Research Report: Local Access to Art and Culture 2012

I am originally from Brainerd and have lived in Minnesota all my life. Amy (my wife) and I enjoy cooking, camping, kayaking, jogging, and cycling. I have been to Africa, Austria and Norway and like traveling in the United States; my last trip was to Alaska this spring. I received a B.A. in Studio Art from the University of MN Morris in 1999, emphasizing in the areas of Ceramics, Printmaking and Sculpture, was apprenticed at the St. John’s Pottery at St. John’s University through the fall of 2000, and earned my Masters in Ceramics and Printmaking at SCSU in 2004. Early in my arts education I decided I wanted to share what I was learning with others, and have been teaching at FHS since 2004. The last book I read was The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie, and I am currently reading ‘The Food You Want to Eat’ by Ted Allen

As an attorney, community and neighborhood leader, investment advisor and former city councilmember, Chris Coleman brings a wealth of experience to the office of mayor. Mayor Coleman regularly works on the national level, serving as a board member at the National League of Cities (NLC) and working on the Council on Youth, Education, and Families for the NLC. In his six years as mayor, Chris Coleman has been an advocate for education and public safety, and was instrumental in championing the Central Corridor Light Rail line – the largest transit project ever undertaken in the state of Minnesota. These efforts and initiatives are all accomplished with sound fiscal management in mind and guided by a passion for the City of Saint Paul. Bridging the education gap for children has been at the core of Mayor Coleman’s agenda. Mayor Coleman has recently introduced revolutionary programs such as the Promise Neighborhood and Sprockets, which focus on how our students spend their crucial time outside of the classroom. Mayor Coleman has marshaled the best minds and resources to enrich the lives of children by extending social and academic opportunities beyond the school day, opening new doors of opportunity to a better life and creating a safe environment for them to live and play. Mayor Coleman is a strong advocate for police, fire and emergency management services, committed to building world-class departments that set the standard for service to residents and community. Mayor Coleman continues to invest in emergency personnel and training, as well as improved technology to assist them in keeping our communities safe. Economic development has been one of Mayor Coleman’s main focuses. Through his leadership, downtown Saint Paul has come alive with new music and restaurant venues. He championed the Central Corridor Light Rail project, and continues to provide leadership during its planning and construction. The Central Corridor will not only transform one of Saint Paul’s most iconic streets, but connect our residents to workplaces and schools. Mayor Coleman is committed to fiscal responsibility. Measuring value by return on investment, he has worked in partnership with the City Council to consolidate and improve city services despite devastating cuts in state aid. Under Mayor Coleman, Saint Paul residents are receiving better services at a better price while the City retains its high bond ratings from all the major rating agencies. Mayor Coleman and his wife, Connie, live on the West Side, where they raised their two children, Molly and Aidan

Barbara Cox is Arts Education Partnership Coordinator at the Perpich Center for Arts Education. Since 1998, she has worked statewide to develop collaborative partnerships and professional development opportunities with educators, administrators, artists, arts organizations, and students. Barbara has worked in art and education for over 20 years—as a K-6 classroom teacher, arts coordinator, education specialist, arts education consultant and jazz radio broadcaster in Minnesota, New York, and California. Barbara was the founding director of Jazz in the Classroom, a nationally renowned curriculum based jazz history project that brought the authentic voice of jazz musicians into K-12 classrooms through artist residencies and workshops.

Heather Doyle has studied welding and metalsmithing from an artist's perspective for more than a decade. She continues to explore the mediums of heat and metal through her business, INDUSTRYelle LLC, designing metal sculpture and creating custom fabrication on a commission basis. Heather taught Sculptural Welding and Blacksmithing at the Minneapolis Community and Technical College for seven years. She is now the Artistic Director and an instructor at the Chicago Avenue Fire Arts Center. In 2006, Heather created "The SPEAK Project," a South Minneapolis public art initiative, produced in collaboration with FORECAST Public Artworks, which uses various forms of visual and performance art to encourage youth to explore the subject of diversity and express their voices through creativity. Heather is a Minneapolis Arts Commissioner, a founding board member of the Chicago Avenue Fire Arts Center and a member of the Artist-Blacksmiths' Association of North America (ABANA).

Originally from Northern Wisconsin, Eric Dubnicka is an artist and Preparator/Exhibition Designer at the Tweed Museum of Art. as well as an artist. He received a BFA from the College of Visual Arts in St. Paul, Minnesota.

Georgia is a creative professional with experience ranging from teaching to nonprofit management to public speaking. She has a degree in education and has taught students, elementary age through adult for the past 35 years in both ballet and French. Possessing the qualities of calm determination and tenacity, she has been able to simultaneously build the school of Saint Paul City Ballet and spearhead the development of the Saint Paul City Ballet Company.

Prior to the formation of Parenteau Graves Communications, Kathy served as marketing and public relations director for The Minnesota Opera and Virginia Opera, on the staff of U.S. Senator Gary Hart, and as the arts writer for the Southwest Journal for seven years, during which time she received the Minnesota Newspaper Award for feature writing. Kathy is the co-author and editor of Indians in Minnesota, published by the University of Minnesota Press. She also teaches news and magazine writing at Metro State University. She has a degree in political science and English from Colorado College, and has served on the boards of the Friends of the Hennepin County Library, PACER Center, Mayflower Community Congregational Church, and Mind Body Solutions.

Jason Inskeep is Adsoka’s principal. His experiences as a leader of marketing departments and in senior roles at advertising agencies serve clients well in developing strong marketing messages and tactics. Adsoka is a brand innovator; the agency concentrates on interactions between the organization and its market to uncover consumer insights that marketers envy.

Willard Jenkins is an independent arts consultant & producer, and writer under his Open Sky banner. Willard Jenkins’ current activity includes concert, festival, and concert series planning/development, artistic direction, consulting, music journalism, teaching, and broadcast work.

Joanna is the owner of Kohler Productions, a multimedia company that produces media focused on community storytelling and advises on strategies to facilitate community voices in the telling of their own stories. In addition to these skills, Joanna has over fourteen years of experience in documentary filmmaking, youth work and youth media education, including her previous position as the Coordinator for the Twin Cities Youth Media Network. Joanna is an award winning filmmaker receiving multiple Jerome Foundation grants, directed three independent films, completed training with the Institute for Cultural Affairs – participatory facilitation, New Mexico’s Media Literacy Institute and been a Fellow with the Creative Community and Leadership Institute supported by both the Bush Foundation and Intermedia Arts. Joanna’s education includes a B.A. in Social Documentary from the University of Minnesota and some graduate courses in Public Affairs from the Humphrey Institute. In addition, Joanna has worked with many community initiatives as both a strategist and producer and served as a chair on the Board of Director’s with SPNN and a Communications Committee member with Minnesota Women in Film and Television. Passionate filmmaking used to tell reflective community stories that create sustainable change is what drives both Joanna's work and the work of Kohler Productions.

I have spent the past 30 years as a manager in a variety of cultural and media organizations and philanthropic foundations. I have enjoyed the creative challenge of changing jobs and being able to participate in the cultural sector from many vantage points. I enjoy meeting people and making things happen and I am gratified when I am able to help creative individuals reach and connect with an audience. I tried to be a professional bassoonist but was in more demand for organizing concerts and people than I was as a player. Then one thing led to another. In the Bay Area I led a community music center that had classical and jazz performing and training programs. It was funded almost entirely by CETA for those of you old enough to remember that federal jobs program. After that I was executive director of Pro Arts, a multi-service cultural organization in the heart of downtown Oakland that organized exhibits, readings, and concerts and that employed dozens of artists in community centers like schools and youth centers. We were among the first in the US to organize and promote artists’ open studio events. It’s exciting to see that East Bay Artists’ Open Studios is still alive and kicking — more than 50,000 people attended last year. I still have the original posters from Open Studios #1 in my memory box, and I see they are still using the logo we developed. From there I became the Executive Director of the Fleishhacker Foundation in San Francisco. I worked there for seven years, founding the Eureka Fellowships program (first of its kind in California) and helping to provide early support to many small, vibrant cultural organizations in the Bay Area. While there, Grantmakers in the Arts was formed as an affinity group of the Council on Foundations and I joined the Board. First with Wendy Bennett and then with Anne Focke I worked for many years as co-editor of the Grantmakers in the Arts Reader, which has become important reading in the field. In early 1990 I was recruited to the Twin Cities to become a program officer at The Bush Foundation, which at the time had a robust cultural grantmaking program and one of the largest artists’ fellowship programs in the United States. Among the projects I worked on at Bush was diversifying the cultural funding programs to include grantmaking aimed to strengthen the energetic cohort of smaller-budget but nonetheless important cultural organizations in the Twin Cities and in the Dakotas. With Anne Focke’s leadership a few of us also spent a couple of years during this time trying to launch Artswire, an early attempt to aggregate the nonprofit cultural sector on-line (this was before Graphical User Interfaces — we were pioneers!). Minnesota Public Radio recruited me in 1999 and I had a happy home there for 9 years. My first assignment was helping to launch KPCC, or Southern California Public Radio, which is now Los Angeles’ leading public radio news station. Later I was the lead staff in launching The Current, a wonderful new station for Minnesota, if I do say so myself. I also was Executive Producer of two Peabody Award winning series, American Mavericks and The MTT Files, both created in conjunction with Producer Tom Voegli and with the San Francisco Symphony and its imaginative Music Director, Michael Tilson Thomas. My experiences at MPR included leadership of both its large news operation and the cultural programming group for my final three years of employment there, as SVP Content and Media. We did a lot of good work there transforming our public radio organization into a public media organization and incorporating digital distribution and audience interaction into our content development work. We also were able to move the production of Performance Today and SymphonyCast from their former home at National Public Radio to St Paul to become part of our production portfolio.

Insight News started in 1974 as a color-cover magazine based in and serving Minneapolis' African American north side. It was owned by Graphic Services, Inc., a general printing and magazine publishing firm in Northeast Minneapolis. Al McFarlane, headed the Midwest Public Relations division of Graphic Services. McFarlane, a 26 year-old media enthusiast, had previously worked for the St. Paul Pioneer Press as a reporter and for General Mills in public relations. He purchased rights to Insight News in 1975 and began publishing as a community newspaper in 1976. Conceived as a free to the reader, advertiser supported newspaper, Insight News was at the forefront of a burgeoning neighborhood and community newspaper industry in Twin Cities. Insight News found its niche by providing concentrated distribution, both door-to-door and newsstand delivery, in communities that had least effective penetration by the daily newspapers. In addition, Insight News tackled tougher stories than its competitors, with a strident, yet, professional voice. Insight championed the idea of culture as an asset, not a liability, in a marketplace that would soon be transformed by waves immigration of African Americans from Chicago, Gary, and Kansas City, and by Africans from, Lagos, Accra, Mogedishu and Addis Ababa, joined by Spanish speaking immigrants from the Caribbean, Central and South America, and by Asian immigrants from Vietnam, Laos, Thailand and Cambodia. McFarlane and Insight News supported the creation of other newspapers serving communities of color. He organized ethnic newspaper owners to form the Minnesota Minority Media Coaliton. In 1996 Insight News became the first African American-owned publication in Minnesota to establish a presence on the World Wide Web. As one of only a handful of Black newspapers on the Internet, Insight News has enabled readers all over the world access to its unique brand of journalism. In 1997 Insight News once again distinguished itself from its competitors by initiating a series of public policy forums. In partnership with community radio stations KFAI and KMOJ, Insight has brought the people who would serve the community in elected office, in education and in business to meet African American voters and consumers face to face.

Wendy Morris, the founder of the Creative Leadership Studio, designs and facilitates engaging learning events and dialogue experiences to help organizations, communities and individuals move towards a preferred future. A pioneering leadership and innovation educator, Wendy is on faculty at premiere leadership venues in North America including ALIA Institute/Shambhala Institute for Authentic Leadership in Nova Scotia and Banff Centre Leadership Development in Alberta. She is also affiliated with two research and training centers at the University of Minnesota: the Center for Integrative Leadership, and the Center for Spirituality and Healing. <br><br> Ten years ago, at home in Minneapolis, Minnesota, Wendy co-founded the the Creative Community Leadership Institute, a cross-sector initiative for creative community change that will expand into North Dakota this spring.<br><br> Wendy draws upon a robust body of knowledge developed through 25 years of on-going action research. Her work has been recognized by more than 25 awards for excellence including major fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Bush Foundation and the McKnight Foundation. She is a collaborator with the Human Systems Dynamics Institute and the Presencing Institute. Wendy lives with her husband and teenage daughter in Minneapolis, Minnesota near her favorite mindfulness meditation center, where she has been practicing since 1993. <br><br>

David Mura is a poet, creative nonfiction writer, critic, playwright and performance artist. A Sansei or third generation Japanese American, Mura has written two memoirs: Turning Japanese: Memoirs of a Sansei (Anchor-Random), which won a 1991 Josephine Miles Book Award from the Oakland PEN and was listed in the New York Times Notable Books of Year, and Where the Body Meets Memory: An Odyssey of Race, Sexuality and Identity(1996, Anchor).<br><br> Mura's second book of poetry The Colors of Desire (1995, Anchor), won the Carl Sandburg Literary Award from the Friends of the Chicago Public Library. His first, After We Lost Our Way(Carnegie Mellon U. Press), won the 1989 National Poetry Series Contest. He has also written the chapbook, A Male Grief: Notes on Pornography & Addiction (Milkweed Editions). His book of critical essays, Song for Uncle Tom, Tonto & Mr. Moto: Poetry & Identity, was published by the U. of Michigan Press in its Poets on Poetry series in 2002. His third book of poetry, Angels for the Burning, was published by Boa Editions Ltd. in 2004. Along with African American writer Alexs Pate, Mura has created and performs a multi-media performance piece, Secret Colors,about their lives as men of color and Asian American-African American relations. This piece premiered for the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (1994) and has been presented at various venues throughout the country. A film adaptation of this piece,Slowly, This, was broadcast in the PBS series ALIVE TV in July/August 1995. Mura has also been featured on the Bill Moyers PBS series, The Language of Life. Mura's other performance pieces and plays include, "Relocations: Images from a Sansei" (1990), "Silence & Desire" (1994) and "After Hours" (1995; in collaboration with pianist Jon Jang and actor Kelvin Han Yee). Mura's stage adaptation of Li-Young Lee's memoir, "The Winged Seed," premiered at Pangea World Theater in Oct. 1997. His play "Internment Voices," co-written with Esther Suzuki, received a CLPEF grant and premiered with Theater Mu in June, 1998. Among his awards, Mura has received a Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Writers' Award, a US/Japan Creative Artist Fellowship, two NEA Literature Fellowships, two Bush Foundation Fellowships, four Loft-McKnight Awards, several Minnesota State Arts Board grants, and a Discovery/The Nation Award. Mura has a B.A. from Grinnell College and an MFA in creative writing from Vermont College. He has taught at the University of Minnesota, St. Olaf College, the Loft, Hamline U., the U. of Oregon and the Voices of the Nation Association writers' conference. He co-founded the Asian American Renaissance, an Asian American arts organization and served as its artistic director. He teaches at Hamline University, VONA (Voices of the Nation Association), and the Stonecoast MFA program. Mura lives in Minneapolis with his wife, Dr. Susan Sencer, and three children, Samantha (15), Nikko (11) and Tomo (9).

http://www.metrisarts.com/people?format=pdfNicodemus serves as Metris Arts Consulting’s key technical contributor and manages daily operations. A choreographer/arts administrator turned urban planner, Nicodemus is a leading voice in arts and community development. With her frequent collaborator, Dr. Ann Markusen, she has authored a number of major reports and journal articles, most notably Creative Placemaking for the Mayors’ Institute on City Design (2010), which helped to define the field, and “ Arts and Culture in Urban and Regional Planning: A Review and Research Agenda” Through her How Art Spaces Matter reports (for Artspace Projects, 2010 and 2011), Nicodemus integrated a range of research methods and data sources across five spaces and four cities to reveal art spaces’ community and arts-related impacts. Nicodemus holds a Masters of Urban and Regional Planning from the University of Minnesota’s Humphrey School of Public Affairs and a B.A. from Oberlin College.

I am Sandi Pillsbury Gredzens. I am a native Minnesotan who lives on the North Shore of Lake Superior in Castle Danger. I have always been drawn to the beauty of natural surroundings, which inspires my work. I am currently working on four bodies of work: Minnesota’s wildflowers, waterfalls, lakescapes and my personal garden series. I have recently rediscovered the joys and challenges of painting outside (en plein aire). I have been a practicing artist for 40 plus years, and have been an educator for 30 plus years. I recently retired from teaching at Two Harbors High School where I taught art. I continue to give private lessons in my home as well as teaching special workshops and Community Education classes. I am very involved with several arts organizations and boards and currently serve on the Grand Marais Art Colony Board, Northwoods Pioneer Gallery and Gift Board, Northern Lake County Arts Board, and the Lake Superior School District CAPP Committee. I am involved with the Voyageur Art Club in Two Harbors. I am also currently a member of the Minnesota State Arts Board, where I serve as an "Artist in Residence" on their roster of available artists for workshops and classes.

Organizational Metro representative Ann Morelli Spencer of Bloomington served on the board of the Metropolitan Regional Arts Council for 6 years, including serving as a member of the Council’s Liaison Committee and as Board Chair. Spencer is active in arts organizations in her community, currently serving on the board of the Skylark Opera. She has a particular interest in ensuring that suburban communities have opportunities for local arts activity. A graduate of Oberlin College and Harvard Law School, she is also an attorney with her own practice in Bloomington.

Laura Waterman Wittstock is president and CEO of Wittstock & Associates. A former journalist, Waterman Wittstock is the author of several publications, including Diverse Populations/Diverse Needs: Community Foundations and Diversity and Changing Communities,and ININATIG'S Gift of Sugar: Traditional Native Sugar Making. She is co-producer of First Person Radio, a weekly public affairs program on KFAI-FM in Minneapolis and writes an online column in the Minneapolis StarTribune. She was an elected member and president of the Minneapolis Library Board, where she worked on the development and realization of the new Central Library (2002-2009). She served as the fourth Louis W. Hill, Jr. Fellow in Philanthropy under the University of Minnesota's Hubert H. Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs (2006). Wittstock is the recipient of several leadership and professional awards, including the Distinguished IEL Service Award, (Institute for Educational Leadership national award for improvement of American education), (2006) the American Indian Honored Educator of 2005.

Missy Whiteman is an artist and consultant is the Greater Minneapolis-St. Paul Area. She is currently the Director of Media Training and Production at Independent Indigenous Film and Media. Previously, she served as New Media Pathways Coordinator at MIGIZI Communications.