeman organized 40,000 people from the National Council of Churches to participate.

Hedgeman was a founding member of the National Organization for Women (NOW) in 1966. She also published two memoirs and continued advocating for African Americans and women until the mid-1980s when her health declined.

Hedgeman died at age ninety in 1990 in New York. Hamline University dedicated The Hedgeman Center for Student Diversity Initiatives and Programs in her honor.

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