Twin City Life
Local art and culture—and a brand new project to help it grow
Friends,
Last August on a road trip to a family reunion, I had an epiphany. For years in these weekly letters, I’ve cast a wide net to gather art and culture. But what would happen if I only focused on what was right in front of me? What if I stopped looking elsewhere for art and culture and instead tried to focus—really focus—on what was happening here in Minneapolis? I thought it would feel limiting to ignore the big city art scenes and the internet, but it turns out the exact opposite happened.
Not only did I uncover a thriving Native art and culture right in my backyard, the letter I wrote about it traveled all the way to students in Sydney and back again as they also explored the multicultural life around them. It reminds me of how the Lakota artist Dyani White Hawk described her own creative process spiraling outward through relationships:
This is nowhere close to being just about me. I'm always blown away by the many, many people in my life that got me to a place where I'm able to make works like this. There were twenty people who helped me make this sculpture. And then there are all of the people who supported them as they showed up in my studio to help make the artwork.
And then I'm thinking about the people in Japan making beads, the people in the Czech Republic making beads, the people at art foundations who give us financial support so we're able to do what we do. It spirals out and out and out! The people who make the sinew, the people who make the thread, the people who crafted my panels, the people who came together last minute to build the base structure. There's a network of people we can't even wrap our heads around, and none of it comes together in its wholeness without this huge network of people.
None of this comes together in its wholeness without a huge network of people. Read it again: none of this comes together in its wholeness without a huge network of people. Her sculpture isn’t “hers” exactly, but a whole community of artists and friends and family who made it possible. Of course, that’s true for all art and culture—the good stuff isn’t rooted in ideas alone but in people, in community in history, in place. That’s a vision for a shared creative life.
Her words have been reverberating in my head for weeks, and I’ve kept thinking about how to expand on this idea. How do we help local art and culture grow while staying rooted in place and community? How do we support the artists and writers and dancers and performers who actually make it? And how do we make it easier for all of us to know what’s going on each month? These are questions we can live into for a long while, and I’ve started a brand new project to help:
Think of it like Still Life—if this was a monthly Advent calendar instead of a weekly letter. And the curated calendar is just the beginning. I have a year’s worth of ideas, and I’ll be sharing more about my creative process right here in Still Life along the way (like the criteria I use to find things, local art and culture I actually attend, conversations with new artists friends, and more).
Just this month, there are music festivals and art classes, group shows of emerging artists and teen pottery hours, writing panels and justice-oriented feasts, a Frankenstein choral ballet, a world premiere of reimagined Indian fables. Bach meets tango, two community-built art shows, Mississippi River puppets, and so much more. And it’s all happening right here by friends and neighbors in a twenty-mile radius.
Even if you’re not living nearby, I hope you take a look. I hope it inspires you to meet artists and communities in your own neighborhood waiting to share their gifts. More to come soon, but I’d like to end with some requests.
Twin City Readers: Would you pick a November event and go to it with friends? That’s the real goal here, right? Art and culture isn’t only something we consume—we make it together, and we grow it together.
All Readers: Would you take two minutes to share the direct link with at least two friends you know in the region who’d find TWIN CITY LIFE useful? And then would you ask them to do the same? Here it is again: www.twincity.life
If you want to copy/paste, you could say something like: “Hey [friend], I know we’re always looking for cool new things to do around town. Check out this new calendar filled with local art and culture we’ve never heard of before: www.twincity.life”
Thanks for considering, and as always, thanks for reading. Let’s get together, one day at a time.
Take care,
Michael
“ars poetica” by Danez Smith Fuck all that other shit even when the fog cleared the wrong sky on my mind the horizon at the end of pity is a useless sun, hotheaded and bitter-born light, let the daughter rise when my earth meets the clouds what her say? what next she believe in and nurse? my big bad for how long i spent making apologies for what I ain't do, caught myself sorry for bodies the nation caught in its borderless maw caught myself washing blood off someone else's hands. i'm off that, that being the mode that made a cage of guilt out my depression that being what fault I fell into & dressed into a lovely but ineffective grave. what i'm sorry for: making poetry into a house of rebuttals, a temple for the false gods of stagnant argument & dead-end feels. here, in these lines, in these rooms i add my blues & my gospels to the record of now, I offer my scratched golds to the blueprint of possible. dear reader, whenever you are reading this is the future to me, which means tomorrow is still coming, which means today still lives, which means there is still time for beautiful, urgent change which means there is still time to make more alive which means there is still poetry.
Wander through this extremely high-res image of the Garden of Earthly Delights
Seeking Unity with the Divine Through….Birds?
Where is your favorite hike? Where are your local meditation centers?
Love this project! I’m in the Twin Cities (well kind of. Scandia) and can’t wait to see and engage with more of the beautiful work that’s happening here! 💛