&nbsp;

You simply cannot have a spy thriller without a cluttered wall of photographs. Typically tacked up on a pinboard between newspaper clippings and marked-up maps, the collection of clues must then be connected, point to point, by an intricate, impossible web of red string. Nevermind that no one actually organizes evidence this way &mdash; as 20-year CIA veteran Gail Helt told <a href="https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2022/02/fbi-crazy-stringboard-recruiting-campaign.html">Slate</a> last year, their job is &ldquo;intelligence, not arts and crafts&rdquo; &mdash; this trope has nonetheless stuck in our collective imagination, dating back at least as far as 1979&rsquo;s BBC version of the Cold War classic Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. A conspiracy is afoot, we are convinced, if only our heroes can visually untangle the plot.

Curators find themselves in a similar position, tasked with presenting a series of disparate documents in just the right order, to thread connections from work to work. In the new exhibition <a href="https://walkerart.org/calendar/2023/multiple-realities-experimental-art-in-the-eastern-bloc-1960s-1980s" target="_blank">Multiple Realities: Experimental Art in the Eastern Bloc, 1960s &mdash;1980s</a>, the Walker Art Center&rsquo;s Visual Arts curator Pavel Pyś has set for himself a pinboard roughly half the size of Europe. Included here are works by nearly 100 artists from six different countries: East Germany, Romania,&nbsp;Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Hungary.

And that pinboard is indeed full of photographs. Photos, films, and collages make up the majority of the work in the show,&nbsp;many&nbsp;as documentation of&nbsp;performances. There are absurd happenings like playing an upright bass&nbsp;while&nbsp;laying flat&nbsp;on the ground, confrontational subversions of public space like facing backwards on an escalator, and&nbsp;flagrant actions making a mockery of strongman iconography like lazing about town with a placard of Lenin&#39;s face. Other installations resemble contact sheets, showing a full session of studio portraits or the process of shaving one&rsquo;s entire head. Elsewhere are experiments in music, sculpture, textiles, mail art, and early computer-based art. I&rsquo;ll warn you: it&rsquo;s a big show, and there is&nbsp;a lot to take in.

&nbsp;

<img alt="" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/mplsart-cdn-central/FileContainers/dbc436f1-82b6-48c7-bde1-4fb8ee2245f8/dbc436f1-82b6-48c7-bde1-4fb8ee2245f8.full.jpg" />

<img alt="" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/mplsart-cdn-central/FileContainers/9d74f522-1d8a-4594-a32b-ef59f4199312/9d74f522-1d8a-4594-a32b-ef59f4199312.full.jpg" /> 
Top: A selection of photos and mixed media collages by&nbsp;Teresa&nbsp;Gierzynska (Poland), 1977&ndash;1983. All works courtesy the artist and Gunia Nowik Gallery, Warsaw.&nbsp;Bottom: Orshi Drozdik&nbsp;(Hungary), Szempillant&aacute;s &eacute;s s&oacute;hajt&aacute;s-sorozat (Blink and Sight series), 1977. Photo collage. Courtesy the artist, Budapest; and Einspach Fine Art &amp; Photography, Berlin.

&nbsp;

To place artworks together in a gallery is to assert (or create) a connection, even when the artists&rsquo; lives may never have intersected. The curatorial team, which also includes William Hern&aacute;ndez Luege and Laurel Rand-Lewis, decided to take us not from country to country or decade to decade but room to room, organizing the show into four thematic sections: surveillance, sexuality, community, and technology. If you&rsquo;re trying to pay close attention, I can see this show leaving you feeling discombobulated, as one friend of mine attested. We skip from one practice to another, from one nation&nbsp;to the next in a matter of feet &mdash; from a Croatian photographing a performance in late &lsquo;70s Yugoslavia, for instance, to a German in the early &lsquo;90s making collages with her East Berlin secret police files from ten years earlier. The red threads, if they existed, would string clear across the room and make the whole show impassable.

Nestled in between each section of the show are &ldquo;content rooms&rdquo; that actually do kind of resemble a detective&rsquo;s evidence board, pairing brief historical synopses with archival photos and ephemera pinned to standing wooden lattices.&nbsp;Here, the curators illuminate this archive of artworks with a little bit of context about the particularities of each place and time. Any communist utopian would be well served to read these histories &mdash; even the Soviet states couldn&rsquo;t see eye to eye, particularly Hungary with its &ldquo;Goulash Communism&rdquo; and Czechoslovakia with its Prague Spring and &ldquo;Socialism with a Human Face.&rdquo; Given the show&#39;s explicit focus on art &ldquo;in the Eastern Bloc,&rdquo; politics is inescapable. As Pyś explains in the exhibition catalogue,&nbsp;&ldquo;Invoking the &lsquo;Eastern Bloc&rsquo; in our exhibition title fulfills a similar purpose: it conjures a geographic and temporal picture while also pointing to a set of ideological constraints under which art was made.&rdquo;

&nbsp;

<img alt="" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/mplsart-cdn-central/FileContainers/74f82c0a-7a83-4f3b-bf0f-898e19bf4e72/74f82c0a-7a83-4f3b-bf0f-898e19bf4e72.full.jpg" /><img alt="" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/mplsart-cdn-central/FileContainers/9dd819e1-1998-4352-85fa-acb05d6c96e3/9dd819e1-1998-4352-85fa-acb05d6c96e3.full.jpg" /> 
Top: Installation view of works by Sanja Iveković&nbsp;(Croatia/Yugoslavia),&nbsp;Ewa Partum (Poland), and Natalia LL (Poland). Bottom: Janina Tworek-Pierzgalska&nbsp;(Poland), Miejsca (Places), 1975. Tapestry, wool, steel (11 elements). Courtesy&nbsp;Central Museum of Textiles,&nbsp;Ł&oacute;dź.

&nbsp;

Common themes do emerge across multiple works, most notably a focus on the body as a political, social, and personal object. You don&rsquo;t have to live under a communist regime to understand the body as a site of control &mdash;&nbsp;abortion restrictions, mass incarceration, and transphobic laws are just some of the methods the Christians and the capitalists still use today. No surprise that the work made by women and queer artists stands out in a show full of small, bodily rebellions:&nbsp;a woman standing nude on a crowded street, a Brancusi-esque&nbsp;Erotic Pillow on its&nbsp;pink pedestal, and&nbsp;a bronze Human Egg each use the female body as a means of confrontation. Gabriele St&ouml;tzer&rsquo;s photo series shows glamour shots of&nbsp;a man posing in women&rsquo;s underwear against a spare white background. Years later, St&ouml;tzer discovered that her subject&nbsp;had&nbsp;been a&nbsp;Stasi informant the entire time. The private playfulness of the queer artists here brings tenderness and joy to the exhibition, records though they are of joy locked away in closets or used as vicious leverage by those in power.

The exhibition stands as a document of the many ways that individuals pushed back against the state &mdash; by flouting mores, by sneaking in subtexts, and by watching the watchers. One installation in the surveillance section shows secret photos taken of plainclothes agents during a crowded event in Romania. Another juxtaposes polaroids taken by the East German Stasi during secret home inspections beneath Jan S&aacute;gl&rsquo;s photos of his own home ahead of the presumed intrusions by Czech police&nbsp;&mdash; the former so the cops can cover their tracks, the latter to see what they&rsquo;ve disturbed. Proper spy versus spy stuff, and spooky as hell. In the corner, wrapped in gauze on a steel table, a block of ice the size of a cadaver slowly melts.

&nbsp;

<img alt="" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/mplsart-cdn-central/FileContainers/d08a6fa9-008e-44e4-83fa-6ae5307a057e/d08a6fa9-008e-44e4-83fa-6ae5307a057e.full.jpg" />

Above: (Top) Jan S&aacute;gl (Czech Republic/Czechoslovakia), Selections from Domovni prohlidka (House Search), 1973, printed 2022. Black-and-white photographs, black-and-white inkjet prints. Courtesy the artist, Prague. (Bottom) Simon Menner (Germany), Secret House Searches from the Images from the Secret Stasi Archive project, 2011-202, printed 2023. Digital prints. Courtesy the artist, Berlin.

Below: Gyula Konkoly (Hungary), V&eacute;rző eml&eacute;kmű&nbsp;(Bleeding Monument), 1969/2023. Metal, ice, cotton wool, gauze, potassium permanganate, plastic sheeting. Courtesy the artist, Budapest. Seen here on November 9 and November 26.

<img alt="" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/mplsart-cdn-central/FileContainers/ad37628a-8ec7-439c-8f16-abb7c2d84606/ad37628a-8ec7-439c-8f16-abb7c2d84606.full.jpg" />

&nbsp;

Halfway through, the exhibition grows more&nbsp;light-hearted, with bright illustrations, ping-pong tables, body-painting hippies, and a room full of blinking and blonking&nbsp;computer-based art. I can imagine the sudden buoyancy&nbsp;undercutting&nbsp;the severity&nbsp;in the&nbsp;first two galleries for some viewers; at the same time,&nbsp;it also rounds out the narrative of artistic life across this great span of years. Experimentation took many forms, as did&nbsp;resistance.

&nbsp;

<img alt="" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/mplsart-cdn-central/FileContainers/64acfbc2-240a-4217-bef6-8a1d985dcd94/64acfbc2-240a-4217-bef6-8a1d985dcd94.full.jpg" />

Wiktor Gutt and Waldemar Raniszewski (Poland), Malowanie Ciała (Painting the Body), 1981. 31 color slides. Pola Magnetyczne, Warsaw.

&nbsp;

Filled as it is with antiquated media (the slide projector televisions are particularly fun), the exhibition reports back a mostly black and white world of weirdos throwing their bodies against their governments, their countrymen, and, for sheer pleasure, against each other. Occasionally it all intersects in a single piece, as in Sanja Iveković&rsquo;s documentation of the artist drinking whiskey and feigning masturbation on a balcony overlooking the motorcade of Yugoslavian President Josip Broz, commonly known as Tito. We get views of the artist, the President&#39;s convertible, the crowded street below, and a lone figure on a nearby rooftop. The police demanded empty balconies for the parade, and within fifteen minutes, the police were knocking on her door, ordering her inside. It&rsquo;s a strange little vignette, and for Minneapolis, it might ring a faint bell &mdash; recalling our own moment of martial law, when residents were ordered off their own front porches at gunpoint during the early days of June 2020. Another thread to connect and untangle, from the police states of yore to the Cop Cities of today.

One thing that has always struck me during moments of art world controversy &mdash; Dana Schutz at the Whitney Biennial comes to mind, or Sam Durant at the Walker&rsquo;s own Sculpture Garden, for instance&nbsp;&mdash; is the confirmation that people really do care about art. They care enough to call it out &mdash;&nbsp;even to tear it down &mdash;&nbsp;when an artwork oversteps,&nbsp;leading on occasion to difficult, beautiful moments of collective learning and cultural evolution. It can be easy to forget, when we&rsquo;re locked inside our little rooms making our little pictures, that art has real power. It still astounds me the degree to which the strongmen of the 20th century feared that power, taking pains despite all their military might&nbsp;to declare what art should be and largely outlawing that which it should not. Many of the artists on view here&nbsp;suffered as a result,&nbsp;through limited opportunities, surveillance and harassment, and in some cases&nbsp;imprisonment.

Insofar as this exhibition takes a stand on matters of politics, the curators side with the individual against the authority. Works made in the style of socialist realism prescribed by these various regimes are absent, save for one&nbsp;painting and a&nbsp;series of linocuts that both carry subversive subtexts and one boring landscape painted by an artist who moonlighted as a much more mischievous community organizer (and ping-pong enthusiast). No artists here speak in favor of their governments.&nbsp;

The question of efficacy then bubbles up: how many little dents did these artists make in the Iron Curtain before it fell? To quantify that may be asking too much. To a piece, this is all work on a human scale, reacting with humor and cunning and caution to the slow, brutal inertia of society. The exhibition presents&nbsp;an impressive archive built on an astounding amount of research. Some works had been lost under floorboards or squirreled away in attics for decades, only now seeing the lights of a museum gallery.

There&rsquo;s a sense of finality here, of history bagged and tagged, and I&nbsp;wish for these artists and their artworks the chance to be free of the wretched statesmen and secret police that haunt this work&rsquo;s shadows. The American artists upstairs in the Walker&rsquo;s <a href="https://walkerart.org/calendar/2023/among-friends-the-generosity-of-judy-and-ken-dayton" target="_blank">Dayton Collection show</a> hang free from that burden &mdash;&nbsp;Warhol, Guston, Puryear, Nevelson, and others &mdash; and I wonder, when the American experiment comes to its inevitable end (sooner or later), how the ugliness of our systems will be used to frame the work we are now making. Of course, if we&rsquo;re at all worth our salt, we should already be asking ourselves that question.

The show provides a history lesson (several, in fact) through the eyes of the people that lived it and the curators who tracked them all down. Near the end of 1984, the villainous Thought Police agent O&rsquo;Brien declares, &ldquo;If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face &mdash; forever.&rdquo; He&rsquo;s not entirely wrong, and it is tempting to look back at this period as the proof (though we need look no further back than today&#39;s headlines, sadly). But as the title suggests, Multiple Realities offers an alternate vision of infinity: climbing up the steps out of the surveillance gallery, past the melting body of ice and the secret police polaroids, Jolanta Marcolla is there to greet us. In a grainy black and white video, up against a brick wall, she smiles and blows us sweet kisses over and over, on repeat &mdash; forever. (Or at least until March.)&nbsp;◼︎&nbsp;

&nbsp;

<img class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/mplsart-cdn-central/mocks/red-threads-multiple-realities-at-walker-art-center.gif" /> 
Jolanta Marcolla, Kiss, 1975. 16mm film (black and white, silent) transferred to digital. 
&nbsp;

<a href="https://walkerart.org/calendar/2023/multiple-realities-experimental-art-in-the-eastern-bloc-1960s-1980s" target="_blank">Multiple Realities: Experimental Art in the Eastern Bloc, 1960s &mdash;1980s</a> is on view now through March 10, 2024, at Walker Art Center.

All photos by Russ White. This article has been edited to correct the nationalities&nbsp;attributed to&nbsp;Ion Grigorescu and Jan S&aacute;gl.

Banner image: Matei Lăzărescu (Romania), Masa de bacaterie (Kitchen Table), 1978. Oil on canvas. Collection Ovidiu Sandor, Timișoara.

<hr />
This activity is made possible by the voters of Minnesota through a grant from the Metropolitan Regional Arts Council, thanks to a legislative appropriation from the arts and cultural heritage fund.&nbsp;<img alt="" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/mplsart-cdn-central/mocks/mrac-legacy-logos.png" width="778" />

The survey exhibition charts nearly 100 artists’ output across six Eastern Bloc countries during the 1960s, ‘70s, and ‘80s, presenting a complicated tapestry of experimental art behind the Iron Curtain

Red Threads: ‘Multiple Realities’ at Walker Art Center

&nbsp;

The words we use shape our perception &ndash; like art, language can shift how we see the world around us. When the name Bde Maka Ska was formally recognized by the state four years ago, it was an acknowledgment of the Dakota placename for a body of water that had later been renamed Lake Calhoun.

Going back to the Dakota name recognized the long history of Native people in the area, as well as the Native community living around and using the lake today. This past &ndash; and present &ndash; are celebrated through a new mural at the Bde Maka Ska Pavilion, painted by artists in this year&rsquo;s <a href="https://hennepintheatretrust.org/we-are-still-here/">We Are Still Here</a> cohort. 

The mural blends Native American symbolism with representations of Native people cycling, running, and canoeing across the lake. It will be unveiled as part of the <a href="https://www.minneapolisparks.org/project_updates/new-bde-maka-ska-pavilion-opens-october-20/">new pavilion&rsquo;s opening</a> on October&nbsp;20, and serves as the capstone project for this year&rsquo;s We Are Still Here artists.

&nbsp;

<img alt="" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/mplsart-cdn-central/FileContainers/aeecfbdb-9c1f-4fd0-a133-75e2ed97d0c6/aeecfbdb-9c1f-4fd0-a133-75e2ed97d0c6.full.jpg" />A digital mockup of the mural going in at Bde Maka Ska Pavilion, courtesy of Hennepin Theatre Trust.

&nbsp;

<h3>What is We Are Still Here?</h3>

The We Are Still Here program began in 2020 as a partnership between the <a href="https://nacdi.org/">Native American Community Development Institute (NACDI)</a> and <a href="https://hennepintheatretrust.org/">Hennepin Theatre Trust (HTT)</a>, and is currently funded by the McKnight Foundation and through&nbsp;a Minnesota State Arts Board Operating Support grant, thanks to a legislative appropriation from the arts and cultural heritage fund.

Each year, a group of Native artists is selected to work with a mentor in a public art medium. The first We Are Still Here cohort worked in digital art, culminating in a series of billboards displayed in downtown Minneapolis; this year&rsquo;s cohort learned and practiced mural-making.

The objectives of the We Are Still Here program are interconnected: organizers view it as a way to increase Native representation in public art across the Twin Cities, particularly in the Hennepin Theatre District and the American Indian Cultural Corridor, which are connected by a network of historic Dakota trails.

It&rsquo;s also an opportunity for Native artists to network with each other, learn a new medium, and access professional public art opportunities, says Angela Two Stars, a public artist and director of <a href="https://allmyrelationsarts.org/">All My Relations Arts</a>, a program of NACDI: &ldquo;We wanted to give an opportunity in creative placemaking for artists who may not typically work in these media.&rdquo;

Artist <a href="https://hennepintheatretrust.org/we-are-still-here-summer-cohen/">Summer Sky Cohen</a> came to this year&rsquo;s cohort with a background in beadwork and clothing design&nbsp;and found a unique connection when it came to painting Native clothing in the Bde Maka Ska mural.

&ldquo;I did not consider myself an artist, in all my years I had never imagined that my work in traditional &lsquo;crafts&rsquo; was an art,&rdquo; said Cohen. &ldquo;The coolest thing is being able to paint an entire person and design their clothing and regalia, using my experience in beading and sewing to guide my thoughts.&rdquo;

The opportunity to represent Native stories and Native truth-telling in a public forum was an inspiration for this year&rsquo;s artists: Cohen, <a href="https://hennepintheatretrust.org/we-are-still-here-racquel-banaszak/">Racquel Banaszak</a>, and <a href="https://hennepintheatretrust.org/we-are-still-here-jearica-fountain/">Jearica Fountain</a>. Throughout the year, the three artists worked with muralist and mentor <a href="https://hennepintheatretrust.org/we-are-still-here-thomasina-topbear/">Thomasina Topbear</a> to learn the process of mural-making, with the Bde Maka Ska mural serving as the group&rsquo;s capstone project.

&nbsp;

<img alt="" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/mplsart-cdn-central/FileContainers/5db3a2b3-93b1-48dd-ba75-68e0d932048d/5db3a2b3-93b1-48dd-ba75-68e0d932048d.full.jpg" />Artists Racquel Banaszak, Summer Sky Cohen, and Jearica Fountain&nbsp;worked collaboratively&nbsp;on the mural. Photo courtesy of Hennepin Theatre Trust.

&nbsp;

<h3>Representation through art at Bde Maka Ska</h3>

When the Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board approached the We Are Still Here collaborative about partnering on the new Bde Maka Ska Pavilion mural, it made sense: this year&rsquo;s artists were learning the craft of mural-making, and&nbsp;Bde Maka Ska sits just off of Hennepin Avenue. It&rsquo;s a site with historic and contemporary meaning for the Native community and a gathering place for people from across the Twin Cities.

On a personal level, it was meaningful for Two Stars and the artists &mdash; who represent many different Native communities &mdash;&nbsp;to continue creative placemaking efforts at Bde Maka Ska.

&ldquo;We move through these spaces and never see ourselves or our language represented,&rdquo; said Banaszak. &ldquo;It&rsquo;s important for non-Native people to recognize that we&rsquo;re still here, and for our community and our children growing up on Native land to see themselves represented and understand that they matter.&rdquo;

The artists sought community feedback before beginning the mural, listening to what Native people in Minneapolis wanted to see represented on the pavilion. Wellness was a recurring theme, said Topbear, including representation of how Native people use the lake for exercise and recreation.

&ldquo;Visibility &mdash;&nbsp;that was the main thing that people said, in different ways. When you&rsquo;re walking around Bde Maka Ska, you&rsquo;re on Native land,&rdquo; said Fountain. &ldquo;We want our history to be told, but we also want to be acknowledged as still being here in the present.&rdquo;

The mural&rsquo;s imagery has nods to both traditional Native symbolism and recognizable glimpses of contemporary life in Minneapolis. A man in traditional regalia rides a lime-green rental bike, women run and canoe, while a goldfinch &mdash; symbolic keeper of the Ojibwe language &mdash; looks on.

&ldquo;Many are unaware of the real live Indians running around, living our traditional lives in a contemporary society,&rdquo; said Cohen. &ldquo;We run, but you wouldn&rsquo;t know unless we wore our traditional regalia that we were there. We ride bikes, but you would never know that that brown person riding a bike participates in traditional gatherings as well.&rdquo;

&nbsp;

<img alt="" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/mplsart-cdn-central/FileContainers/d8b2e5f0-bbf4-4152-9987-48b79611eadf/d8b2e5f0-bbf4-4152-9987-48b79611eadf.full.jpg" />A blank wall at Bde Maka Ska Pavilion awaits the new mural, which will be unveiled on Friday, October 20. This project was made in partnership with the Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board.&nbsp;Photo courtesy of Hennepin Theatre Trust.

&nbsp;

<h3>Uplifting Native women&rsquo;s voices</h3>

Creating the mural was a collaborative effort, both in the process of collecting community ideas and in working as a group to create the finished product. Many in the cohort noted that it was especially meaningful to collaborate and learn from other Native women artists.

&ldquo;I&rsquo;ve never worked with only women, Native American artists,&rdquo; said Fountain. &ldquo;One day we were all painting together and I was like, &lsquo;Wow, I&rsquo;ve never been in a room with just Native American women.&rsquo; We were talking about everything &mdash;&nbsp;our history, our art.&rdquo;

Topbear enjoyed the opportunity as a mentor to pass along skills she learned from other women in her life &mdash; and to share these with Native artists, to facilitate artistic representation by and for Native people. For their capstone project, she stayed on to help guide the three cohort artists in creating the imagery, allowing the artists themselves to produce the mural.

&ldquo;Uplifting young women and young women&rsquo;s voices has always been very important to me,&rdquo; said Topbear, who is also a member of <a href="https://www.instagram.com/fewandfarwomen/">Few and Far Women</a>, an international street art group. &ldquo;It was beautiful to work with all Native women artists, and to be able to show them a skillset that I learned from other women.&rdquo;

&ldquo;We finally live in a time where we can have a diversity of our own narratives,&rdquo; said Fountain, on the importance of creating Native art in public spaces. &ldquo;Before it was only television &mdash; now it&rsquo;s social media, television, public art, everything.&rdquo;

The mural was created on polytab in downtown Minneapolis, in a vacant retail space temporarily donated to HTT by Ryan Companies. This added yet another public component to the project &mdash; passersby could watch the mural come together through the studio&rsquo;s glass walls.

&ldquo;It turned an empty retail space into something that was alive and vibrant,&rdquo; said Mary Jane Mansfield, public art manager with HTT. &ldquo;People could walk by and see the mural in progress; there was a didactic in the window with information about the project and the artists.&rdquo;

&nbsp;

<img alt="" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/mplsart-cdn-central/FileContainers/00c247ef-7572-4dc3-9fb1-69d907e5e336/00c247ef-7572-4dc3-9fb1-69d907e5e336.full.jpg" />Photo courtesy of Hennepin Theatre Trust.

&nbsp;

<h3>Looking ahead: Focus on community-engaged art</h3>

As this year&rsquo;s artists wrap up their capstone, the We Are Still Here collaborative is preparing to launch its third cohort. This group will be focused on community-engaged art.

&ldquo;Artists will create work where the community is invited to contribute and be a part of it,&rdquo; said Two Stars. &ldquo;It&rsquo;s a way we can intentionally engage and bring together our different communities along the American Indian Cultural Corridor and Hennepin Avenue.&rdquo;

In the meantime, this year&rsquo;s artists hope the Bde Maka Ska mural will provide recognition and joy to the Native community for years to come. As Cohen said: &ldquo;Our energy goes into these pieces. I hope the energy put into this mural helps uplift other Native people.&rdquo;&nbsp;◼︎&nbsp;

&nbsp;

<iframe allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/HSPxrrIHB7g?si=UPzN6BmcPXNlIP_T" title="YouTube video player" width="560"></iframe>Video courtesy of Hennepin Theatre Trust.

The opening of the new Bde Maka Ska Pavilion will be celebrated at 11 am&nbsp;on Friday, October&nbsp;20.

For more about Hennepin Theatre Trust, visit <a href="https://hennepintheatretrust.org" target="_blank">their website</a> or follow them on Instagram <a href="https://www.instagram.com/hennepintheatretrust/" target="_blank">@hennepintheatretrust</a>. For more about NACDI, visit <a href="https://nacdi.org" target="_blank">their website</a> or follow them on Instagram <a href="https://www.instagram.com/nacdi.mn/" target="_blank">@nacdi.mn</a>.

To learn&nbsp;more about&nbsp;the artists, visit:

Summer Cohen&nbsp;on&nbsp;Instagram&nbsp;<a href="http://www.instagram.com/cohensummer/" target="_blank">@</a><a href="http://www.instagram.com/cohensummer/" target="_blank">cohensummer</a>&nbsp;and&nbsp;on Facebook&nbsp;<a href="https://www.facebook.com/beadsblingbuckskin" target="_blank">@beadsblingbuckskin</a>.&nbsp;

Raquel Banaszak&nbsp;on&nbsp;Instagram&nbsp;<a href="https://www.instagram.com/racquel_kwe/" target="_blank">@racquel_kwe</a>.

Jearica Fountain on Instagram&nbsp;<a href="https://www.instagram.com/jearicafountain/" target="_blank">@jearicafountain</a>&nbsp;and&nbsp;<a href="https://www.instagram.com/jearicafountain_designs/" target="_blank">@jearicafountain_designs</a>.

&nbsp;

Public art project celebrates Native past, present, and future on the lakeshore through a mural at the new Bde Maka Ska Pavilion

'We Are Still Here' cohort unveils new mural at Bde Maka Ska

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