by Shubhanjana Das, Sahan Journal

This story comes to you from Sahan Journal through a partnership with MPR News. Use the audio player above to listen to a conversation she had with MPR News host Nina Moini on Minnesota Now.

Languages are portals to other countries and communities. They reveal more than how people speak — they’re a window into history, geography, tradition and sometimes forgotten folklore.

In Minnesota, you don’t have to travel far to come across a language that you may not have heard — or even heard about.

While it may come as no surprise that Minnesota’s top three languages, after English, are Spanish, Hmong and Somali, several rarer languages and dialects are also spoken here.

Every four years, the U.S. Census Bureau releases state-specific language data, which highlights languages spoken at home. Last year, Sahan Journal reported on how this linguistic diversity reflects a changing state. But beyond numbers, the data also reflect Minnesotans’ efforts to preserve some languages spoken by a small group.

We profiled the Minnesota speakers of six rare languages who, in their own ways, are preserving those tongues for the next generation — and by doing so, also keeping alive their cultures, histories and traditions.

Zakaria Amin, Kurdish language teacher at Moorhead High School

In his hometown of Erbil, in the Kurdistan region of Iraq, Zakaria Amin worked as a translator for the U.S. Army after the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq. That work helped the English-language graduate further sharpen his English-speaking skills. Now a resident of Moorhead, in western Minnesota, Amin works to bolster Kurdish, which is spoken by just over 300 people in Minnesota, according to 2013 U.S. Census language data.

Amin teaches the language to Kurdish American children as part of Moorhead High School’s English Learner program. He is also a project manager with the Kurdish American Development Organization.

“Language is not only the speaking part,” Amin said. “Language carries many things — norms, ethics, traditions, culture, identity.”

Kurds, who live in parts of Iraq, Iran, Turkey and Syria, are one of the world’s largest ethnic minority groups without a state of their own. That makes it all the more important to speak and preserve the language, Amin said.

He said his goal in teaching the language is to better connect Kurdish families, whose elders speak Kurdish while their younger relatives born in America often don’t. “They understand each other, but they are not speaking the same language,” he said.

For Amin, the language is infused with memories of Erbil, where he was born. “Every single corner of the city is part of my memory,” he said. “This cannot be detached from me and from my personality and identity. So for me, practicing language is a must. Now I have to teach people how to do that.”

Amin, who is a father, insists on speaking Kurdish at home with his family and English when out in public. “There are certain people who are probably getting aggravated if they see other people are speaking different languages,” he said. “I know that English is not the only language in America by law, but I still care about other people’s feelings, and we try to speak English as much as we can outside.”

Amina Baha, refugee services director, SEWA-AIFW

When Amina Baha was in high school, she won a presidential award. She was eager to share the news with her parents, who are from Afghanistan but immigrated to America from Pakistan.

She explained to her father, in English, the importance of the award. But he had no reaction. “I got frustrated, and I was upset,” she said.

Baha repeated the news, but still got no response from her father. Then, after her mother prodded her, she realized why. “I had to switch gears, and when I told him in Pashto, he got up and gave me a hug, and said he was very proud of me, and he knew that I could do it,” she said.

Baha’s relationship with languages and literature has been shaped by her father, who, like Baha, speaks Urdu, Farsi, and Pashto, along with English. She is one of about 115 people in Minnesota who speak Pashto, an official language in Afghanistan spoken by the Pashtun people.

“He made sure that I spoke Pashto as well as Farsi at home,” she said. “He would not talk to me or respond unless I spoke in one of those languages. It was really frustrating as a child to go through that, but as I got older, I realized the importance of knowing other languages, especially such rare languages.

“There’s a saying in Pashto that, the more languages you know, that’s how many people you can communicate with,” she said. “I came to appreciate what he was trying to do, or what he did, and how much of an impact that has on my life today.”

As refugee services director at SEWA-AIFW (“sewa” is a Hindi word meaning “to serve,” while AIFW stands for Asian Indian Family Wellness), Baha uses her language skills to reach the people she works with. “It broadens my world and my understanding and just awareness of how close we are,” she said.

Baha described Pashto as “very poetic,” “expressive” and “colorful.” In Pashtun culture, people often express their emotions through poetic, rhyming couplets called “landay,” spoken and sung by women at weddings. Pashtun people also sing “tappay” at weddings as well as in times of grief. “I don’t think something like that exists in any other culture,” she said.

For Baha, it is important that her son and daughter speak Pashto and Urdu — her husband is from Pakistan. Baha said she notices in her work with South Asian immigrant families that parents often push their children to learn English first and put their native language second.

“I wish more people would focus on the preservation of language, regardless of what language you speak,” she said.

Beatrice Jua Wisseh Hinneh, clinical supervisor and Liberian language teacher

In 1989, Beatrice Jua Wisseh Hinneh traveled from Liberia to California to seek medical treatment for her daughter, who had a heart condition. She then visited her sister and a friend in Rhode Island, planning to return soon to her family in Monrovia, the Liberian capital. Except, she couldn’t.

A war, one later known as the First Liberian Civil War, tore through the country, and Hinneh found herself stranded in America with her sick daughter. The war lasted 14 years, five years into which Hinneh found a home in Minnesota’s Brooklyn Park where she could “start life all over again.”

“It was heartbreaking,” Hinneh said. “I left my youngest daughter [in Liberia]. My grandmother died. My sister died in the war. I have a lot of family members that died in the war.”

Hinneh comes from the Kru tribe of Grand Kru County in southwest Liberia. “They are tough-headed, very resistive to torture, and to hardship,” Hinneh said.

In Minnesota, where she joined Kru associations and met other immigrants from the region, speaking the Kru dialect helped her feel more at home.

The Kru tribespeople’s dialect is part of the Niger-Congo language family. Traditionally seafarers, hunters and warriors, Kru men were hired by U.S. and European navies to patrol for illegal slave ships after the trans-Atlantic slave trade was outlawed.

In Liberia, a former American colony whose official language is English, Hinneh spoke Kru at home and English in school. “When the settlers came to Liberia, our Indigenous languages, like Kru, the Pele, the Basa, were played down,” she said. “You had to speak English to belong.”

Hinneh, who now teaches Kru to adults and children via Zoom classes, said it was essential for her people to know their tribal dialect in Liberia — sometimes for the sake of their lives.

“During the war, they [the rebels] were looking for people from certain tribes to execute,” she said. “And so they would ask you, ‘What tribe are you?’ And they will ask you to speak the dialect, and if you couldn’t speak the dialect, then they knew you were lying. And so a lot of people lost their lives. So you use language to communicate for your life.”

For Hinneh, it is important that her children learn the language, know “where they come from.”

“It gives you a sense of belonging — that I’m a Kru woman,” she said. “I’ve always been a Kru spirit. Whether alone or with people, I’ve always had it in myself.”

Lamar Renville, Dakota language teacher at Bdote Learning Center, descendant of Sisseton-Wahpeton Oyate

Growing up in Montana, Lamar Renville had no contact with their Dakota identity. They were one of only two Native students in their school, didn’t know their father — who was Dakota — and didn’t even know which tribe they were from.

While supporting the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020 and reading Black authors, they discovered how systemic racism affected both Black and Indigenous people.

“As a Dakota person, my entire story had been erased, and that was very much a part of what happens with systemic erasure of Native Americans in the United States and Canada,” said Renville, who until recently was unhoused. “It became very apparent that my whole adult life being homeless is directly tied up with all of that.”

Eager to learn more, they delved deeper into their Dakota identity, starting with learning the language, which is spoken by about 750 people in Minnesota. “I’ve reoriented my entire life around it,” said Renville, who now teaches the language to Dakota and Lakota students at the Bdote Learning Center in Minneapolis. Renville is one of just five licensed Dakota language teachers in Minnesota.

Renville’s great-great-great-grandfather, Gabriel Renville, worked with missionaries to create the written form of the Dakota language. Despite that connection, Renville is the first family member in three generations to speak the language after learning it for three years and teaching at the center for two years.

“I’m really grateful for my position in the school, because during the school year, I get the opportunity to speak Dakota every day,” they said.

For Renville, teaching has become a way of remedying the erasure of their own identity in their school years in Montana. “I was the problem because I had brown skin, and so I was treated differently,” they said. “I personally get to undo that for these kids by being a different influence and knowing how it could impact them to not have that in their life. And this is all through the language.”

Access to the language came with extensive research on the tumultuous history of the Dakota people in Minnesota, Renville said. The Dakota consider Minnesota their ancestral home, with origins linked to Bdote in present-day Fort Snelling. The devastating U.S.-Dakota War in 1862 was followed by the hanging of 38 Dakota men in Mankato, the largest mass execution in U.S. history, and the forced removal of most Dakota people from Minnesota.

But the Dakota language is embedded in Minnesota, Renville said. “Minnesota itself is ‘mini shota,’” they said. “‘Mini’ is water and “shota” means smoky. And I’ve been told that it’s the reflection of the clouds in the sky. Everywhere you go in Minnesota, there’s place names that are in the language. And so, it’s really the language of the land here.”

For Renville, the language has been a portal not just to history but also to community. They have reconnected with their family and reservation Dakota communities. They are also creating TikTok videos in the Dakota language to connect with young people. “The language has been a really strong gateway to making connections with other Dakota people and feeling like I’m a part of a community, and it’s a really hard community, because there’s a lot of trauma,” Renville said.

Renville also teaches the language to their 8-year-old daughter, who lives in Florida. “I give my daughter a weekly allowance to learn Dakota, because there’s not really any incentive to speak it in Florida,” they said.

A poet and an author, Renville’s dream is to make Dakota a mainstream language through online classes, TikTok and YouTube videos — with the goal of not only reaching Dakota children, but also their parents. “My goal moving forward as an artist is to incorporate the language into everything,” they said.

Kalsang Dickey, nursing assistant and Tibetan language teacher

Kalsang Dickey’s way of serving Tibet from Minnesota is by preserving the Tibetan language. Dickey, 52, a nursing assistant, has been teaching Tibetan to kids from kindergarten to eighth grade at the Tibetan American Foundation of Minnesota for 16 years.

Growing up in Lhasa, the Tibetan capital, Dickey didn’t realize until she was in her teens that Tibet isn’t synonymous with China, which took it over in 1950.

The Tibet she was born and grew up in had its own culture, language and history, but life under Chinese rule was full of restrictions and forced acceptance of a different culture. “My memory of Lhasa is very beautiful, and some are very sad,” she said. “The beautiful part is that my family is still there, childhood friends and my schoolmates. The sadness is that we lost the country. There’s no freedom of speech, no freedom of religion.”

In Tibet, she spoke Ütsang, the most popular Tibetan language dialect, at home, and Mandarin in public. She learned some Hindi when she moved to India at the age of 21 “to find freedom for myself,” and began learning English when she came to Minnesota in 1997.

“When I came to Minnesota, nobody knew Tibetans,” she said. “When I said Tibetan, they always called me Japanese. Even my lawyer didn’t know where Tibet is. He thought it was in India.”

As of 2013, the U.S. Census reported just under 1,300 Tibetan speakers in Minnesota.

In her early years in Minnesota, Dickey wrote letters to her family in Tibet because phone calls were too expensive. She wrote in Tibetan to her mother and in Mandarin to her siblings. Dickey said it was her way of making sure she didn’t forget either of those languages.

But as phone calls became more accessible, she started to lose touch with the Tibetan language. “Sometimes, when I tried to write something, I felt like, ‘How should I write this?’” she said.

Dickey took her children to the Tibetan school before she was asked to join as a teacher. “Every time my daughter spoke Lhasa dialect very nicely, the older teachers were really happy with that,” she said. “So when I dropped her off at school, one of our principals always asked me to join the school to teach Tibetan. But I didn’t have the confidence to go teach the kids.”

That principal eventually persuaded Dickey, saying, “‘If you want to serve the Tibetan government, and the Dalai Lama, this is how you can.”

“That’s how he convinced me,” she said. “Then I was like, I think I can do that. So I accepted that teacher position.”

Her resolve was further strengthened in 2016, when she visited Tibet for the first time since moving to Minnesota. “I noticed lots of Tibetan kids speaking Chinese rather than Tibetan,” she said. “Just like here, where some parents only speak English at home with kids, over there, parents were speaking only Chinese at home. It’s like erasing all the culture from them, kind of brainwashing.”

Dickey, a cancer patient, took a break from teaching when she was ill, but soon returned to it. “This is my life’s joyful work,” she said. “My family wanted me to rest. I said, ‘I don’t want to leave; I want to do this continually.’”

An admittedly “strict teacher,” Dickey said she worries “the language will vanish in 30 to 40 years” and wants to keep pushing students and their parents to speak it.

“Languages are our roots, the cultures, heritage, everything is our roots,” she said. “If we don’t have languages, culture, then, just like a tree, if you don’t have the roots, then the tree is gonna die.

“I can’t do too much, but this is one of the biggest things, [helping keep] our culture alive.”

Joffre Iban Gonzales Yupangui, Kichwa speaker

The province of Cañar, located in southern Ecuador between the western and central Andes ranges, is home to the Cañari, an Indigenous group with roots in pre-Incan civilizations. That’s where Joffre Iban Gonzales Yupangui was born before his family moved to Minnesota three years ago.

Joffre, now 16, was brought up around the folklore, spiritual and cultural traditions, and Kichwa language of his people. He has always spoken Kichwa and Spanish. Now a student at Lincoln International High School in Minneapolis, Joffre seeks to share his language and culture.

“I dedicate myself to promoting the language, teaching, and also preserving my native culture and trying to preserve other cultures that are currently being persecuted and silenced by the government in Ecuador,” he said in Spanish through a translator.

Speaking their Indigenous language came at a price for his parents, Maria Petrona Yupangui Simbaña and Carlos Fernando Gonzales Grand. “[For] the landowners, especially in the 1970s and ’80s, for the mestizos [mixed-race people of Spanish/Portuguese and Indigenous descent], speaking in Kichwa was like a sin,” Yupangui Simbaña said, also in Spanish and through a translator. “For speaking Kichwa they would mistreat us, beat us, and not pay us for our work.”

Even in Minnesota, she said, Spanish-speaking Ecuadoreans ridicule their language and urge them to speak only in Spanish.

But she passed on her native language and the resolve to preserve it to Joffre. “From my perspective as a mother, I’ve communicated in both languages [Kichwa and Spanish],” she said. “It’s our ancestral language, our own mother tongue, Kichwa. So we have to value it. It’s not because we like it or because we want to, but because it shows who we are, where we come from, what roots we have, what blood flows in our veins.”

Joffre credited his mother with teaching him the language, and for instilling the pride that now drives his advocacy.

While his language is embraced among his teachers and school peers, Joffre sees more reluctance to accept Kichwa among Ecuadoreans in Minnesota from his parents’ generation. He said the trauma of past exploitation continues to shape how families experience the present, creating a lasting sense of fear rooted in what earlier generations — including his own parents — endured under systems of forced or exploited labor.

But with the younger generation, “I do see a great interest in learning, not only about the culture, but also about the history,” Joffre said. “Because history is what keeps us alive.”

His mother agreed. “History touches the heart of knowing, to reopen the history book and see what happened, now, why would you lose it? It’s a history or culture where you open the book and gain strength — where I come from, who I am, and how I am, and where I need to go.”

Jordanne Le Fae reserved a spot near her bicep for a tattoo of what has become a new Minnesota symbol: the Rebel Loon.

The round graphic of the state bird with wings outstretched above has become synonymous with Minnesotan's resilience during the immigration enforcement surge. It didn’t take long for the arts world to adapt it into anything imaginable, including tattoos.

As a tattoo artist herself and the owner of St. Paul's Weird Ink Society tattoo shop, Le Fae had an artist in mind.

“Our artist, Erin, she actually has merch on our website from long ago that says ‘loons are goth ducks,’” Le Fae said. “She's always liked loons, so when I said I wanted to get one, she was like, ‘You better let me do your loon.’ I was like, ‘Who else would I have do it?’”

For months, Weird Ink had at least one Rebel Loon tattoo scheduled every day, with weekends sometimes having a half-dozen bookings. It has slowed down since, but orders have continued months after they first went viral.

Le Fae's shop adapted the design in just about every way. They made the original, a knitted-pattern, a watercolor, a Pokémon and a pride loon, just to name a few.

The loon has also taken the form of murals. Artist and bartender Natalie Reynolds-Wolff designed a sprawling Rebel Loon for Insight Brewing.

“I think this is just a symbol of unity, a symbol that you're welcome here, that you're safe here, and that we will protect our neighbors,” said Insight marketing manager Joey Steinbach.

Founded on uniting people

The Rebel Loon has come a long way since January when Bernardo Anderson of Moorhead shared the design inspired by the Star Wars “Rebel Alliance” logo.

After seeing Minnesotans come together for their community, Anderson said it only seemed right to adapt the symbol to feature the state bird as a new logo of resistance.

“I wanted a symbol for uniting people and not dividing people,” Anderson said. “I wanted the symbol to be for something, not against something.”

When Anderson, a web developer, conceived the idea, he figured someone had already made a version. To his surprise, he found nothing after as comprehensive a search as possible.

He deliberately used only three colors —black, blue and red — to make the logo easily replicable.

Originally, he wanted to be anonymous. That did not last long as people quickly connected him to the design, which he made publicly available.

"It's everyone's logo, because it symbolizes an idea, and I can't copyright an idea," Anderson said.

Now, the logo is on everything from onesies to beer mugs, stickers to neon signs. And, to Anderson’s initial surprise, people.

“It got really serious when I first saw somebody saying they're going to get a tattoo of it,” Anderson said. “I was like, ‘Whoa, that is serious.’”

The story of Minnesotans’ resistance through tattoo

Mitchell Plisek was one of the first artists to replicate the design. His first Rebel Loon was posted by his client on Twin Cities Geek, a Facebook page that is now saturated with different tattoos marking Minnesotans' resistance through art.

Angela Caldwell, 54, had just one tattoo prior to sitting down with Plisek. She sees getting the tattoo as a way to support her community she has called home for 10 years.

The two-day endeavor resulted in a Rebel Loon surrounded by the Northern Lights spanning a portion of her forearm.

“It's kind of cool that this hits so many marks for you, for your time in Minnesota,” Plisek told her. “It’s kind of like your own Minnesota badge of honor.”

Le Fae of Weird Ink has long lost count of how many loon tattoos her shop has done. Some of her favorite clients had no tattoos, are over 50 and are “so passionate” that they walk in needing the design, she said.

“We've seen people from all walks of life. People that you know are obviously very upset with what's happening in our world right now,” Le Fae said. “This feels like a tangible way to put a mark on their body saying, ‘No, I officially am putting this so seriously that I'm against what's happening right now, that I'm willing to mark my body and become part of a movement.’”

Le Fae and other artists are discussing ways to archive the resistance art trend.

Alongside the Rebel Loon Archive, an organization cataloging the many artworks and materials created since the onset of the enforcement surge, started archiving Minnesota resistance tattoos for what will turn into a book coming out next year.

Minneapolis’ West Bank neighborhood, also known as Cedar-Riverside, was once a hub for a thriving music scene. Beginning in the 1960s, folk, blues, rock and international musicians were drawn to the area, helping shape its cultural identity.

A new documentary explores that musical history. Kevin Dragseth is the director of the Twin Cities PBS film, “Wild West Bank Sound.” He joined MPR News host Nina Moini to talk about the project.

Use the audio player above to listen to the full conversation.

Subscribe to the Minnesota Now podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.

We attempt to make transcripts for Minnesota Now available the next business day after a broadcast. When ready they will appear here.

On a Minneapolis street, architectural historian Jane King Hession stands between a red-brick house and a boxy white one perched above Interstate 94.

Each is a Minnesota architectural landmark. The brick Malcolm Willey House was designed in the 1930s by a giant of 20th century architecture, Frank Lloyd Wright, and was a link between his early Prairie School-style of architecture and his later Usonian style.

Across the street is a white minimalist two-story house with a periwinkle blue driveway. The Faulkner House was built in 1938 and was the first home in Minneapolis designed in the International Style, a Modern architecture movement from Western Europe that prized function over form, clean lines over ornamentation and new industrial technologies and materials (glass, steel, concrete) over old ones.

The Faulkner House was designed by a lesser known but quietly influential architect, Elizabeth “Lisl” Scheu Close, who has been a muse for Hession for decades.

“What I would like people to know about Elizabeth Close is that she was a trailblazing Modern architect,” Hession said.

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At the time, the Faulkner House would have been a “shock in the neighborhood,” Hession said, surrounded by century houses in Tudor and Colonial styles, ornamented with gables, shutters, window boxes and other decorative flourishes.

“Elizabeth Close was a very practical architect, and she was interested in designing a functional house,” Hession said. “She felt many houses had problems designed into them from the beginning, and she wanted to get rid of those when she designed her homes.”

Even the more Modern Wright-designed home was constructed in familiar red brick, while Close chose redwood siding and resin-bonded plywood.

“I like it simple and unpretentious and easy to take care of,” Close told MPR in a 2000 interview. “Maintenance is such a chore.”

Hession has been studying the work of Close, Minnesota’s first Modern architect, for decades, even conducting an oral history with the architect in 2000 for the Minnesota Historical Society. Close passed away at the age of 99 in 2011.

“When I first met her, and I would say after my first session, it became really clear to me that this woman had an incredible life, an incredible career. Why didn't I know more about her?” Hession said. “I went to architecture school at the University of Minnesota. I don't recall her name ever being mentioned. So it became clear to me that her story needed to be told, and I wanted to be the one to tell it.”

This month, the University of Minnesota Press published Hession’s book “Elizabeth Scheu Close: A Life in Modern Architecture,” which features many of the more than 250 houses Close designed in Minnesota, as well as projects including hospitals, community centers, churches and Ferguson Hall, home to the music school at the University of Minnesota. In 2002, Close became the first woman in Minnesota history to win the Gold Medal from the state chapter of the American Institute of Architects, one of the highest honors in the field.

“There were no other architects like her,” Hession said. “She was not the first female architect in Minneapolis or Minnesota, but they were very, very few, and she quickly became one the most prominent female architects in the state.”

The book came out in hardcover in March 2020, but the events surrounding the release, including an exhibit and lecture, were canceled because of COVID. With the release of the paperback, Hession is reviving a moment to celebrate and reflect on the legacy of Close, known to friends and family as “Lisl.”

Hession will give a free book talk at 6 p.m. on Wednesday, April 29, at the Elmer L. Andersen Library at the University of Minnesota. Hession also curated the exhibit on Close at the library, which is on view through May 22. (Hession also co-curated the 2025 exhibition “Making Room: Women’s Histories from the Northwest Architectural Archives” at the University of Minnesota)

“My mother would have been very pleased,” Roy Close, Close’s son, said of the book. “She was never doing it for the glory. It was that she wanted to be an architect, having seen the kind of impact that architecture could have on the people who lived in the homes.” He adds, “It meant a lot to her.”

The book is a deep dive into the life and career of Close, who was born in 1912 in Vienna, Austria, to a prominent Social Democratic family and grew up in a house designed by leading Modernist architect Adolf Loos, a residence similar to the Faulkner House with its geometric lines and stripped-down exterior. It was here that Close developed a passion for Modern architecture.

“Lisl’s upbringing in Vienna was very interesting, because she was born into a very politically active family,” Hession said. “Among the things that her father, who was a lawyer, did was he was involved with providing housing for people in need after World War I, and there was great need for housing in Vienna and other parts of Europe at the time. So, she had this example of someone who saw architecture as a way to serve social needs and help people.”

Close began architecture studies in Vienna, but, at age 20, emigrated to the U.S. to study architecture at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she met her husband and fellow architect, Minnesotan Winston Close. In both Austria and the U.S., Close faced misogyny in the male-dominated field, with many firms refusing to hire her, but she persisted.

“She didn't let anything stop her. She didn't get angry, she didn't get even,” Hession said. “She just kept moving, and she just kept achieving her personal goals, and those goals were to design efficient architecture that serves the needs of the people living in it.”

“She took the attitude that she was an architect first and a woman second,” Roy Close said. “She expected to be treated professionally, and I think insisted on it.”

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In 1936, Elizabeth and Winston Close moved to Minneapolis and by 1938, they had opened Close and Scheu, the first Minnesota architecture firm dedicated to Modern design. While Winston was also an advisory architect to the University of Minnesota, Close became the dominant force at the firm, designing more than 250 houses that reshaped how Minnesotans think about private residences.

Hession explains that Close’s legacy was working closely with clients to understand how to design a home that could work best for them, instead of imposing her design on them, which was a common practice for architects in the 20th century.

“When you design a house for someone, you get to know them really well, and inevitably you get to be friends,” Close said in the MPR interview.

“It wasn't really about style for her, it was about solving an architectural problem, and I think middle class Americans became more interested in living more freely in a house,” Hession said. “She wanted her architecture not to be a palace for someone to live in, but a functional space tailored to that person's needs that would support a well-lived life.”

Hession’s work on Close continues. She and Kimberly Long Loken, an associate professor at University of Wisconsin-Stout’s School of Art and Design, are working on a documentary about the architect that is set to come out in 2027.

On The Thread’s Ask a Bookseller series, we talk to independent booksellers all over the country to find out what books they’re most excited about right now.

Saturday is Independent Bookstore Day, a national event celebrating reading and the booksellers at small businesses who put those books into readers’ hands.

Across Minnesota, more than 70 independent bookstores are participating. Many are offering readings, special offers and opportunities to win prizes.

In the greater Twin Cities metro, book lovers can pick up a free independent bookstore passport and get it stamped at any of the 38 participating businesses. Stamped pages serve as coupons for future visits, with bonus coupons and prize drawings for those with 10 or more stamps.

Seven stores are participating in the Twin Ports and along the North Shore.

In New Ulm, owner Brie Taralson of Lykke Books paused in her preparations for Saturday to talk about a book she’s currently enjoying.

A self-professed nonfiction book nerd, she recommends reading “Flourish: The Art of Building Meaning, Joy, and Fulfillment" by Daniel Coyle.

Having written two books about high-performing individuals and successful groups, respectively, Coyle turns his attention to what helps people not perform well — but thrive.

The key takeaway, Taralson says, is that we flourish because of connection with others.

She appreciated that this book makes space for the beautiful mess of life, where the outcome isn’t preordained. She liked its talk of flow state, that “I could do this for hours” zone we enter when we do something we love.

That state has value, the book argues, and so it’s worthwhile to take part in hobbies that take us there, even if they don’t seem productive otherwise. The book contains case studies as well as practical recommendations that could work on an individual, family or group level.

“Here’s what I love about this whole field of positive psychology,” Taralson says. “It's not about fixing something that's broken. We can all benefit from these things. It's not really directed at a particular type of person. It's just, if you want to be more joyful and really flourish and be happy with your life, these are all tools that I think would be helpful to learn.”

Founder of St. Paul-based New Native Theatre, Rhiana Yazzie, directs a new play titled "The Bird Blind," which she says explores the question: What are healthy relationships? Heavy topics like addiction and domestic violence are woven into the story, two topics she says are seen in Native communities.

“You're watching a story that feels very real and at the same time very heightened, theatrical,” Yazzie said.

“The Bird Blind” follows several characters as they make healthier choices to improve their lives and become positive influences on a young boy's life.

The young boy named Tim forms a friendship with a hunter who has his own struggles. Together, they examine their relationships while sitting in a bird blind, a shelter they use to stay hidden while hunting birds.

“It features Tim, a little bit of his family, and how his family slowly heals from everything that's been happening, and how he meets other people,” 13-year-old River Lane, who plays Tim, said.

Healing for future generations

Alaska Native playwright Kira Apaachuaq Eckenweiler says the play explores how healing oneself can benefit future generations.

“How could we [be] thinking about, [and] how could we always try to be there for our future generations so that they could be healthier than us,” Eckenweiler said. “That they could live a life that's beautiful.”

She says inspiration for the play came from her own life and the relationships she's experienced or observed in her home village of Unalakleet.

“Life is so far from perfect, and it's messy. It's beautiful, it's wonderful, but it is messy sometimes,” she said. “I think my play has a lot of that. It shows the messiness of life, but also the beauty in it.”

For actress Susanna Piquk Lowndes, who plays Tim's mother, theater arts is its own type of beauty. She says that for her, as an Alaska Native, the theater provides an opportunity to express herself through storytelling, and even more so when those stories center Native voices.

“It's very healing and cathartic to be able to directly represent our people on stage, and I can't wait for our community to come together and heal through art with the story,” Lowndes said.

Actor Mato Wayuhi says the production has been a safe place to explore those heavier topics being portrayed. He plays Tim's father, a character who has been affected by the ripples of generational trauma -- in his case, alcoholism. Wayuhi says that while he isn't the most likable character at the start, audiences may still be able to feel for him.

“My favorite thing about the role is I get to find those little moments of his heart and his playfulness and his humanity and his love for his people,” Wayuhi said.

He feels that the play has tangible takeaways, whether the audience knows it or not.

“I want people to see us on stage and say, ‘Oh, I've felt like that before. I've seen that before.’ And it might be a jump scare, however, to know that you're not alone, and to know that we're all going through this together,” Wayuhi said. “We can find solutions together.”

Frank Henry Kaash Katasse plays the role of the “troubled hunter” who befriends Tim. Being from Alaska himself, he says the play gives insight into the daily life of an Alaska Native community in the vast state.

“This play can transport you to literally a different part of the country, and you find things that are strange about being in that part of the world, but you also find things that you can relate to and connect to,” Katasse said.

Eckenweiler hopes audiences will take away the points of finding healing and growth, and seeing that life is filled with its ups and downs.

“Our youth look up to us. Our youth adore us. They love us, just even when we're broken. They still love and want, need us to be there for them,” Eckenweiler said.

“The Bird Blind” has showings at 825 Arts in St. Paul, located off University Avenue, through May 10.

Chandra Colvin covers Native American communities in Minnesota for MPR News via Report for America, a national service program that places journalists into local newsrooms to report on undercovered issues and communities.

On the day the Sharafs bury their 18-year-old daughter, the girl’s mother is so bereaved, she can barely stand. The father is so anguished, he nearly climbs into the grave himself.

But as Patmeena Sabit’s debut novel unspools, it’s up to the reader to parse the truth about the girl’s death — and who may have been accomplices to it. The narrative is told through a kaleidoscope of viewpoints. Fellow Afghan immigrants, journalists and law enforcement each relate what they saw, through their own lens. But eye witnesses can be wrong. Neighbors have an agenda. One person’s truth is another person’s lie.

For Sabit, that’s the whole point.

“When I was creating the story, I was thinking … about the nature of perception and how reliable that is, and objective truth and if there is an objective truth to any one situation,” she tells Kerri Miller.

“Good People” is both a cultural study of a community’s judgement and an interrogation of what it means to be an American — all with a crime at the center of it. Sabit and Miller talk about it on this week’s Big Books and Bold Ideas.

Guest:

• Patmeena Sabit was born in Kabul and fled to Pakistan and then to the United States with her family after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. “Good People” is her debut novel.

Subscribe to the Thread newsletter for the latest book and author news and must-read recommendations.

Subscribe to Big Books and Bold Ideas with Kerri Miller on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, RSS or anywhere you get your podcasts.

This week’s MN Shortlist features a great American novel adapted for the stage, music from a video game-turned-TV show and Parisian cafes, a new rural arts space and the regional premiere of a play that recounts part of the European migrant crisis.

‘Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women’ at the Guthrie Theater — Through June 21

High school students over the world are likely familiar with “Little Women”– whether that be in the form of assigned reading for 11th grade English class, or through the 2019 film starring Saoirse Ronan and Timothée Chalamet. This week, however, the Guthrie officially opened its own take on the coming-of-age classic, titled "Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women” (in case you were worried the story was authorless).

Adapted for the stage by Lauren M. Gunderson—who according to American Theatre Magazine is one of the most produced playwrights in America—this version of “Little Women” stars Isabella Star LaBlanc. LaBlanc is perhaps best known for playing opposite Jodie Foster in the fourth season of HBO’s “True Detective.” LaBlanc actually grew up in Minnesota and cut her teeth at local theaters, but this marks her debut at the Guthrie.

The Music of Fallout at Crooners Supper Club — April 24 at 7 p.m.

For lovers of the post-apocalyptic media franchise “Fallout,” its music is a key part of its identity. Its moody score is mixed in with jazz standards from musicians like Billie Holiday and the Ink Spots, creating a nostalgic but eerie soundscape for the retro-futuristic video games and TV show. On Friday at Crooners Supper Club, the Riffin’ Trio will present an evening show that features the music of “Fallout,” with their signature mix of saxophone, flute, guitar and upright bass.

The YES! House Grand Opening in Granite Falls — April 25 3 p.m. to 8 p.m.

After years of elbow grease, renovations and a $1 million capital campaign, the arts nonprofit Department of Public Transformation is officially opening its first brick-and-mortar venue in a historic main street building in Granite Falls, a town of about 2,800 in southwest Minnesota.

“This building was in major disrepair, like holes in the ceiling, there was mold everywhere. It was a hard space,” says Ash Hanson, the creative executive officer of the Department of Public Transformation, an organization that supports artists in rural communities.

The YES! House now features a gallery, stage, climbing wall, creative workspaces, recording studio and two furnished apartments for visiting artists in residence.

“There should be spaces like this in every small town,” says Hanson.

The free grand opening will feature a tour, art show, live music, film screening and food and libations.

Winona Concert: Cafe Accordion Orchestra — April 25 at 7 p.m.

Minnesota band Cafe Accordion Orchestra, or CAO, plays music that you’d expect to hear in a comedic French film, with elements of Latin dance and Tin Pan Alley. Formed in the 1990s, CAO has performed across the country, as well as internationally. Their concert at the Winona Arts Center on April 25 will feature their signature repertory of Parisian valse musette—a kind of romantic French dance music—as well as American Jazz and Blues standards and other European styles.

The Jungle at Mixed Blood — Through May 3

In the mid-2010s, the European migrant crisis was at its peak, as people from countries like Iraq and Syria fled their homelands due to war. Then in 2017, theater makers Joe Robertson and Joe Murphy debuted “The Jungle,” a fictional retelling of a standoff in a refugee camp in France between migrants and government officials.

The play is something of a docudrama and was influenced by Robertson’s and Murphy’s own experience running a theater company for seven months inside a refugee camp during the crisis. “The Jungle” saw success in London and New York and is now making its regional debut at Mixed Blood in Minneapolis. It’s a timely play as Minnesota is still reeling from the surge of federal immigration agents in January.

The annual Basilica Block Party music festival in Minneapolis has come to an end.

In a notice on the festival’s website, organizers say the last block party was held in 2024.

“We are deeply grateful for the fans, the artists, and the support shown for our beloved Basilica,” organizers wrote.

The festival launched in 1995, serving as a fundraiser for restoration of the Basilica.

But it’s only been held sporadically since the pandemic. Organizers called it off in 2020 and held it again in 2021, then took a hiatus until 2024. That year, the festival moved from the Basilica to Boom Island Park, with August dates instead of its typical July.

Last year, organizers said they were taking a pause to assess the future of the festival.

It’s one of several live music events to close down in the Twin Cities in recent years, including Rock the Garden and Twin Cities Summer Jam.

The Minnesota Yacht Club is back this summer for a three-day festival, bringing acts including The Lumineers, Matchbox Twenty and The Strokes to Harriet Island Regional park.

Prince fans gathered outside his Paisley Park home and studio in Chanhassen on Tuesday, marking 10 years since the death of the music icon.

Flowers, signs and other tributes to Prince have long adorned a fence outside Paisley Park, along Highway 5 — officially the Prince Rogers Nelson Memorial Highway.

Prince fans gather at Paisley Park, 10 years after his death

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On Tuesday, fans from the Twin Cities and across the country — even from around the world — made a pilgrimage to the site, taking photos and adding their own contributions to the memorial.

Visitors from as far away as France and the Netherlands joined locals to share their memories of the music legend, and read tributes from others.

Even in death Prince looms large over his home state — his impact everlasting.

“I don't think, until he died, we even realized, you know, how much he kind of meant to us,” said Minnesota writer Frank Bures. “It's hard to overstate the impact he had on my generation.”

Ten years after his death, people still make pilgrimages to see where Prince spent most of his life. Frank Bures researched and produced an audio walking tour about Prince for VoiceMap.

It begins at the Mary Tyler Moore statue on Nicollet Avenue.

“This area, Nicollet Avenue over to First Avenue, there's so many great locations for telling Prince's story,” said Bures. “Also, there's like a transition from Mary Tyler Moore in the 70s as kind of the pop culture representation of Minneapolis, to Prince in the 80s… it's a nice transitional spot.”

On Bures’s tour, “In the Footsteps of Prince,” participants see filming locations from “Purple Rain” and the site of Prince’s former club “Glam Slam.” They also stop at the Dakota, a jazz club and a favorite spot of Prince’s.

“He would come in the back door. He had a table reserved just for him,” Bures said. “And he did a series of, like, kind of pop-up concerts that were a big deal.”

The Dakota was also one of the last public places Prince visited before his death in 2016.

“I mean, it was just like a gut punch,” Bures said. “It was just crazy and hard, and, you know, a lot of tears.”

After his death became public, thousands showed up to First Avenue to pay their respects to Prince. The music venue not only served as the central location in Prince’s blockbuster film “Purple Rain,” but also as a place he performed at different points in his career.

“Around in 2007, I think, he played a concert here,” Bures said, adding that Prince went on so late that the city only let him play for an hour in the early hours of the morning. This prompted the city to create a permit specifically for Prince that would allow him to perform later than other artists. Prince never got to use it in his lifetime.

“But then when he died, you know, people just poured into the streets here,” Bures recounted. “There was like 10,000 people here mourning and kind of celebrating his life and just in shock. And that's when they pulled that permit finally, so they could keep the party going all night.”

Celebrations of Prince can still be seen throughout the Twin Cities. Last year, a stage adaptation of Prince’s film debuted at the State Theatre, and Minneapolis has announced a celebration of “his royal badness” for this summer.

Prince showed people through his record-setting music that you could achieve your dreams in your Midwest hometown.

“There’s this kind of historical narrative that if you want to make it big, you got to leave the Midwest and go to LA or New York,” Bures said. “Prince kind of showed that that wasn't true…for a lot of creative people in this part of the world, you know, that just is really meaningful and powerful to see. To know that you can, you know, do great work and do great things here.”

Prince’s influence is still easy to hear in Minnesota — and just as easy to feel. A decade after his death, his music is woven into the city’s identity, from local venues to everyday playlists.

When Purple Rain debuted, it helped turn the Twin Cities into a cultural landmark. For many, it was a moment that put Minneapolis on the global stage.

Today, Prince is remembered as more than a musician. His impact on fashion, gender expression and artistic freedom — especially within Black and queer communities — continues to resonate. His willingness to challenge norms helped redefine what it meant to be an artist.

That legacy lives on through the songs people still return to, from “Purple Rain” to “When Doves Cry” and “I Wanna Be Your Lover.”

Many told MPR News they remember exactly where they were when they heard of his death in 2016, a moment underscoring how deeply his music connected with listeners in Minnesota and beyond.

Minnesota’s Chris Tungseth has done it once again — defying the odds and cracking into the top seven of the reality TV series “American Idol.”

Tungseth advanced Monday night as the show celebrated “Disney Night,” with nine contestants performing songs from popular Disney movies such as “The Lion King” and “Aladdin.”

Tungseth, who’s a construction worker from Fergus Falls, seized the opportunity to give a nod to Minnesota’s cold winters with his rendition of “Let It Go,” from the animated movie “Frozen.” And viewers were anything but frozen when casting their deciding votes to send him on to the next round during the live show.

“American Idol” judges Lionel Richie, Carrie Underwood and Luke Bryan — joined by guest judge Jennifer Hudson, who herself was once a contestant on the show — praised Tungseth’s rendition of the song.

“I think you did fantastic,” said Richie. “And the fact is you were giving us expression, stage presence, it was fantastic.”

Underwood followed up by adding it was probably the most animated performance Tungseth has given on the show up until now. And host Ryan Seacrest said he never imagined he’d hear Tungseth perform a song so far outside his comfort zone.

“Yeah, it’s outside of my comfort zone,” Tungseth said of the song choice. “But it’s also an extension of me.”

In the lead-up to his performance, Hudson gave Tungseth tips on strengthening his stage presence — and it paid off. By Tungseth’s own admission, it’s an area where he needs to improve, having had limited opportunities to perform live outside of singing in church while growing up.

To prepare for his audition on the show, Tungseth hit the local music scene in Fergus Falls. One of the places he performed at is Outstate Brewing Company, located on the banks of the Otter Tail River. Every week since the start of this season of “American Idol,” co-owner Pat Lundberg has hosted a watch party at the establishment in support of the 27-year-old.

“His heart is 10 times bigger than his talent, and his talent is extraordinary,” Lundberg said. "He’s done just a fantastic job. As we watch it, we couldn’t be prouder. That said, if he went home tomorrow, we couldn’t be prouder.”

Tungseth has connected with viewers this season by sharing personal challenges he’s faced. His father died from leukemia in 2023, and his mother is currently living in a nursing home because of multiple sclerosis.

Two contestants were eliminated Monday night. “American Idol” will challenge Tungseth and the six other remaining contestants next week with “Taylor Swift Night,” where they will be tasked with performing one of the pop star’s hit songs to make it into the top five. Two episodes remain before the season finale.

Ten years after Prince’s death, Bob Blake stood outside the three-story storefront that once housed Glam Slam — the nightclub where, three decades ago, he first stepped into Prince’s orbit.

Blake was in his early 20s when his cousin who worked at the nightclub recruited him to work at Paisley Park, Prince’s studio and home.

“I just needed some extra cash,” remembers Blake. “I was young, so I wanted to meet some girls.”

He says that moment led to his first lessons in business.

Blake counts himself among the hundreds of people from the Twin Cities who say working for Prince gave him opportunities he might never have had. Blake, a citizen of Red Lake Nation, grew up in St. Paul as a self-described “kid from the neighborhood.”

He says he learned how to wear a suit and how to talk with attorneys, promoters and others in the music industry while working for Prince.

“It really made me want to elevate my game. The way I spoke, the way I came across, the way I did things. Even the way that I looked at the world. It made me feel like there was an abundance out here,” said Blake. “Like, there was no limits to what you could accomplish.”

He says inspiration also came from seeing Prince perform. Blake remembers working security for the musician at a little club across the street from Madison Square Garden in New York City.

“I felt the energy. It felt love, you know what I mean? It felt free. It felt like ... wow,” Blake said.

Blake also remembers more chaotic moments on the road. One afternoon, on a Los Angeles video shoot, he remembers coordinating flights for multiple performers when Prince called him onto the tour bus to check in with him.

“He knew I was nervous. He knew I didn’t want to mess up,” Blake said. “He took the time out to calm me when he had to do everything. He wanted to try and make me better.”

Blake worked for Prince for about seven years. Today, he runs a solar energy company. He’s also the executive director of a clean-energy nonprofit.

And, coincidentally, Prince’s generosity also boosted Blake’s eventual career.

His first job in renewable energy was with a solar startup out of Oakland, Calif., founded by environmental activist Van Jones — who got his early funding, quietly, from Prince.

“Fast forward now, I get this passion for renewable energy, for solar and for the environment. And how do I, indiscriminately, get this job, but through Prince's donation to Van Jones, right?” said Blake. “It’s wild to think about that.”

Prince’s philanthropy was largely hidden during his lifetime — friends, including Jones, later described Prince as a devout Christian who, by the tenets of his faith, avoided publicly discussing his giving. Tax filings for his Love 4 One Another foundation showed $1.5 million in donations from 2005 to 2007, as MPR News reported in 2016.

Among the gifts later attributed to him: $1 million to the Harlem Children’s Zone, $200,000 to a Minneapolis charter school network and a check to the family of Trayvon Martin. In Oakland, Jones has said in various interviews, Prince anonymously paid for rooftop solar panels — their owners never knowing who had funded them.

At the 10-year anniversary of Prince’s passing, Blake walked through downtown Minneapolis recently to arrive at the front of the building that once housed Glam Slam, Prince’s downtown nightclub, where Blake also spent many nights providing security. For him, it’s a moment of profound gratitude.

“He took a lot of us on the ride with him,” said Blake. “That's what everyone doesn't know. He took a lot of us and made such a big difference in our lives, and he was simply amazing. Forever grateful to that man.”

On Wednesday, a federal jury found that Live Nation engaged in anticompetitive practices that stifle competition and harm the live music industry. The verdict marked a major victory for more than two dozen states in the antitrust trial against the live entertainment company, and has the potential to transform the concert ecosystem in the U.S.

Live Nation owns, operates or works with hundreds of venues across the country. It also manages artists, promotes concerts, books tours and owns Ticketmaster, which is one of the largest ticketing companies in the world. Throughout the trial, an attorney representing 33 states and the District of Columbia argued that Live Nation wielded too much power over the industry at the expense of fans, venues and artists. Live Nation repeatedly denied those accusations, but the jury ultimately sided with the states, declaring that the company had an unfair dominance in the industry.

Afterwards, Live Nation issued a statement saying the verdict "is not the last word on this matter" and pointed to several pending motions that the court still has to rule on. The company said it plans to appeal any "unfavorable rulings."

Several artists and organizers NPR spoke with say they don't expect to see any immediate changes in the live music industry — but they see this is a first step in the right direction.

Joey La Neve DeFrancesco is a guitarist and vocalist in the Providence, R.I. punk band Downtown Boys. In 2020, as the COVID-19 pandemic wreaked havoc on the music industry, DeFrancesco founded the United Musicians and Allied Workers (UMAW), a grassroots union advocating for the wellbeing of artists. Since then, the group has organized campaigns focused on increasing streaming royalties, merchandising payouts and SXSW payment rates for musicians. DeFrancesco says UMAW heavily supported the antitrust lawsuit against Live Nation and was closely monitoring the trial.

"We were all ecstatic. It's been decades that artists have been fighting this company," DeFrancesco says, citing Pearl Jam's boycott of Ticketmaster in the early 1990s. "It remains to be seen what the judge is going to do with this verdict — if we're going to truly break apart this Live Nation-Ticketmaster monopoly. But having this scale of a win is a huge development for artists."

More than just ticket prices

The Live Nation verdict comes at a time when many working musicians say they're struggling to make ends meet. As the value of recorded music has decreased with streaming, there's an increased emphasis on touring and merch sales to make up the difference. But artists NPR spoke with say the rising costs of transportation, lodging, food and other factors required to put on shows are creating an untenable situation.

Conor Murphy is a St. Louis, Mo. based musician who spent more than a decade as the lead vocalist of the emo band Foxing and now continues to perform as Smidley. In the fall, Foxing announced it would be going on an indefinite hiatus. Murphy says there's a multitude of reasons for the break, but one of the leading factors is how financially unsustainable it's become to be a full-time musician. He says it's especially frustrating, then, to see fans spending more than ever on concert tickets. (As part of the Live Nation verdict, the jury found that Ticketmaster had overcharged fans in some states by $1.72 per ticket).

"My bands in particular, from my experience, we're not seeing the benefits of ticket prices being more expensive," he says. "We're not taking home more money at the end of tours."

Murphy's not alone Damon Krukowski is a writer, UMAW organizer and one-half of the indie-folk duo Damon & Naomi. He says he and his wife Naomi Yang recently sold out three performances in London, and still ended up in the negative.

"Three nights at our favorite club, sold out, and we lost money because expenses are so high right now," he says. "It's not the club's fault. We love that club and they're transparent about money and everything. It's not the fans' fault. But it's like, if you're charging normal money at a decent, normal club, it's not adding up right now."

Krukowski says he thinks the problem is a wider consolidation of power across the industry — that includes Live Nation, but also extends to streaming giants and recorded music companies. He says the industry looks completely different today than it did when he started playing music in Boston in the 1980s.

"We used to have such a wide variety of partners to work with as independent artists. We had venues that were independently owned. We had record stores that were independently owned," he says. "We had a network on the radio that was community and college radio stations, and we had a way of touring that didn't depend on these huge companies that are backed by enormous capital."

Impact on local scenes

All of the artists NPR spoke with say they hope the Live Nation verdict leads to lower ticket fees for fans as well as more robust competition and investment in small, local music scenes across the country. A study conducted by the National Independent Venue Association (NIVA) found that 64% of independent venues, promoters and festivals were not profitable in 2024.

Stephen Parker, executive director of NIVA, tells NPR that the verdict is incredibly meaningful at a time when so many venues are struggling.

"It's not just a win for the states. It's a win for the small businesses and nonprofits that I represent," he says. "It's a win for the fans and the artists that have suffered under Live Nation for way too long."

In past statements to NPR, Live Nation has said that it promotes thousands of shows in independent venues across the country.

In Boston, Krukowski says the local landscape has shifted dramatically in recent years. Two major venues with over 3,500 capacity have been built in the city since the pandemic; one is operated by Live Nation and the other is owned by a partner of AEG Presents, which is Live Nation's biggest competitor. But small clubs and independent venues with much lower capacities have shuttered across the city.

"That means that my friends who play adventurous, independent music or improvised music have nowhere to play in Boston. So they don't," he says. "They go on tour and they don't play here."

Krukowski's not the only one who's noticed a shift. Online, some music fans on Reddit have posted about certain bands skipping Boston on tour, and touring in smaller markets instead. Krukowski says one such place booking notable lineups is Portland, Maine.

There, the Maine Music Alliance — a coalition of artists, venues, music industry workers and community members — has been leading a fight against Live Nation's proposal to build a 3,300-seat concert hall in the city. So far, the group has succeeded in getting a temporary moratorium on large venues in Portland, which was recently extended until September.

Scott Mohler is executive director and co-founder of the Maine Music Alliance. He says the verdict comes at a crucial moment for the group's ongoing battle against Live Nation.

"This is incredible legitimacy added to what I think a lot of people have thought are just a bunch of hippies and hipsters shouting about the corporation for the past year," he says. "I do think that it's going to certainly create more engagement and the council will be hearing from voices that they hadn't heard from before."

In the meantime, individual artists are doing what they can. Pop-rock singer Caroline Rose says they've been avoiding working with Live Nation as much as possible in recent years. They say the verdict is "a pretty amazing milestone" for now, but they're curious about what will actually happen next.

"We'll see how it pans out. I have a general distrust that things ever turn out in artists' favor," Rose says, laughing. "We've just been burned so many times."

In 2025, Rose released their album year of the slug exclusively on Bandcamp and in physical format. Since then, they've been focused on smaller solo tours in independent venues across the country. They say playing intimate rooms creates an incredibly rewarding, almost spiritual connection with the audience — and they say it's been refreshing to focus on those interpersonal connections rather than constantly trying to size up to the next biggest possible venue.

"By far, the most positive and nourishing experience has been working with the venue staff and the promoters that work at these independent clubs," Rose says. "It's a totally different type of show and a totally different type of experience, as opposed to when you get into the bigger rooms and you have better sound systems and maybe there's not a bathroom with no seats on the toilets anymore. But I do think it's important to pay homage to those venues and actively support them and treat them with respect."

Copyright 2026, NPR

On The Thread’s Ask a Bookseller series, we talk to independent booksellers all over the country to find out what books they’re most excited about right now.

Seeing a new work on the shelf written by an author you love can feel like winning the lottery. Shirley Fergenson of The Ivy Bookshop in Baltimore, Md., remembers being absolutely captivated by Daniyal Mueenuddin’s 2009 short story collection “In Other Rooms, Other Wonders,” which was a finalist for the National Book Award.

This year — 17 years later — he’s published a new work of fiction, entitled “This Is Where the Serpent Lives.”

Fergenson says when she saw it, she “practically jumped up and down. I took it home, I read it, and I fell in love with it. It's the same voice. I loved it then, and I love it still.”

“This Is Where the Serpent Lives” is a sprawling work set in Pakistan over several decades, starting in the 1950s. It’s being marketed as a novel, but Fergenson says it’s actually three short stories and a novella with interlinking characters.

“It sort of feels like ‘Upstairs, Downstairs’ with a little bit of ‘The Godfather’ thrown in,” she says.

“There are rich landowners, there are servants, forbidden Love, ambition, corruption. There is moral compromise and fluid loyalty. It is a class-and-cast panorama of amazingly rich characters. Each one could have a whole story written about them. They're so full of life.”

“The main reason to read this book is the exquisite writing, but if you need a story that is one story arc that takes you from the beginning to the end, this is not your story.

There are linkages, but they're literary, and they are so beautifully told that even in the bleakest, darkest setting, every detail feels like a photograph through an artist's filter. And the final novella is so powerful that it feels like its own full novel.”

Listen to an NPR interview with the author: Daniyal Mueenuddin discusses his debut novel, 'This Is Where the Serpent Lives' : NPR

Record Store Day is Saturday. It's a special day to celebrate and support independent record stores in our communities each year. If you're a music lover, there will be loads to do and plenty to listen to.

MPR News host Clay Masters spoke with host of the Current's Morning Show, Jill Riley, about her favorite Record Store Day activities.

Use the audio player above to listen to the full conversation.

The Walker Art Center on Thursday cut ties with Cardamom, the restaurant housed inside its ground floor, exactly a week after restaurant management announced staff layoffs in favor of a QR-code service model.

The restaurant is set to close within 90 days.

“We were caught by surprise by the changes at Cardamom and, after careful consideration, have decided to part ways,” Walker executive director Mary Ceruti said in an emailed statement. “The reduced-service model, which favors automated efficiencies over a human-centered approach, does not align with our core values.”

Cardamom owner DDP Restaurant Group, started by chef Daniel Del Prado, has owned and managed the restaurant since 2021. Last week, a company spokesperson cited rising costs and varying traffic levels as factors to moving away from full-service dining.

In an emailed statement Thursday, DDP Restaurant Group said Cardamom was never profitable.

“Our innovation was designed to preserve jobs and a restaurant at the Walker, just as dozens of other restaurants in Minneapolis have done to achieve financial survival,” DDP said in the statement.

A Hospitality Minnesota report released last week showed the state’s industry is “on the brink of no return” following the surge in federal immigration enforcement in recent months. Businesses are also still recovering from the COVID-19 pandemic and navigate pressures from tariffs and mounting regulations, according to the report.

Former Cardamom workers said at a worker press conference outside Cardamom on Thursday afternoon QR codes are not the solution.

“Hospitality is human,” said Hazel Nelson, who had worked at Cardamom for about a year.

DDP terminated 16 Cardamom employees, according to CTUL, a workers’ rights nonprofit supporting Cardamom workers in organizing. A spokesperson said most do not have another source of income.

Most of those employees declined to re-apply for Cardamom’s new role food-running and bussing and would receive severance pay, according to restaurant management.

Former employees picketed after the press conference and plan to again on Sunday to advocate for workers at other DDP Restaurant Group businesses, which include Porzana and Flora Room. They’re demanding the company give its employees at least two weeks’ notice of termination in the future, allow labor organizing without fear of retaliation and sign onto the “86 ICE” campaign to support workers amid federal immigration operations.

Abby Jimenez is a powerhouse.

Originally known for starting Nadia Cakes out of her home kitchen, these days she’s known more for her books than her bakery.

Her latest rom-com, “The Night We Met,” hit #1 on the New York Times bestseller list one week after it was released.

It’s no surprise to her vast fan base. Jimenez writes witty, meet-cute romance books that also tackle real life issues like alcoholism, family trauma and caring for a loved one with dementia. And all her stories are set in or tinged by Minnesota, Jimenez’ adopted home state. What’s not to love?

Jimenez joins Kerri Miller on Big Books and Bold Ideas this week, for the first time ever, to talk about the oft-maligned romance genre, how changing views of sex and marriage and masculinity are reflected in her books, why Jimenez always include a content warning before the story and why getting people to read anything these days feels like a win.

She also deftly handles a lightning round with Miller, including the romance novel she thinks should be added to the curriculum for all Minnesota college and the cupcake from Nadia Cakes she would bring to a roundtable of famous authors.

Guest:

• Abby Jimenez is a prolific romance writer. Her latest book is “The Night We Met.”

Subscribe to the Thread newsletter for the latest book and author news and must-read recommendations.

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The 2026 crop art season for the Minnesota State Fair competition has begun. This week, the fair announced new rules for the crop art competition, and the artist community is buzzing.

“There are big feelings in crop art,” says Marta Shore, a crop artist and the superintendent for the crop art competition.

Crop art is the very Minnesotan, very time-consuming artform of making mosaics from seeds and plants.

Crop Art Wednesdays (CAW), a monthly crop art gathering at Lake Monster Brewing in St. Paul met Wednesday and the new rules were top of mind.

“When the rules come out, everyone hops on, as soon as that link is live, you're checking to see what's changed, what’s new,” said crop artist Gayle Deutsch.

Many say the most significant change is that quinoa will be banned from the fair competition beginning in 2027. At the heart of crop art is a celebration of Minnesota agriculture, and because Minnesota farmers don’t grow quinoa as a crop, the seed has been banned. It’s a big loss for crop artists because, as Deutsch says, quinoa is prized by crop artists for lettering.

“It lays really nice and looks really neat, which is one of your things. You really want to make sure your piece is neat for points, for a ribbon,” Deustch said. “So, that is a little bit of a travesty, but it's okay. At least they gave us warning.”

Deutsch points to the “yellow mustard incident” of 2023, when the fair announced that the seed was banned well after many artists had already started their entries. Many artists start their work in the winter, as the pieces can take months to complete.

“I will say the drama about [quinoa] is much less than yellow mustard,” Deustch said. “People were very upset, because here you have this piece that you're starting, and now all of a sudden you can't submit it, because yellow mustard is illegal.”

The mustard seed ban was actually reversed, but artists think the quinoa ban will stick.

“They gave us a lot of advanced warning, but now I'm going to have to figure out what to do with all of this quinoa that I have,” said crop artist Sarah O’Brien, positing that there will be much more quinoa art this year while the seed is still legal. “Maybe there is going to be more quinoa than I would have thought in my in my pieces.”

Artist Kaela Reinardy says the most significant rule change for 2026 is limiting submissions per person. That number is down to five.

“I think that's a good thing, because I think I'd rather have a limit on number of pieces and have the field smaller than have people not be able to have theirs displayed,” said Reinardy.

The crop art competition has exploded in popularity in recent years, said superintendent Shore, and there’s only so much display space in the Agriculture Horticulture Building

“I do like it being in Ag-Hort because, again, that link to crop, the celebrating crops, celebrating agriculture,” said Shore. But, “if someone would like to donate $10 million to build us a crop art building, we would love it.”

Other rule changes include updates to entry categories, deadline dates, sizing and more. Chia seeds have also been banned for 2027, and Shore suspects there maybe more sizing rule changes implemented next year.

Shore, who began in this position in 2024, said the shift is to recommit to the roots of the artform.

“We really want it to be about crops that can be grown in Minnesota,” she said.

Ten years after Minneapolis icon Prince’s death, the city of Minneapolis and Paisley Park are planning a celebration of his legacy — along with a few thousand fans.

City leaders announced plans Thursday for a block party and Prince sing-along on June 6. Musical director Sanford Moore will conduct a Minneapolis-based choir of 100 vocalists, plus any Prince fans who want to join in on his biggest hits. Organizers said they’re anticipating up to 15,000 people at the event.

L. Londell McMillan was Prince’s attorney and manager. He announced the event at a press conference in front of a towering 110-foot mural of the music legend, steps away from his home venue at First Avenue.

“Although Prince in the physical is passed, he lives,” McMillan said. “He remains with us. You hear it everywhere you go.”

Organizers said the sing-along idea is a callback to the day Prince died in April 2016, when fans took to the streets outside First Avenue and for a spontaneous sing-along after the news broke.

The event will mark what would have been Prince’s 68th birthday on June 7. Organizers said to come ready to sing – and bring their best purple and sequins.

“If Prince taught us anything, it's that subtlety is overrated,” Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey said.

The sing-along is part of the annual Prince celebration weekend, with events in downtown Minneapolis and at Paisley Park.

From MPR News, Art Hounds are members of the Minnesota arts community who look beyond their own work to highlight what’s exciting in local art. Their recommendations are lightly edited from the audio heard in the player above.

Want to be an Art Hound? Submit here.

A classic story returns to the stage

Juanita Vang is co-executive director at the Southeast Asian Diaspora (SEAD) Project in Minneapolis. She performed in the original production of Ehkhudah Zar’s play “Muyehpen” in 2023, and she’s excited that Exposed Brick is mounting a new, traveling production of the play.

Written in English and billed as one of the first — if not the first — tellings of the classic Karen story in English, Muyehpen will be performed at the Minnesota History Center in St. Paul this Friday at 7 p.m. and at the Paramount Theatre in Austin at 6 p.m. April 25.

The theater notes that, while all ages are welcome, the play contains references to sexual assault.

Juanita says: I love seeing how oral traditions through the centuries are able to come to life and are able to be documented in a way where we can show the rest of the world.

Now that it's actually being documented, hopefully, it builds a more beautiful world of diversity and understanding that we all come from different places, but we also have shared lived human experiences, and hopefully, that instills empathy and love in the world.

— Juanita Vang

Abstract art show: where sound and color meet

Amanda Clark owns of Siiviis Gallery in Duluth. She’s shining a light on an exhibition opening at Lizzards Art Gallery on Friday. “Chromesthesia: The Sound of Color” features abstract works by 20 artists represented by Lizzards. There’s an opening artist reception 4-7 p.m. Friday, and the show will be up through late June.

Amanda is looking forward to seeing the sheer variety of work in this show, as artists convey on canvas the sounds they hear.

Amanda says: They hand-selected artists that are very different from one one another, and it kind of pushes their boundaries of what they normally might do in their artistic endeavors or their artistic style.

And so I think this show is kind of pushing that thread of, how can I still keep my same artistic values and artistic techniques, but then create something that's a little bit less conceptual.

— Amanda Clark

Flamenco at a turning point

Jessica Fiala is a company member of Ragamala Dance Company, and she teaches tap classes at Ballare Teatro. She’s looking forward to seeing Zorongo Flamenco Dance Theatre’s show “Amanecer” April 24–26 at the Luminary Arts Center in Minneapolis.

Jessica says: Zorango Flamenco was founded in 1982 by Susanna De Palma, so over more than 40 years now, she's been carving out a place for Zorongo as this anchor arts organization in the Twin Cities that also fosters an international artistic dialogue.

But for this production, she's handing over the creative reins to longtime company member Deborah Elias. And so I'm particularly excited about this production because it marks a turning point in the company's history.

“Amanecer” means “Dawn,” so it's both celebrating everything that has brought them to this point, with Susanna continuing as a mentor and advisor for the production, but it's also marking the dawn of a new chapter for Zorongo.

— Jessica Fiala

It was ten years ago that Gaelynn Lea rose to fame by winning the NPR Music Tiny Desk contest. Her memory of getting the call is the first chapter of her new book “It Wasn’t Meant to Be Perfect.” Lea was born with the rare genetic disease Osteogenesis imperfecta, also known as brittle bones disease. Her memoir traces her upbringing in Duluth and how she’s navigated her disability in all different facets of life.

Lea spoke to MPR News host Kelly Gordon about her memoir.

The following was edited for length and clarity. Use the audio player above to listen to the full conversation.

What was the moment where you decided you needed to tell your full story?

After a show, one of the people in the audience came up and was like, “I really think you should write a memoir.” And that just planted the seed. And then the more I thought about it, you know, I do a lot of public speaking about disability in addition to doing concerts. And I'm always surprised by how much people say they learn, because I just don't think we learn enough about disability in traditional schools.

What can people with and without disabilities takeaway from this book?

I hope that people with disabilities will see parts of their own story in the book. Pretty much everything that I decided to keep in the final draft are things that I think you will have experienced yourself if you’re disabled, on some level, maybe a different version of the same idea, because they're pretty universal concepts.

If you’re not disabled, my goal is twofold. First, I want people to realize that having a disability does not mean that your life is automatically going to be not fulfilling or not satisfying or creative, but that it does require support of the community, of the government, of health care — like it does require those things, because it's such a big barrier if you don't have support in if in this society.

My goal is, once you’re done reading it, you have a better understanding of people with disabilities are just regular people who do really need that support. And what can you do to be a part of the solution and move it forward. I really hope that it inspires people to think about their own lives in the way that maybe they can help move things forward.

The title alludes to the concept of perfectionism. And talk about your introduction to fiddle music that allowed you to let go of the perfectionism you internalized playing classical orchestral music. Do you have to actively work to keep that joy and not let perfection get in the way?

I must say, I think it's a continual struggle. I think of playing music is sort of like a form of meditation. You never just get to say, “oh, I've mastered that, and I never have to think about it again.”

And so for me, music on a good day, music is something that it connects you to this higher energy. I think it feels like a divine energy personally. And so when you get caught up in the perfection mind set, that is sort of like you getting too self focused. And so I really try to zoom out when I see myself doing that. Music is just so much bigger than I think we give it credit for.

How did the creative process of writing a book differ or stay the same, from writing music or playing music?

Well, I must say, it took a lot of discipline, more than I was used to. And so it was a pretty intense journey. It's always super hard to sit down and write. I don't know what that is. I'd rather like pay my taxes. But then once I was doing it, I did start to feel a lot of the same creative buzz that I feel when I write music or when I perform.

The ending of the book came to me really suddenly, as like a download kind of thing, and that's exactly how songwriting feels. So it was really interesting to see that writing a book did have these moments that paralleled songwriting.

Dozens of Tuskegee Airmen went missing in action during World War II. Most of them have not been found. Who were these men and what happened to them? In her book, “Forgotten Souls,” NPR investigative correspondent Cheryl W. Thompson tells their stories.

This episode was produced by Rennie Svirnovskiy and edited by Justine Yan. The original interview was produced by Ryan Benk and Ed McNulty. Mastering by Jimmy Keeley.

We'd love to hear from you. Send us an email at TheSundayStory@npr.org.

Listen to Up First on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

Copyright 2026, NPR

Agatha Smithson is that rare person who lacks the gene for self-doubt. Brash and brutally dismissive of anyone who disagrees with her, Agatha is the main character and unreliable narrator of Nancy Foley's deviously plotted debut novel, “I Am Agatha.”

If you're one of those readers who prizes likeability above all else in your fictional characters, you may be inclined to give “I Am Agatha” a pass. But that would be a mistake. This is a strange, fresh story about artistic ambition and personal autonomy willingly abridged for love. And, all too unusually, the love affair here is between two women in their 60s.

Agatha's character is inspired by the real-life minimalist painter Agnes Martin, known for her canvases covered in graphs and stripes. Martin lived for years in New Mexico near Georgia O'Keeffe.

Diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, Martin was a solitary person, although she had significant relationships with women. Foley, who grew up in New Mexico, says that her novel was inspired by rumors of such a relationship between a friend of her grandmother's and Martin.

“I Am Agatha” takes place mostly in the 1970s, with flashbacks to Agatha's rough youth in Canada and allusions to a hard time in New York, including a stint at Bellevue. New Mexico offers Agatha a new start and an austere landscape that jibes with her art and own personality. Here's Agatha, in her typical brusque, pared-down manner of speaking, describing the view from the adobe house she built herself high upon a mesa:

My house looks west out over a canyon that although far from any ocean whatsoever yet resembles one in scope and light. This ocean canyon heaves waves of shale and basalt, quartz and silt. Cloud shadows flit across its rock floor like ghost boats.

There is no other place on Earth like Mesa Portales. I have traveled to many places, so mine is not an uninformed opinion. The truth is that there is a hierarchy. Some places are objectively better, just as some people are objectively better than others.

The "objectively better" person Agatha wants to bring to live with her on Mesa Portales is her longtime secret love, a woman named Alice who's now declining into dementia. But, there are two obstacles to Agatha's caretaking plan: The first is Alice's adult son, Frank Jr., who plans to move his mother into a care facility in Taos.

At one point, Agatha and Frank argue over this plan and Frank Jr. drops some bombshell news. Agatha tells us: "I'm startled but won't let him take my own breath away from me and puff himself up with it." It's hard not to root for a character who knows how to sling words around like that.

The other obstacle seems more immovable: It's Alice's daughter, Lorna, who's buried in the backyard of Alice's house. Years ago, Lorna was murdered by her abusive husband, and Alice likes to sit every day by her daughter's grave, which is planted with violets and lilacs.

I'm not giving much away when I point out that Agatha's practical, if grotesque, solution to this dilemma is revealed in the cover art of “I Am Agatha;” metaphorically, that book jacket hits readers over the head with a shovel.

This novel becomes even more deliciously weird as a pattern emerges: That is, whenever Agatha talks with Frank Jr. or other characters about Alice's welfare, Alice is never present. She's always taking a walk or a nap or just unavailable.

It becomes impossible to ignore that Agatha is estranged from a lot of people. She makes brief enigmatic references to a falling out with O'Keefe, and an academic colleague, and a parasitic graduate student who's writing her thesis on Agatha's art. As a narrator, Agatha turns out to be no more forthcoming to us readers than she's been to any of these characters — former friends she now regards as antagonists.

In its ingeniously duplicitous narrative structure, “I Am Agatha” is reminiscent of Patricia Highsmith's magnificent Ripley novels. Not that Agatha is an amoral con artist like Tom Ripley, but she will do anything to safeguard Alice, her fading love. "We are all of us hunted animals from the moment we are born," says Agatha, contemplating old age and death. None of us will outrun Mortality, but watching brilliant and wily Agatha try is captivating.

Copyright 2026, NPR, Fresh Air

Fifty years ago this month, 1,500 people flooded a new art gallery in downtown Minneapolis. It was 1976, and the air was filled with cigarette smoke and chatter from the shoulder-to-shoulder crowd. People who were in attendance say the atmosphere was buzzing, because something was different about this space: Every piece of artwork on display was made by a woman.

“It was so many people that they had to take turns coming in and out of the space,” artist Patricia Olson recalls. “It spilled out into the alleyway and out into the street.”

This was the opening of the WARM: A Women’s Collective Art Space, a feminist gallery, in the Wyman Building.

“Everybody at the next gallery meeting just kind of sat back and said, ‘What the heck was that?’” Olson says. “It was overwhelming, and we felt that we had arrived.”

A WARM front

WARM stands for the Women’s Art Registry of Minnesota, a feminist art collective that artists Susan Fiene and Lynne Lockie had launched three years earlier.

On April 10, an exhibition marking the 50th anniversary of the gallery opened at the Kickernick Gallery, which is just across the alley from where the original WARM gallery once stood. “LEGACY: The Women of WARM Gallery” features the work of 73 of WARM’s original 90 members, from tiny sculpture to massive paintings and a virtual reality experience.

“During the winter of 1973-74, we created a phone tree to locate other women artists,” Fiene recalls in the exhibition catalog. “WARM needed structure for the gallery project. We hammered out the constitution on my dining room table.”

Members created WARM as a platform for women artists when galleries and museums were barely showing work by women at all. They created a mission statement: “To establish women's artistic and cultural experience as a valuable and integral part of society.”

WARM would go on to become one of the most prominent women’s art collectives in the country, drawing the attention of the groundbreaking feminist artists Judy Chicago, Betye Saar, Alice Neel and Miriam Schapiro, the latter of whom attended the 1976 gallery opening and reported that “it is the most elegant of the five such collective art galleries in the United States and that it is very professional.”

The “Legacy” exhibition has provided an experience for the members of WARM, as well as the hundreds of students and artists they mentored, to reflect.

“It never occurred to me when I was a young woman, making things at my dining room table and then in my basement, while I was raising three little kids, that I could actually become an artist,” says artist Harriet Bart. “Through WARM, I learned it was possible through cooperation and hard work.”

Mona Lisa and other stories

Bart and Hazel Belvo are old friends as well as artists whose work has been collected by leading art institutions, from the Minnesota Museum of American Art, Minneapolis Institute of Art and the Walker Art Center to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Library of Congress and the National Museum of Women in the Arts.

They sit next to each other, with a stack of old photos and other WARM ephemera, in Belvo's airy home studio up on a hillside in Golden Valley. Bart opens a pamphlet with the “Mona Lisa” on its cover and reads.

“‘If the ‘Mona Lisa’ had been painted by a woman, the world would probably never have seen it,’ which I think is really true,” Bart said. “So, if you believe a creative talent must not be wasted just because it belongs to a woman, help make sure it doesn't happen. Become a member of the most controversial art gallery in the Twin Cities.”

Bart and Belvo remember how, in the 1970s, even local galleries and museums were not representing women. Bart ticks off data from exhibitions at the Walker Art Center: “These are solo shows: 1979 — five men, two women. 1980 — seven men, one woman. 1981— six men, one woman,” Bart says. “Then the group shows: in 1979 there were 75 men, 15 women; 1980, 67 men and 12 women; and in 1981, 171 men and 68 women.”

“Numbers speak,” Belvo says.

WARM, Belvo and Bart say, wanted to change those numbers. They point to the Walker Art Center exhibitions of late: In the past year, there have many blockbuster solo art exhibitions by women, including Dyani White Hawk’s “Love Language” and Christine Sun Kim’s “All Day All Night”

“This is a really important movement, a very important time in the history of women and art, and in particular in our area,” Bart says. “Those of us who know the story are fading away.”

‘Most unnatural and most fabulous’: Warming to the art of consensus

A few days later, and a few days before the exhibition opening, Bart joined other WARM members Patricia Olson and Vesna Kittelson at the Kickernick Gallery, surrounded by the artwork of the feminist collective: Quimetta Perle’s textile featuring Georgia politician Stacey Abrams; Marty Nash’s bold, abstract acrylic painting; Joyce Lyon’s pond surface in oil stick; and Vicki Lee Johnston’s mysterious nestlike sculpture made of steel and sheep hair.

They reminisce about the exhibitions, the grant writing and gallery sitting that was part of a member’s duties, and the visiting guest speakers of the feminist celebrity kind — such as art historian Linda Nochlin, who had penned the seminal feminist essay “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” just two years before WARM formed.

Members also created the triennial publication, the WARM Journal, which featured the work of local poets and writers.

“One of the problems back in the mid-70s was that women's work was not being written about. When it was written about, it was not written about in any sort of way that made sense from our point of view as artists,” Olson says.

“If you don't understand a woman's life, you don't understand the work that women are making,” Bart adds.

There were also monthly member meetings, which many say became foundational to their future careers.

“Those Saturday meetings were endless, and we sat in our directors chairs in the circle, and we worked on any given topic or subject that needed to be dealt with to reach consensus,” Bart says. “I learned a lot about trust and listening: Instead of just listening to my own voice, listening to the other voices and how we could do things together that we couldn’t do alone.”

“We did not want to have a hierarchical organization,” Olson adds. “There were absolutely no guidelines for putting together an organization like this. We were feeling it out, which was both exciting and wonderful, and it was consternating at the same time.”

Kittelson had recently arrived in the U.S. from what was then communist Yugoslavia when she joined WARM. She says these meetings were eye-opening.

“The process was fascinating, unknown to me, and the first signs of my comprehension of democracy,” Kittelson says. “It was natural here, but to me, it was most unnatural and most fabulous.”

‘Where would I be without them?’

For the next 15 years, the gallery was run collectively by its 90 members. It closed in 1991. Members point to a few causes: The rent increase at the Wyman Building and the progress WARM had made. Many members went on to exhibit their work across the country and teach at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, the University of Minnesota, St. Catherine University and more.

“Many of these people stayed in touch,” Olson says. “They became colleagues in other projects. They formed deep friendships and deep aesthetic connections with each other.”

Even with the gallery closure, WARM continued to mount exhibitions and ran a mentorship program through 2018. That same year, archivist and artist Heather Carroll, a mentee of WARM, curated an exhibition at St. Catherine University, “Roots and Fruits: Exploring the History and Impact of the Women’s Art Registry of Minnesota.”

“I am definitely a fruit of WARM. Where would I be without them? They've been my teachers, my mentors, my friends,” Carroll says. She has also been compiling an ongoing WARM oral history project for the Minnesota Historical Society, which she will present May 28 at the Kickernick.

“I'm looking back to look forward. What can we learn from the women of WARM and the way they did things and bring it into the now so that we can do better?” Carroll says.

Some WARM members have died since the gallery closed in 1991, while others left Minnesota long ago. Many, however, continue their art practices — like Bart, who recently moved into an art studio in the Kickernick building. Much of the art in the “Legacy” exhibition was made by WARM artists in the past few years.

A 50-year crescendo

On April 12, dozens of WARM members came from across the state and country to attend an opening reception at the Kickernick, which also had a shoulder-to-shoulder crowd.

“I'm feeling exhilarated,” Patricia Olson says. “It probably rivals the 1,500 that showed up at the original opening 50 years ago.”

“It's like a crescendo, a 50-year crescendo,” Belvo says.

Member Quimetta Perle traveled to Minneapolis from the East Coast, where she’s still making art.

“I've gotten to see a lot of my friends and colleagues from 50 years ago,” Perle says. For Perle, WARM was “a gallery in which I could show absolutely anything I wanted without any censorship whatsoever, and that was so important and so thrilling.”

Member Dani Roach recalls how difficult it was to balance a career working in libraries and her artistic pursuits when she became a member in the 1980s.

“A number of the other artists had full-time jobs too, and you saw that it could work, that you could squeeze some time to make your work, to sit at the gallery, to go to meetings,” Roach says. “I look back on those years — I have no idea how I did it, and I'm so glad I did it.”

‘We could do this too’

Painter Nicole Drilling studies a frame covered in glass doorknobs with the text “Easy” within, a piece by WARM member Susan Bacik.

“Look at all these people here. They touched so many lives and made so many things possible through the power of coming together and deciding their own fate,” says Drilling, tears in her eyes. “This is very inspiring.”

Drilling was an MCAD student and a mentee of MCAD professors Patricia Olson and Elizabeth Erickson, who passed away in 2024. Drilling doesn’t see this kind of support system for women artists today.

“These women were like, ‘We're not getting shown anywhere. The only way we do it is if we do it ourselves, and we do it together,’” Drilling says. “These times absolutely call for that. The show is very timely for taking a moment to recognize that we could do this too.”

Author and MPR host and newscaster Emily Bright’s newest collection of poems took 20 years to make. It paints pictures of spring and asks the question: What seeds are we planting for the future?

The most recent poem in the collection was written as a response to the shooting at Annunciation Catholic Church and School in Minneapolis. Bright said although this collection ranges over the course of many years, a thread emerged.

“It goes from New England where I grew up, there's some poems set in Ghana, where I lived briefly, and a lot in the Midwest,” she said. “And a lot of these poems were about connections across divides, with other people, our connections with the environment.”

Bright said she hopes others will share her poems.

“There's no greater compliment,” she said. “If it makes you stop and look at the world around you and appreciate it, I can't ask for better than that.”

The book is out Tuesday. Cover art is by Minnesota artist Evan Abrahamson and published by Duluth-based Holy Cow! Press. Bright will be doing multiple readings of her book throughout the state. You can find those times here.

The first reading is at Next Chapter Books in St. Paul at 6 p.m on April 14.

Listen to the conversation and hear some of Bright’s poetry by clicking the player above.

One of the most iconic scenes in 20th-century American cinema unfolds in the movie “Fargo,” where a villain loads a human foot into a wood chipper as a pregnant cop arrives to arrest him.

Actor Peter Stormare played the villain, Gaear Grimsrud, and will be on hand Tuesday night for the film's 30th anniversary screening at the Fargo Theater.

“I can't wait, and I've never seen the movie,” he said. “So now I can see the movie and see what made it so good.”

That’s right: Stormare has seen clips from the movie but never seen “Fargo” all the way through.

“That's a good thing about human beings. We don't like to look at ourselves, and we don't like to listen to ourselves on tape,” he said.

Stormare and the Coen brothers

Stormare landed the role of Gaear Grimsrud after acting at The Public Theater in New York City alongside Frances McDormand, he said. McDormand is married to Joel Coen, who directed “Fargo” with his brother, Ethan.

Stormare said the brothers wanted to cast him as Grimsrud after seeing his performance in New York.

“They asked me, also, ‘Can you get a beard?’ [Grimsrud] had a beard that was also blonde. So they dyed my hair and my beard blonde, platinum blonde. And I met them in Soho, and they started laughing and said, ‘You look like Kenny Rogers on methamphetamine.’”

Stormare complained that his look was causing too many people to stop and stare at him, and he asked to ditch either the beard or the hairstyle.

“And they said, ‘No, you're right. Just have the hair.’”

Grimsrud is a violent man whose presence is menacing, as he is a man of few words.

“That was what made him special, because he didn't speak much,” Stormare said. “But when he spoke, he sort of spoke in his own language.”

To perform Grimsrud, Stormare said he channeled Clint Eastwood’s performances from movies like “Dirty Harry” and "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.”

“His daring approach to acting, no one had done before. He was a groundbreaking trendsetter, for me, who knew that silence speaks louder than words,” Stormare said.

Stormare’s character may have been mostly silent, but the rest of the cast had lots to say in the film — and their accents scream Minnesotan.

Minnesota accents and other stereotypes

Ethan and Joel Coen grew up in the Twin Cities, and the accents and speech patterns of their characters had to match their vision.

The end result was exaggerated accents, with characters frequently exclaiming “Oh geez,” “You betcha” and “Oh ya” along with other stereotypical Minnesota-isms.

To nail down the accent, the Coen brothers reached out to a friend of theirs who was a reporter in Minnesota, according to Todd Melby, author of “A Lot Can Happen in the Middle of Nowhere,” a book about the making of “Fargo.”

Melby also works as an editor for MPR News.

“Joel and Ethan said to him, ‘Our next project takes place in Minnesota. So we want to find someone who's got that accent. Do you think you could do interviews with people, and that way, we would have several people to choose from who are real Minnesotans, who sound like they're from Minnesota?’” said Melby.

Melby said the Coen brothers also played up the weather. Characters wade through deep snow, and the sun rarely appears.

“It wasn't just that people were insulted because of the accent; their weather was also insulted. Like, it made the weather look really, really bad,” Melby said.

He adds that the Minnesota stereotypes in “Fargo” rubbed a lot of people the wrong way. But the film had an undeniable impact on the state.

“‘Fargo’ put Minnesota on the map nationally. Before that, Minnesota culture — the snow, the accents — had never been portrayed on the big screen,” he said.

Now, 30 years later, the region has embraced the film. The Fargo Theatre has a wooden statue of Marge Gunderson, and tourists can check out the famous wood chipper featured at the end of the film. The Fargo-Moorhead visitors center has both the original and a replica, which tourists take advantage of for photo ops.

“Some people put their babies in the chipper as a joke. Other people, if they have a tiny little dog, will put their tiny little dog in the chipper. They also have a fake leg you can put in,” Melby said.

Tuesday night, though, the hottest place in town will be inside the Fargo Theatre.

Emily Beck, the theater’s executive director, said the venue had to close during the pandemic. Attendance hasn’t gotten to what it used to be. She hopes that this showing of the movie will help rebuild interest in the theater, which is celebrating its own 100th anniversary.

“I hope that this brings some people in, maybe for their first cinematic experience, but primarily people who haven't been to a movie theater for a while,” Beck said. “And I hope they sit down, have a fantastic time and they're reminded of how precious and unique that experience is.”

The movie begins at 7 p.m. with a Q&A session with Stormare shortly after. It’ll be the first in the Fargo Theatre’s new centennial film series, which will screen a film from each decade since the theatre opened.

A new film featured at the Minneapolis St. Paul International Film Festival is celebrating Indigenous dance.

Meskwaki filmmaker Oogie Push is also making her feature directorial debut at the 45th Minneapolis St. Paul International Film Festival with “Why We Dance” — a documentary rooted in the Twin Cities that pushes back against the way Indigenous stories have long been told on screen.

"It's a love letter to each character," Push said. "It's a love letter to the land. It's a love letter to our dancing. It's a love letter to our ancestors."

“Why We Dance” had its world premiere at MSPIFF on Sunday night. It will screen again on April 18. A panel with Indigenous filmmakers from Minnesota whose work is also featured in the festival will follow.

“Why We Dance” follows Indigenous people from across the United States, Hawaii and Mexico who share a deep connection to their culture through dance. The film opens on the wind-swept prairie of the Rosebud Reservation, following fancy dancer Canku OneStar across his homelands.

The film also visits O'ahu and Honolulu, where Pualeilani Paia Kamahoahoa and Paisley Paiea Kamahoahoa of the Kingdom of Hawai'i speak candidly about the challenge of practicing their cultural traditions authentically — beyond the cultural tourism that shapes how visitors to the islands experience Indigenous life.

The film also follows Mary Anne and Sergio Quiroz of Indigenous Roots Cultural Center in St. Paul and their travels to Mataxhi, Mexico. The film introduces Loa Miles Simoes, a Meskwaki tribal member adopted into a non-Native family and raised in Hawai'i, whose journey back to her homeland is central to the film's emotional arc.

Deep roots

The stories each have deep roots.

One has to do with how the Meskwaki people purchased their land back in Iowa. In 1923, the U.S. Department of the Interior sent a letter to more than 500 Native American tribes demanding an end to traditional religion, cultural celebrations and social gatherings, including social dances like pow wows.

The threat was not abstract — tribes faced the potential withholding of medical services and trade opportunities, and even the seizure of more land. Many were forced to speak their native languages and practice their ceremonies in secret.

The Meskwaki resisted. What had already been celebrated as a traditional harvest gathering — a multi-week celebration of corn, horse races, games and dance — had by the 1920s evolved into something with broader reach, drawing visitors from across the region as pow wow culture spread across the United States and Canada. When the tribal pow wow committee recognized the onlookers gathering to watch the celebration, they began charging admission.

"That's how we bought our land back," Push said.

The film began as something far more modest.

Push's cousin, Jarod Pushetonequa, approached Push about shooting footage of pow wow dancers for his performance company. Push connected him with Ryan Stopera, a Minneapolis-based filmmaker, and the team began shooting around the Twin Cities: at Minnehaha Falls, Crosby Lake Farm and eventually Dreamland, a black box theater that became the project's first real home.

Push first came on the project as an interviewer. When the original director stepped away, Stopera — acting as the film’s producer and director of photography — asked if she wanted to step in. What followed was a close creative partnership — with editor Ryan McGuire also central to the process — that Stopera says was defined less by disagreement than by the effort to keep Push's own voice where it belonged.

"The only pushback with Oogie and I was her humility in not wanting to center herself, and I encouraged her strongly to do so," Stopera said, "because her story and her voice is so powerful."

The thread of dance

Push herself appears as a character, tracing the history of the Meskwaki Settlement and the pivotal role the pow wow played in buying it back. Over 76 minutes, a supporting cast of dancers, family members and community organizers add texture and depth. Each one is a thread in a larger tapestry about why dance matters culturally and politically.

"I really believe that if you are with the right people, magic happens," Push said. "You just create this synergy and create something beautiful."

The film draws on deeply personal territory for Push. Her uncles are interviewed in it, and her grandfather created the Eagle Dance that appears on screen. Push is also developing a separate collection of Meskwaki cultural documentaries, including a full-length film on the history of the pow wow.

Stopera says learning that history of how the Meskwaki purchased their land back has been one of the most galvanizing parts of the project for him.

"The joyful resilience and defiance of the no dancing letter, the economic ingenuity of the tribe just down the line is really inspiring and motivating," said Stopera.

"We just kept following the relationships and the stories that all connected together," said Stopera.

Both Push and Stopera were deliberate about the film's emotional register.

"A lot of fellow doc filmmakers and I are critiquing how much trauma is used to gain attention in the field," Stopera said. "We know that there's so much more depth to the stories, specifically of BIPOC communities, that need not center trauma."

Push agreed, saying that the film focuses more on cultural resilience.

"It's more about our joy and our love for dancing and how it makes us feel and how it connects us to everything. I just love that people will be able to see our people, our homelands, our joy, and see that no matter where we come from, we're all the same."

Push said she hopes audiences carry something with them when they leave the theater.

"I hope that ‘Why We Dance’ adds a blessing to the audience's life, to their day, that they carry it with them when they leave the theater and they're reminded of their own connection to this land, regardless of where they came from, and connection to their ancestors and how we're all interconnected."

Still Showing: Indigenous & Aboriginal Films at MSPIFF 45

• Why We Dance — Sat 4/18, 4:15 p.m., The Main 1

• The Condor Daughter — Tue 4/14, 2:00pm, The Main 5, Fri 4/17, 9:30 p.m., The Main 5

• Mārama — Tue 4/14, 9:50 p.m., The Main 1

• The Boom (short) — Tue 4/14, 7:05 p.m., The Main 1 & Sat 4/18, 4:15 p.m., Film North

• Aki — Wed 4/15, 2:30 p.m., The Main 2

• Comparsa — Fri 4/17, 2:15pm, The Main 2 & Sun 4/19, 11:20 a.m., The Main 2

• Source to Sea: A Winter Migration — Sat 4/18, 7:00 p.m., The Main 2 & Sun 4/19, 12:00pm, Edina

• Medicine Ball — Sat 4/18, 2:00 p.m., The Main 2

• Legend of Fry-Roti: Rise of the Dough (short) — Sun 4/19, 1:55 p.m., The Main 2

The Rock & Roll Hall of Fame announced its 2026 class of inductees on Monday night, a list of eight performers that includes an R&B legend, a heavy metal band and a drummer-turned-frontman whose music dominated mainstream pop-rock in the 1980s.

In recent years, the Rock Hall has expanded its definition of rock icons to include artists from a wider range of genres and backgrounds. The basic rules for induction have remained the same, though:

Artists become eligible for nomination 25 years after the release of their first commercial recording (in other words, artists whose debuts came out in 2001 are newly eligible this year). There are four different categories of inductees:

• Performers whose music and cultural impact has changed the course of rock and roll.

• Influential musicians whose innovative styles have propelled cultural change, which this year includes key innovative voices in African and Latin music.

• A "musical excellence" award designated for writers, producers and session musicians who have played a key role in rock history.

• The Ahmet Ertegun award, honoring industry professionals who are not performers but have made a significant impact on the business of music.

The official induction ceremony will take place on Nov. 14 at the Peacock Theater in Los Angeles. It will be streamed on ABC and Disney+ in December.

Performer Category

Phil Collins
Even though he was inducted into the Rock Hall as a member of Genesis in 2010, it was Collins' solo career, especially a string of hits in the 1980s, that helped turn him into one of the most commercially successful artists of that decade. The drummer-turned-singer is widely known for popularizing the "gated snare" recording technique — which cut off the lingering reverb from the drums — and resulted in an explosive sound that became a signature sound of the era. Collins' career spans over five decades and has earned him a long list of accolades, including an Academy Award for best original song in 2000 for "You'll Be In My Heart" from Disney's Tarzan.

Billy Idol
The British rocker Billy Idol enters the Rock Hall on his second nomination. Known for hits like "Dancing with Myself," "Rebel Yell" and "White Wedding," the bleach-blonde singer's punk rock attitude continues to reach fans around the world more than four decades since the release of his debut solo album.

Iron Maiden
Heavy metal fans rejoice! Iron Maiden is finally being inducted into the Rock Hall on its third nomination. Since the 1980s, the band has been redefining heavy rock with anthemic storytelling, full-throttle instrumentation and spooky iconography. Different iterations of the band's mascot, Eddie, have appeared on Iron Maiden's album covers and merch for decades, becoming a key fixture of a particular strain of teen rebellion.

Joy Division/New Order
After three nominations, Joy Division and New Order are entering the Rock Hall under a joint induction, recognizing the link between the groups. Both bands featured guitarist Bernard Sumner, bassist Peter Hook and drummer Stephen Morris, who were forced to reimagine their sound after the death of singer and songwriter Ian Curtis in 1980. Joy Division's moody post-punk sound, which featured the baritone vocals of Curtis, gave way to New Order's more electronic, dance-driven rhythms, which proved massively popular in the 1980s.

Oasis
Today is gonna be the day that Oasis gets into the Rock Hall. (Well, November 14 will be the actual day.) The Britpop group, led by brothers Liam and Noel Gallagher, has had a resurgence since their highly-anticipated reunion tour last year (which briefly broke Ticketmaster and had fans on both sides of the Atlantic crying their hearts out).

Sade
The English band named for lead vocalist Sade Adu changed the sonic landscape of the 1980s and '90s with its blend of jazz, soul and R&B. The velvety, intimate quality of Sade's music echoes across generations of artists, from Drake to Adele, and has now earned the group Rock Hall inductee status.

Luther Vandross
After starting his career as a background vocalist for stars including David Bowie, Roberta Flack, Stevie Wonder and many more, Luther Vandross became an R&B and soul legend under his own name, thanks to the sheer power of his voice beginning in the 1980s. (He was also a producer for A-listers like Whitney Houston, Aretha Franklin and Diana Ross.) With over a dozen studio albums, his influence has reached across generations to stars including Beyoncé, Alicia Keys and most recently, Kendrick Lamar, who named one of the biggest hits of 2025 after him. Vandross will be inducted after his first Rock Hall nomination.

Wu-Tang Clan
You can see the Rock Hall's effort to expand the definition of rock icons in past years particularly strongly when it comes to the hip-hop acts it inducts. At least one act from the genre — including the Notorious B.I.G., Missy Elliott, A Tribe Called Quest and Jay-Z — each year since 2020. Considering Wu-Tang Clan's collective and individual output, which spans more than 30 years and expanded the East Coast's mark on the genre with references to vintage kung-fu movies and dark humor, it's no wonder the Rock Hall is finally giving the Staten Island crew its long-deserved flowers.

Early Influence Award

Celia Cruz
The Cuban singer, widely known as The Queen of Salsa, becomes the first primarily Spanish-language artist to be inducted into the Rock Hall. After rising through the ranks of Havana's music scene in the 1950s, Cruz left her home country in exile and eventually landed in New York City, where she became one of the most prominent voices of the legendary salsa label, Fania Records.

Fela Kuti
At the end of the 1960s and into the '70s, the Nigerian singer and political activist helped create the Afrobeat genre by combining West African highlife with elements of jazz and funk. Known for his electrifying, unconventional live performances, the multi-instrumentalist is the Rock Hall's first African pop star.

Queen Latifah
Queen Latifah was only 19 years old when she released her debut album, All Hail the Queen, in 1989. Female empowerment has been at the forefront of her music and image since the beginning of her career. With songs like "Ladies First" and "U.N.I.T.Y.," Queen Latifah changed the landscape of male-dominated rap; alongside her music career, she has found arguably greater success as an actor.

MC Lyte
Another teenage pioneer in the world of hip-hop, the Brooklyn-raised rapper gained popularity with socially-conscious lyricism that tackled issues including street violence and drug addiction.

Gram Parsons
Gram Parsons played with The Byrds and helped spearhead the band's seminal country rock album Sweetheart of the Rodeo, which came out in 1968 — but he was technically considered a "sideman" and not a full member of the band. That's why Parsons was not inducted alongside his bandmates when The Byrds entered the Rock Hall in 1991. Now, the Americana visionary — who recorded a pair of celebrated and influential solo albums that featured duets with Emmylou Harris and also played with the Flying Burrito Brothers and the International Submarine Band — gets his due for melding folk, Southern twang and rock and roll before his death at the age of 26, in 1973.

Musical Excellence Award

Linda Creed
In the 1970s, Linda Creed wrote and produced love songs that would come to define the sound of Philadelphia soul, including the Stylistics' hits "Stop, Look, Listen (To Your Heart)" and "You Are Everything," both of which were later covered by Diana Ross and Marvin Gaye. After being diagnosed with cancer at age 26, Creed wrote the song "The Greatest Love of All." Whitney Houston's rendition of the song would go on to top Billboard's Hot 100 chart shortly after Creed's death in 1986.

Arif Mardin
Arif Mardin's producer credits span more than four decades and dozens of legendary collaborations, including with Aretha Franklin, the Bee Gees, John Prine and Norah Jones. Born in Turkey, Mardin started working at Atlantic Records in the early 1960s and eventually became an executive and one of the label's most reliable hitmakers.

Jimmy Miller
Jimmy Miller signed a recording contract as a singer before finding his true calling behind the console, particularly for his work with the Rolling Stones across five albums: Beggars Banquet, Let It Bleed, Sticky Fingers, Exile on Main St. and Goats Head Soup. Known for encouraging and harnessing a group's raw, live energy in recording sessions, the producer left an indelible mark on the sound of rock and roll in the 1960s and '70s.

Rick Rubin
Rick Rubin co-founded Def Jam Recordings while studying film and television at New York University. He went on to turn the label into a powerhouse of 1980s and '90s hip-hop, producing and releasing albums by acts including LL Cool J, Beastie Boys, Run-DMC and Public Enemy. He later founded the label American Recordings and served as co-president of Columbia Records. Since the founding of American Recordings, and particularly in his work with Johnny Cash, Rubin has become known for his skill in musical subtraction — paring down a recording to its essential elements.

Ahmet Ertegun Award

Ed Sullivan
He began his career as a sports journalist, but in 1948, Sullivan became the host of a television program — originally called Toast of the Town and later renamed The Ed Sullivan Show — that was welcomed into millions of people's living rooms every week. Sullivan's show widely introduced Americans to countless musicians, including Elvis Presley, The Jackson 5, The Supremes and, maybe most famously, The Beatles, whose first appearance on his show, in February 1964, was, at the time, one of the most-watched programs in history.

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