Lake Street Arts!
Since 2015 Pangea World Theater's Lake Street Arts! (LSA!) program has worked to deepen the practice of placekeeping through the arts. Offering workshops, large scale public art, story circles and ensemble based performances Lake Street Arts! (LSA!) tends to the communities we arise from. LSA! utilizes the Arts to create visions for a more just, joyful and livable Minneapolis and our shared Earth to emerge.
Let's dream together.
Featured Video: Rebecca Nichloson from Life Born of Fire 2022, Minneapolis Song for George Floyd
CURRENT AND PAST PROGRAMS AND PROJECTS
Milkweed Maps Yard Sign Project is a simple way to connect all the small acts we can take to tend to our shared Earth. Designed by the Dakota artist Marlena Myles. This work of art yard sign encourages Milkweed and pollinator friendly planting for the Monarch Butterfly and letting the leaves and plants winter over to support Fireflies, Bumblebees and more. Each small act we take stitches together a map of renewal and resilience for all of us. Add to this map. Get a yard sign at one of Pangea's events or contact Pangea to arrange picking one up. Take a picture of the sign in your yard or the balcony of your apartment where you have a potted flower, your community space or wherever you are tending to the Earth.
Poetry in the Windows is a Placekeeping project between poets and local businesses and organizations. Pangea and guest curators invite poets to write a piece that speaks to the moment we are in. Then the poems are installed in the windows of local businesses and organizations along Lake Street from Bde Maka Ska to the HaHa Wakpa (Mississippi River). Poetry in the Windows makes space for what is missing, stolen and unimagined. It offers dreams for the transformation and healing of our streets, communities and shared Earth. Each poem installed has a QR code to see where all the poems live and to hear the poets read their work. In three cycles of Poetry in the Windows Pangea has installed fifty-five poems. This project connects poets, independent businesses, and the public together in mutual support.
Going to Seed is a multi-year collaboration with Dakota writer and educator Diane Wilson The Indigenous People’s Task Force — Ikidowin Youth Theater Ensemble, Mudluk Pottery, and Longfellow Rising and the Santa Fe based artist, Chrissie Orr. Going to Seed explores grief and feelings of powerlessness in the face of climate change and the intractable systems that keep solutions at bay. Going to Seed shifts the narrative about where we are coming from, where we are now and importantly where we are going. Using theater, story circles, and a large-scale public art projects around restoring Milkweed and Pollinator plants to our yards and green spaces, Going to Seed supports a collective sense of hope not founded in false optimism but grounded in the power of our shared Earth, celebration, connection and each other.
The Seeding Change Institute is a new initiative by Pangea World Theater and funded by The Jerome Foundation to create a generative, supportive institute for artists to strengthen their skills and critical approach to making socially engaged Art projects and work in any genre. The Seeding Change Institute is developed for artists by artists and those working in the arts. The Seeding Change Institute seeks to connect artists to a larger community, to a deeper understanding of the role of the artist in social transformation and to each other. Now in it's third year the institute has twenty-six cohort alumni.
It Takes a Hive a collaboration between Pangea World Theater’s Lake Street Arts! and Mudluk Studios. It Takes A Hive — is a series of workshops exploring what it means to tend to ourselves, our communities and our shared earth. Everyone that attends the workshops learns basic collage or clay techniques and are invited to share thoughts on the prompt. Each participant will make a honeycomb-shaped collage piece or clay tile about what that TENDING means to them.The finished honeycombs will become part of a large scale hive installation at Pangea World Theater new building in 2027-2028. Once the HIVE is installed at Pangea, everyone will be able to come find their artwork in the large hive and witness how your part of tending to yourself and the world fits together with others.
You Are Here! A new map of Lake Street Drawn from a series of collage workshops and writing prompts You Are Here! A new Map of Lake Street was created by collaborator Keegan Xavi, with words from a poem by Poetry in the Windows writer Rush Merchant and design by stowe silver. The map celebrates our shared Earth & Sky and was part of a year of free community art workshops and performances on and about Lake Street, in Minneapolis 2022-2023. Our workshop artists were: Venus De Mars, Anthony Ceballos, Dejajolle, Sarah M. Greer, Sayge Carroll and Keegan Xavi. A poster of the map was made and 500 copies were distributed to the public.
WE NEED EACH OTHER The Lake Street Arts! Story Circle Archive is an edited collection of poems, images, visual art and stories gathered from over thirty story circles and interviews held between 2020-2021 in the Twin Cities about people's experiences with the Covid-19 and the Uprising after the murder of George Floyd by the Minneapolis police department. The archive is a 141 pages and might take a moment to load on your computer. There is also a print version and Pangea has distributed over 700 copies of this archive to the public.
Seed Syllables was a collaboration between Chrissie Orr and Pangea's Co-Artistic Director Meena Natarajan. Commissioned by the Academy for the Love of Learning in Santa Fe where Orr is a fellow. Orr and Natarajan engaged in conversations with 32 artists/activists/cultural workers and thinkers across the U.S. and Canada through zoom. Then in residency in both Santa Fe and Minneapolis they created two public rituals from poems created out of the conversations and a series of paintings by Orr. This major work has become a living archive and Orr and Natarajan are currently conceiving of another project on the Rights of Nature that will build on the connections and power of Seed Syllables.
Life Born of Fire was an ensemble created ritual performance with music, dance, songs, poems, film and stories woven from many story circles and artists own experiences surviving Covid-19 and the Uprising after George Floyd. The first version was performed outside in a vacant lot, two buildings away from the 3rd Precinct, Minneapolis, August 2022. The second version happened at The Southern Theater in Minneapolis August 2023.
Lake Street Story Circles Project 2019-2020 brought a cohort of ten artists together to hold Story Circles and create new performance work about life, spirit, resistance, politics, vision, relationships, history, business, survival and joy. Grounded on Lake Street, grounded in Minneapolis, grounded in story, in place and each other. The sound round of this program happened during Covid and the Uprising and produced a unique archive of videos that captured in real time life on Lake Street and in the Twin Cities in the summer of 2020.
The Transition Stage to Metamorphosis was a multi-year 2021-2023 large scale public arts project directly across from the 3rd precinct police station where the police officer that murdered George Floyd was from. The Transition Stage to Metamorphosis was a collaboration with Angela Two Stars a public artist, curator and director of All My Relations Arts, a project of the Native American Community Development Institute in Minneapolis, MN. Angela is an enrolled member of the Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate. The project invited community members to write laments and hopes for Lake Street. These were woven into a large chrysalis sculpture and then turned into a stage covered in Butterflies. A place for performance and community gatherings. It was featured as part of Public Arts St. Paul's Wakpa Triennial Art Festival.
The Colors of Lake Street Hana Bibliowicz worked with apprentices Scarlett Lopez and Elizabeth Santana to create the pillar. Netsanet Negussie, Lula Saleh, and many others to create the interactive ceramic sculpture that combines visual arts, ethnography, performance, and social justice. In 2023 Colors of Lake Street was dedicated in it's permanent home in Midtown Global Market on Lake Street in Minneapolis.
"This piece is about the skin, the frontier between the outer and inner world, as well as the landing space of all oppression. It enhances humanitarian values and the importance of the individual as well as the exquisite value of the arts and the crafts in the generation of a better tomorrow.” - Hana Bibliowicz
IN DEVELOPMENT
Liberating Spaces including Artist Gatherings and a National Symposium in 2027
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Spirit Roads: An Augmented Reality Journey Through Dakota Homelands
This project will reconnect the Longfellow neighborhood of Minneapolis with the Dakota homelands beneath its streets.Dakota artist Marlena Myles (Spirit Lake Dakota / Mohegan / Muscoge) will be the lead artist.
WATCH THIS SPACE!
It is my honor to curate Lake Street Arts! With the ongoing attacks against immigrants and Indigenous communities, the lack of real change addressing police violence in Minneapolis and across the country, the ongoing systems of anti-Blackness and misogyny and war and greed engulfing the world and trying to steal the future…Art that nurtures the epic, gorgeous and messy stories of who we are remains deeply necessary for our survival.
Love in these Tender and Dangerous Times,
Ellen Marie Hinchcliffe
Lake Street Arts! Curator
This activity is made possible by the voters of Minnesota through a grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board, thanks to a legislative appropriation from the arts and cultural heritage fund.
Pangea is so thankful for the funders of Lake Street Arts!
