In 2023, Minnesota artists used art in all its forms to understand and challenge what was happening in the world

As I look back at all the art things I experienced in 2023, one of the shows that quietly stays with me was one in which the performer laid in bed for the entirety of the piece, barely moving. “NET/WORK: wheelchair bound (remix) took place in week three of Red Eye’s New Works Four Weeks Series. The annual festival brings together a mix of theater, dance and performance. In “NET/WORK,” D. Allen’s voice could be heard as a voiceover, while their photographic and video images were seen projected behind their body. 

The voiceover relayed recent events in Allen’s life. Allen, who uses a wheelchair, had been struck by a car, their wheelchair destroyed. The documented images showed Allen working on the piece as they described processing and navigating that traumatic event and injury, while still considering how to adapt their project for the Red Eye iteration. I found myself drawn into the intensity, loss, grief, and endurance of Allen’s voice. While it illustrated a very specific experience of an individual, I somehow hold it in my own heart even now. That feeling of stasis, of anger, and of not knowing what comes next seems to spill over into our culture in the years following the mass grief of Covid, the existential dread of worsening climate crisis, two wars, and ongoing injustice around the world. 

Art in its various forms has immense power to help us understand our world, especially in its most challenging moments. There were many instances in the last year where people making creative work in Minnesota found ways to speak to current challenges.

Take “North,” the multimedia work by composer Mary Ellen Childs. I first encountered the piece at a showing at Icehouse, and later as an immersive installation at the Anderson Center in Red Wing. (You can read about it here.) Sensorial and vivid, the work both celebrated the mystical beauty of nature and reminded the viewer of its precarious state in the wake of climate change.

I saw a number of works throughout the year that looked at human’s relationship to land in different ways. I loved Marlena Myles’ augmented reality installation at the Arboretum , and “Groundwork,” a group exhibition at Dreamsong, offered intriguing works that explored earth as both subject and material.

“Fetal,” meanwhile, the play by Trista Baldwin produced by Frank Theatre in the fall, acted as a kind of call to action in play form. The events of the story took place in a clinic, where three women awaited getting abortions. While waiting, they heard about the Supreme Court’s decision overturning Roe vs. Wade. Director Wendy Knox has a knack for casting, and actors Kate Beahen, Carolyn Pool, Julia Valen, and Elena Yazzie stirred up riveting chemistry for the timely piece of theater.

As the war in Ukraine drags on, I was glad to see Leon Hushcha’s solo exhibition at The Museum of Russian Art, which reflected painfully on the plight of the artist’s homeland and people. Migizi, meanwhile, has been quick to present programming around the conflict in Gaza, but artists and organizations were exploring the simmering conflict before October 7. (Pangea World Theater’s production of “Returning to Haifa,” for example, and Body Watani’s “Terranea: Hakawatia of the Sea,” at Red Eye Theater, both spoke to the experiences of Palestinian people before the start of this most recent war.)

U.S. immigration policy got a close look in the Jungle Theater’s production of Arian Moayed’s “The Courtroom: A Reenactment of One Woman’s Deportation Proceedings,” a piece that illustrated the unreasonable hoops people have to jump through to live here. And David Mura released an incredible book examining white supremacy, which I was very honored to speak with him about here. 

Race, identity, culture, history, and justice also featured in a number of successful performances, like “For the People,” by Ty Defoe and Larissa Fasthorse at the Guthrie Theater, “Sugar in our Wounds,” by Donja R. Love, at Penumbra Theater, and both “The Song Poet” and “Cruzar la Cara de La Luna” produced by Minnesota Opera. Cécile McLorin Salvant’s “Ogresse: Envisioned,” meanwhile, skillfully wove together a critique of minstrelsy in American culture with fantasy and jazz, while Saymoukda Duangphouxay Vongsay’s “Shaman Warrior & Cannibals” investigated the secret war in Laos through a science fiction lens.

I loved accidental discoveries I made throughout the year, like the time I was wandering downtown and happened to wander into “Night Club,” a cool little gallery that features contemporary, experimental works. I also participated in “Collective Investigation” by Matthew Bakkom, where participants are tasked with mining the treasures of the Minneapolis Central Library.

Among my favorite shows this year were Joe Rainey’s juxtaposition of pow wow recordings and new music with his “Niineta” release show at the Cedar, part of the Great Northern Festival, and “Multiple Realities: Experimental Art in the Eastern Bloc, 1960s-1980s,” at the Walker Art Center. I also loved Cantus’ “And All the Days Were Purple,” by composer Alex Weiser, based on text by Yiddish poet Anna Margolin. New Native Theater’s “A Christmas in Ochopee” won my heart this holiday season, and Moira Bateman’s solo exhibition at Form + Content gallery, started the 2023 year off right. 

I’m so happy to be able to engage broadly and deeply with the Twin Cities art scene, and the above is just a slice of the works that really stood out for me as I look back. I can’t wait to report back in 2024 with all that’s glimmering, transformative, remarkable and eye opening in the coming year.