What does it look like when artists and cultural organizers respond to authoritarian pressure—not with silence or fear, but with imagination, strategy, and collective action?

This January 2026 Arts Freedom Weather Report comes from Minneapolis, a city once again at the epicenter of grief, rage, courage, and creative resistance. In the wake of multiple killings, intensified ICE activity, and federal misinformation, communities across Minnesota are responding not only with protest—but with song, ritual, writing, mutual aid, and rapid-response cultural organizing.

In this episode, we explore three urgent realities shaping this moment:

1. How culture becomes infrastructure for democracy when institutions fail—through singing vigils, collective mourning, and grassroots artistic action.
2. What decentralized resistance actually looks like on the ground, as hundreds of small, uncoordinated acts add up to something powerful and sustained.
3. How imagination, grief, and creative practice help people endure and act, especially in communities long accustomed to state violence and surveillance.

Listen in for an on-the-ground report from Minneapolis that shows how artists, organizers, and neighbors are transforming fear into solidarity—and keeping democratic culture alive under pressure.

NOTABLE MENTIONS

People

Bill Cleveland

Host of ART IS CHANGE and founder of the Center for the Study of Art & Community.

Renee Macklin Goode

Minneapolis poet and mother whose life and work are honored in this episode. (Minnesota Public Radio)

Gregory Bovino

U.S. Border Patrol official referenced in discussion of federal enforcement escalation in Minnesota.

Hannah Arendt

Political theorist cited for her insights into authoritarianism, fear, and the erosion of civic imagination.

Christopher Fry

British poet and playwright; excerpt from The Sleep of Prisoners is referenced during the episode.

Marquis Bowie

Minneapolis-based poet, teaching artist, and cultural healer whose reflections on grief, writing, and survival appear in this conversation. (MN Artists / MPR)

Organizations & Groups

Center for the Study of Art & Community

Producing organization for ART IS CHANGE.

Resistance Revival Chorus

National movement using collective singing as protest, courage-building, and democratic practice.

Hennepin Avenue United Methodist Church

Host site for large-scale community singing and resistance gatherings in Minneapolis.

Unidos MN

Latino-led organization providing community safety training, constitutional observers, and mutual aid.

Minnesota Arts & Cultural Coalition

Statewide coalition organizing legal briefings, advocacy, and shared resources for arts organizations.

Forecast Public Art

Minneapolis-based organization providing rapid-response grants and support to artists and cultural leaders.

Minneapolis Arts Commission

City commission supporting and advising on arts policy and cultural resources

Publications

Mad Dog 30/30 by Marquis Bowie

Poetry collection by Minneapolis poet and teaching artist Marquis Bowie, exploring grief, rage, tenderness, survival, and Black interior life. The book is referenced in the episode in connection with Bowie’s role as a cultural healer and witness in moments of community trauma.

The Sleep of Prisoners by Christopher Fry

Verse play referenced through an excerpt read during the episode, reflecting on war, conscience, and moral reckoning.ence, and moral reckoning.

Places & Contextual References

George Floyd Square

Referenced as part of the geographic and emotional landscape shaping current events. (New York Times)

San Pablo Lutheran Church

Site of memorial services and community gathering following Renee Nicole Goode’s death.

Acknowledgements:

From FreeSound.org

Winterstorm II: A Cinematic and ambient soundscape by kjartan_abel -- https://freesound.org/s/552032/ -- License: Attribution 4.0

Winterstorm II: A Cinematic and ambient soundscape by kjartan_abel -- https://freesound.org/s/552032/ -- License: Attribution 4.0

Chord Swell - Gmin by Moqally -- https://freesound.org/s/843450/ -- License: Attribution 4.0

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Art Is CHANGE is a podcast that chronicles the power of art and community transformation, providing a platform for activist artists to share their experiences and gain the skills and strategies they need to thrive as agents of social change.

Through compelling conversations with artist activists, artivists, and cultural organizers, the podcast explores how art and activism intersect to fuel cultural transformation and drive meaningful change. Guests discuss the challenges and triumphs of community arts, socially engaged art, and creative placemaking, offering insights into artist mentorship, building credibility, and communicating impact.

Episodes delve into the realities of artist isolation, burnout, and funding for artists, while celebrating the role of artists in residence and creative leadership in shaping a more just and inclusive world. Whether you’re an emerging or established artist for social justice, this podcast offers inspiration, practical advice, and a sense of solidarity in the journey toward art and social change.

Hey there.

What does it look like when artists and cultural organizers respond to authoritarian pressure not with silence or fear, but with imagination, strategy, and collective action?

O Minneapolis, I hear your voice singing through the bloody mist we'll take our stand for this land and the strength in our midst Here in our home they killed and roamed in the winter of 26 we'll remember the names of those who died on the streets of Minneapolis.

Trump's federal thugs thank you, Bruce. And thank you listeners for tuning in.

You should know that this episode has come together during a tumultuous period of extreme and violent upheaval taking place in my old stomping grounds, Minneapolis, Minnesota, a period that encompasses two murders and an avalanche of brutal criminal behavior, denial and fabrication by representatives of our federal government.

As such, the stories and reflections it contains represent the unfolding of both the evolving Hellscape and the extraordinary courage, solidarity and pushback by Minnesotans of all stripes during this time. So we begin from the center for the Study of Art and Community.

Our periodic check in on how activists, artists and arts communities are responding creatively to the cascading authoritarian drift in our politics and policies this month. What stands out isn't just the pressure, it's how people are making culture act like culture again as infrastructure for democracy.

So let's begin with something breaking in Minneapolis, Minnesota, on January 23, tens of thousands marched through downtown Minneapolis to protest the murder of of Renee Macklin Goode and demand accountability in a kind of culturally inflected protest that had dance, rhythm and collective performance at its center. In these marches, the choreography of bodies, music, banners and communal song has become central.

Not mere demonstration, but cultural resistance and mourning enacted in a public space.

Following a memorial at Minneapolis San Pablo Lutheran Church, community members became a marching singing vigil, moving together through the Phillips neighborhood as part of a citywide outcry over ice presence and the fatal shooting.

This is for our neighbors who are locked inside. Together.

These actions blend spiritual performance and protest elements in a way that feel like culture in motion, people using collective voice, movement and ritual to name loss and build solidarity. Residents in the Twin Cities are also engaging in DIY grassroots expression around protest sites and makeshift memorials.

Murals, signs, poetry and culturally inflected protest symbols have appeared organically near where organizers and neighbors gather. A spontaneous arts Ecosystem responding to crisis.

Thirteen days after Renee Goode's murder, amid increasing pressure by ice and growing pushback by the community, Alex Preeti was gunned down. My friend David o' Fallon worked at the Kennedy center in the NEA and ran Minnesota's Humanities Center. Reflects on what happened next.

So we knew that we were being lied to then. We know we are being lied to now. But I'm really proud to be in Minneapolis right now.

And I was with the group of minimum 50,000 people that marched on the 23rd of January at 10 below actual temperatures. Only wimp. Talk about windchill a minute. Unreal numbers. 50,000 people helping each other.

People giving out hand warmers, individuals bringing carafes of hot chocolate and coffee to share all of that. People watching out a hand here, a shoulder there. This is their reality.

So I'm sure that we all know the people who lie and say that we're all paid by George Soros or I'm still waiting for my check, you know. Well, it's laughable. The lies are laughable, except they hurt people.

A really important thing to say is.

There is no central organizing committee. This is a rising up of people from a hundred different centers.

Neighborhoods, communities, neighborhood centers, politically oriented people, just concerned citizens. Everybody is finding a pathway. I was just on the phone this morning with people and I'll be again this afternoon.

People shopping for other people who are afraid to leave their home. So a couple of concrete examples. We marched on Friday.

Alex was killed Saturday morning. Holy sweet bleeding Jesus, you know? So there's a group called Resistance Singing.

And again, it happened like in hours, not weeks of planning, in hours.

And dozens of volunteers were there to say, let me help you here. Go there. Seat here. Here's a QR code and so on.

Here is one of the organizers of the resistance singing, who, for safety's sake, did not share her name.

I am not afraid I am not afraid I will live for liberation Cause I know why I was made. We've been singing that one in English and in Spanish. No tango miedo song is a vehicle for us to grieve. It's a vehicle for us to feel rage.

It's a vehicle for us to strengthen ourselves like we. That song, I am not Afraid that I sang. We're not singing it because we're actually not afraid. Like we are afraid.

It is terrifying what is happening and it's a way to gather our courage.

And that same church has hosted some of the training that I've been to called Monarch, which is basically how to be a constitutional observer led by Unidos, a Latin American group here that's incredibly well organized. And again, there's no single central authority. That is a strength. That is a strength.

Yeah.

So a hundred small things are happening.

And they add up to one really big thing.

We're not walking away.

We know.

Today we heard that Bovino might be deported from our state Border Patrol Commander.

Gregory Bovino will imminently leave Minnesota along with some of his agents.

He'll retire with pension of some kind.

He'll live a life of.

Of comfort and ease.

They'll replace him with this other guy who's coming in. And we're not confused. We know what the long game is. We know it. A hundred people have written about it. We know it. So we're not going to sit down.

We're not going to walk away. We're not going to somehow be quiet. I'm on a number of signal groups, right? Minutes ago, I got an alert.

20 ICE agents are raiding an apartment building in St. Paul right now. We also learned from some of the training we went through that included people from Chicago that ICE and Homeland Security keep learning.

So one person observed that when they sent ICE agents and others into Chicago, they sent, I don't know, 6 or 700, and they were too easily overwhelmed. That's why we have 3,000 3,000 in Minneapolis, mostly in Minneapolis, but also in greater Minnesota with families in schools.

So one of the communities that's not far from my small growing up Minnesota town of Litchfield is Wilmer. Wilmer has quite a large Hispanic and also increasingly Somali community. 100 people there doing something is fairly significant.

But people from all over the metro area and even greater Minnesota and even Wisconsin came to be part of the 50,000 plus that marched on January 23rd. So massive gatherings like that serve their purpose, but smaller ones with 50 people here, 100 people there.

I was at the Alex Memorial site yesterday afternoon. For a while, there was consistently probably 75 or 100 people there.

I mean, sometimes I feel like I'm living in a vortex because where, you know, I have a hard time putting all this together, but where Alex was killed and then Renee was killed, and then only a couple blocks from there, the two kids were killed at Ascension Church, Harper and Fletcher, entirely different, but killed by a nut with a gun.

Okay.

And then we're only a few blocks from George Floyd so it's like this. And then I knew Melissa Hortman, the legislator, and I know John and Yvette Hoffman, and all of this has happened within a few months.

It's like, really?

So I think another feeling is everybody.

That I know here is walking around carrying grief in our bodies, a combination of grief and anger. And the question, what can I do that will matter? And, you know, not everybody in Minnesota wants ICE to go away. So there's a thread here of people.

Saying, no, they came here today, do.

The work of getting rid of illegal aliens. And the people pushing that narrative have also money and agency and media vehicles and so forth. So the work here is going to be ongoing.

And I think it's important to say long term, the grief. And somebody said this, and I kind of like it. Grief is a way of waking up. We drop illusions like, hey, it's going to be okay.

We'll kind of get through this. This is not a rough patch we're going through. This is a deeper level of change.

In Sabathony center, not too far, George Floyd Square Marquis and I are hosting a healing and writing workshop the city asked Marquis to do, and I'm there to support him.

So that combination of what happened there with what's happening now, somehow in ways that I can't quite articulate, it's all part of a deeper transformation. We are building a level of community, and we'll see if we can sustain will take generations. Honestly, it will take generations.

We have learned from continually connecting with people in Chicago. So we learned other people now are.

Reaching out here, saying, hey, what are you all doing there?

How's that working? So there's a mycelium layer of learning going on.

That again, there's no central authority.

There's no one guiding.

We don't have a Dr. Martin Luther King right now. But people are learning from each other.

And again, my friend, you are part of this.

You are part of this. You connect people, you tell stories, you share links and information.

You know, Hannah Arendt has written, of course, a few books about all of this, right. One of the things, Bill, that she said, that has really stuck with me, which is they want in inducing fear to limit your imagination.

So the work of imagination right now is incredibly important. And that doesn't have to mean that I'm going to figure out some grand utopian vision. It's creating work.

Hey, you know, I gotta say, nobody's walking around hanging their head. I mean, we might once in a while hang our head and go, holy sweet Jesus, what's happening to us, of course that happens.

That's not the dominant thing. You can have that moment. That's okay. And then we literally stand up and walk into it.

So, for example, tomorrow there's a Minnesota Arts and Cultural Coalition, which is statewide. We're having a webinar full of legal advice. What do you do if irs, if ICE comes after you?

There was instructions on what to say when you were closing your business. For example, on the 23rd, the Minneapolis Arts Commission is full of resources, initiatives, links, ideas.

And one of them, the Forecast Arts gallery, is making 20 grants of a thousand dollars each to community leaders in the arts and cultural world.

Small grants.

A thousand bucks. It does a couple of things. I mean, the money really helps. You can feed somebody, you can rent a hall, you can make work, all of that.

But it also is an incredible sense of lift and affirmation. Like, oh, man, they see me, they got me. I'm not walking this path myself. It matters.

So there's all kinds of creative thinking, forward imagination work going on right now, you know? So thank you. Seriously, I mean that. Especially right now, man, when we're all carrying, like, this fucking weight. It helps.

I'm going to share my favorite current poem with you. Okay. All right. This is from the sleep of prisoners from Great Britain, right?

Yeah. Christopher Fry.

Dark and cold we may be. This is no winter now. The frozen misery of centuries breaks, cracks, begins to move that thunder. That's the thunder of the flow. The.

The upstart spring.

Thank God our time is now when wrong comes up to meet us everywhere, never to leave us until we have taken the longest stride of soul we have ever taken. The business now is exploration into God. Whatever God means to you. The business now is exploration into God. Affairs are now soul sized.

It has taken us a thousand years to wake up. Where are you headed? Will you wake up for pity's sake?

Now, David mentioned his good friend, poet and cultural healer Marcus Bowie.

Here is his take on what is happening in the Twin Cities.

Marquis, if you're willing, I just to share what your experience is over these past few months, that Minneapolis has been invaded and how it's affected you and your work and the people that you work with.

It's been a little hectic. I live in between where George Floyd got murdered and where Renee got killed. I live a couple blocks from there.

I actually used to live right there where Alex got killed, too. A couple blocks away from there on 27th and Stephens. So all these things bring back memories to me. And for a 50 year old black man from America.

Minneapolis, Minnesota. This has always been the norm for me. The federal government, Minneapolis police, they have always targeted people that look like me.

And it's a little different that other people are chasing the police, which is strange for me. A bunch of people chasing the police with whistles. I believe they're good intended, but I believe that's how you're going to get yourself hurt.

You don't see a lot of black people out there, brown people out there chasing the police because we know they want to have this type of physical fight and we're just not ready for it, in my opinion.

So I know that. I mean, you are a poet, you're a writer, and you're a teacher and a cultural ambassador, ambassador in your community. What's happening?

I mean, you have a regular ongoing gathering of folks who are putting pen to paper and trying to make sense of things. What's coming out of that?

So my thing, I do a creative writing healing circle to help people unpack trauma and unclutter their minds. Right now I feel like we're being reactive versus being proactive. And I said this about Donald Trump's first presidency.

I feel like it was a blessing in disguise because it's exposing things that people thought were not existent. Like a lot of people that saw the murder of George Floyd, for instance, thinks the system is broken.

And I question people on that because the system is working exactly how it was designed and if we think it's broken, we'll attempt to fix it. That's why so many white people are frustrated, because now these last two killings were white people. Yes, of course, nobody deserves to die.

But if you stick your head in a lion's mouth, what do you think is going to happen? You think you can chase the police around and nothing bad is going to happen?

That's like trying to be a snake charmer and then get mad because the snake bites you.

Marquis, you found power in the written word, in this moment, with your students, with your circle, but also long before. How did you come to that?

2007, I was sentenced to 175 months in federal prison. And I was thinking, how do I escape this place physically? I can't go nowhere.

So I just started writing and being a part of this creative writing class In Yankton, S.D. it was a professor named Jim Reese that was coming from Mount Marty College in South Dakota.

And I was really starting to deal with stuff that I had been holding my system since I was like 15 years old. When my best friend Slash cousin got killed while we had a party after that. Then this trauma, then that trauma.

And when I got sentenced to that time, I was 32 years old, and I just started unpacking this. Didn't even know why.

I just knew that I needed to let some of this stuff go, man, and start my healing process, because for the most part, I was just going through the motions of life.

And I can actually be calm in this storm because I've seen things like this before, and this is a way that it helped me come out of there as a better person. My creative writing allows me to get in places that I probably wouldn't be invited to. And my story. I wrote a book that came out a couple months ago.

Yes. Yeah.

What are you hearing from the people in the writing circle you lead?

I'm just hearing people feel how frustrated they are and how upset they are at the system. A lot of them thought that it was working, and a lot of them thought that, hey, the police are the good guys.

I'm no way against the police in that aspect. Like, I used to be. I used to hate the police growing up, but I just look at them as people, as humans that have jobs.

And some of them are good at it, some of them are bad at it. And that's just in every realm of life. You got your good pilots and you got your bad pilots.

You got your good doctors and bad doctors, but there's no way that police should be able to get away with qualified immunity if they keep killing people. A pilot couldn't be able to do that. If he kept crashing planes and he was the only one to survive, he would no longer be a pilot.

Yeah.

So do you feel like in this moment where the folks in Washington seem to be putting everybody in the same basket, that it's a lesson for folks who have never been in this basket before?

I would say that's like a double answer. I would say yes, but it's about power. It's about keeping the status quo. I mean, a lot of these people are playing political gymnastics.

They're trying to change seats, but it's the same people that are going to be making the decisions.

It was the Bidens, it was the Clintons that were locking black and brown people up with the crack laws and calling them super predators and saying they don't want no N words in office, and yet they want us to vote for them.

So you're used to Minneapolis police Department, and now you got these Other guys running around. What do you think about this new posse that's in town?

The bigger, badder gang? They just, they got unlimited resources. The federal government, they are. They're a bigger arm of law enforcement in the state. You need evidence.

But the federal government, the feds can eat out a ham sandwich. And I'm looking at people not truly realizing who these people are. Of course, they're not from Minnesota, but these are federal agents.

I think of Neil from the Matrix when he didn't realize he was the one yet. He would see the agents and he would get out of Dodge because he.

Knew he wasn't ready for it.

Yeah.

So what do you see going forward?

I think it's about to tame down, I believe. I mean, with this, with the one guy leaving out and the new guy, he's a little bit more professional, I would say.

But Barack Obama was doing the same type of stuff. He just didn't want to sit up and be king like our president. Now he wants to be the king. He wants to be a dictator.

These are just bigger bullies, basically, with qualified immunity. They don't even got to know who these people are.

That is for sure. Thank you so much, Marquis, for taking this time.

Just want you to know that we're.

Going to turn this episode around right away.

Good word. Ready?

So before we close, here are a few things that rose up for me from our conversation with Minneapolis. First, culture just moves faster than institutions.

You know, when formal systems are taking the time to warm up and get going, or when they falter, people turn to song, ritual, writing and shared presence to care for one another and act. Next, well, you know, resistance doesn't require a single leader or a master plan.

Hundreds of small, locally rooted actions, singing, feeding neighbors, sharing information can add up to real collective power. Like in Minneapolis. And finally, imagination is not a luxury in moments like this, it's a survival skill. Authoritarianism feeds on fear.

And creative practice is an inexhaustible source for keeping people upright, connected and moving. And then I just want to say thank you, Minneapolis.

Art is Change is a production of the center for the Study of Art and Community or theme and soundscapes spring forth from the head, heart and hand of the maestro. Judy Munson. Our text editing is by Andre Nebbi. Our effects come from freesound.org and our inspiration comes from the ever present spirit of OOC235.

So until next time, stay well, do good, and spread the good word. Once again, please know this episode has been or 100% human.