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Four repeating photos of African American girl

MinneCulture | Theater Artist Kim Hines Authors Novella for Young Adults

Kim Hines’ young adult novella Wingo Fly (2020) revolves around Christy Wingo, a 10-year-old Black girl in 1965 Minneapolis, Minnesota. The book is filled with humor, mystery and social justice issues. Based in Minneapolis, Kim has been a theater artist for 50 plus years and this is her first book.

“This book is really based on when I was ten years old in 1965. Christy is a lot like me,” says Hines. “We don’t have a lot of stories about Black people growing up in the Midwest. We were middle class. There’s not a lot of stories about Black kids growing up in a middle class family.  There’s a lot of books out there about kids growing up in poverty and growing up in gangs and you know all the stereotypes that I think White America has about Black people. And growing up I don’t think I read anything that spoke to the way I was living.”

Listen to our story by KFAI’s Dixie Treichel and hear excerpts from the book.

KFAI’s MinneCulture · Theater Artist Kim Hines Authors Novella for Young Adults

Photo courtesy of Kim Hines. Wingo Fly can be found at Magers & Quinn Booksellers in Minneapolis. Support for MinneCulture on KFAI comes from the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund.

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MinneCulture | The Master of Deception: John Ivan-Palmer Remembers His Magician Father in New Memoir

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The Minneapolis of the 1950’s offered a thriving entertainment scene that lured men and women with money into dozens of theaters and burlesque clubs. Variety performers arrived from all over the country— contortionists, jugglers, ventriloquists, dancers—and a magician named Jack Pyle, aka the “Master of Deception.”

In 2020, the magician’s son, John-Ivan Palmer, wrote about his father and the era of variety floor show entertainments in his memoir “The Master of Deception: A Son Searches for His Father in the House of Illusion.” Listen to our story by KFAI’s Britt Aamodt.

KFAI’s MinneCulture · The Master of Deception: John Ivan-Palmer Remembers His Magician Father in New Memoir

Support for MinneCulture on KFAI comes from the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund. Photo of Jack Pyle courtesy of John Ivan-Palmer.

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MinneCulture | Sharp Imagery and Precise Language: Heid Erdrich’s Little Big Bully

Heid E. Erdrich’s latest volume of poetry, Little Big Bully, is brutal and beautiful. It won the National Poetry Series, and was released just before the 2020 election. A major theme throughout the book of poems is poor behavior, manifested in numerous ways. An Anishinaabe poet and member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Ojibwe, Erdrich writes of violence and erasure with aching clarity, in one case, comparing the disappearance of bird species with that of Native nations. Erdrich talks to Sheila Regan about her latest work in this MinneCulture piece. Listen here:

KFAI’s MinneCulture · Sharp Imagery and Precise Language: Heid Edrich’s Little Big Bully

“So at some point, when I was struggling with both personal events, and the political events since 2016,” say Erdrich. “I saw somebody post something about, you know, the 10 signs of a narcissistic abusive relationship, and like, Oh, my God, this totally applies to the country.”

In her poems, Erdrich grapples with why people get hoodwinked by bad people.

“Yeah, I was really trying to figure out like, what is the mechanism? What is the thing emotionally, intellectually, behaviorally, and that allows abuse, people who side with abusers, people who become subordinate.”

Signed copies of Little Big Bully are available at Birchbark Books in Minneapolis. Support for MinneCulture on KFAI comes from the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund.

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Artwork, of "Soil Horizon" depicting sky, dry grass, dark soil, roots, a lighter bedrock

MinneCulture | Like the Banks of a River: Deborah Foutch’s Fiber & Mixed Media Art

Minneapolis artist Deborah Foutch creates rich and complex work with fiber and mixed media that expresses her love of the natural world. Her Soil Horizon series portrays a living system using special layering techniques and honors her father who was a soil conservationist. This story was produced by Dixie Treichel.

“My work is about a living system in the world,” says Foutch. “I’m looking at a way that layers will show me qualities that I see when I stand and look at water. I take paint and I water it down a lot and I pour it through layers. I spreads on whatever material I’m using it on.”

KFAI’s MinneCulture · Like the Banks of a River: Deborah Foutch’s Fiber & Mixed Media Art

Funding for MinneCulture on KFAI is made possible by the Minnesota Arts & Cultural Heritage Fund. Photo of “Soil Horizon” and “Rooted Earth,” courtesy of Deborah Foutch.

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Snow Queen with Tiara looks over her left shoulder while her giant white cape suspends behind her

MinneCulture | The (Really Mean) Snow Queen Streams On Screen

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Ballet Co.Laboratory wants to change the way people think about ballet by changing ballet itself. That’s no easy task. The art form is full of tradition, which some people find stuffy and elitist. Plus, there’s this little thing called COVID happening. As Todd Melby reports, the St. Paul company is doing its best to challenge the status quo at a challenging time. Listen here:

KFAI’s MinneCulture · The (Really Mean) Snow Queen Streams On Screen

For holiday dance productions, we’ve come to expect Tchiakovsky’s Nutcracker as the standard. Ballet Co.Laboratory bucks the trend with a production of Hans Christian Anderson’s 1844 fable, The Snow Queen. The ballet tells the story of a little girl whose brother has been frozen by, you guessed it, the Snow Queen, played by Rachel Seeholzer.

Because of COVID, this ballet will be performed in front of cameras, not a live audience. The cameras magnify facial movements of the dancers that might otherwise be missed to someone sitting in the cheap seats. 

“Usually in ballet, it’s smile and be pretty and pretend everything is fun,” says Seeholzer. “For once, I get to furrow my brow and get to pout my lip and let my eyes get really stern.”

Ballet Co.Laboratory’s production of The Snow Queen will be available for streaming on Saturday, December 19 and Sunday, December 20. Tickets are $40 per household. For more information, go to balletcolaboratory.org.

Support for MinneCulture comes from the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund. Photo courtesy of Ballet Co.Laboratory in St. Paul, Minn.

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Stencil-like graphic of Paul Deng Kur overlaid with text from his book

MinneCulture | Driven by Hope: Paul Deng Kur and the Story of a Lost Boy

Paul Deng Kur is from South Sudan, but now lives in Minnesota. He is an author and holds two advanced degrees, but neither are relevant to his current occupation, driving for Lyft and Uber. Although the coronavirus pandemic has hurt the ride share industry, he isn’t scared of COVID-19. He grew up with a different threshold of fear.

“I am scared of two things: lions and snakes,” says Kur.

That’s because Kur was one of countless Lost Boys who endured treacherous nights in the Sudanese jungle, a bloody civil war, and the displacement of his family. KFAI’s Britt Aamodt spoke with Kur about his journey to the US, the power of stories, and the day a suicidal passenger slid into his backseat. Listen:

KFAI’s MinneCulture · Driven by Hope: Paul Deng Kur and the Story of a Lost Boy

There’ s something about two strangers cut off from the world in a moving car that invites intimacy. As a ride share driver, Paul Deng Kur had heard hundreds of stories.

One particular passenger had a weight to get off his chest.

After George Floyd was killed by a white police officer at the end of May, a wave a vandalism swept into Minneapolis. This passenger’s business had been among those destroyed.

“He told me he wanted to take his life. He feel like loser,” said Kur.

After the two arrived at their destination, Kur shut off his driver app and put the car in park.

“Just to talk to him. We talked nearly two hours.”

The passenger shared his hopelessness around losing his business and Kur shared his own story of loss.

“I have seen so many people die… I tell him I am Lost Boy. Many don’t know what Lost Boy is,” said Kur.

Kur became a Lost Boy in 1987, four years into the Second Sudanese Civil War when Sudan’s government bombed Kur’s village in the south, believing it was supplying the rebels with food and protection.

Kur escaped the bombing only because he, like many South Sudanese boys, was in the pasture looking after livestock. And like most of those boys, when he returned to the smoking ruin that had been his home, he couldn’t find his family. They were gone. Fled somewhere. Or dead.

This happened village after village, leaving behind numberless young boys and some girls with no homes or families. They were told to walk east to a refugee camp in Ethiopia.

Suddenly there was a line of Lost Boys and Girls, miles long, all marching east on foot. Kur was five years old.

After spending time in refugee camps and later as a soldier, Kur, then nineteen, and nearly 4,000 Lost Boys got an offer that was hard to turn down: a ticket to America, which despite its divisions, was at least not embroiled in armed civil war.

Kur ended up in Pittsburgh, where he pursued college, eventually earning advanced degrees in the fields of education and leadership. It was difficult to relive the memories, but he sat down at a keyboard and, little by little, began to tell the story of his life as a Lost Boy.

“I deleted it so many times. When you write something you have to review it and with reviewing it, it get to me. Affect my sleeping,” says Kur.

Even though he deleted the manuscript and started over, he eventually self-published the memoir called Out of the Impossible: The Hope of the Lost Boy.

It was these stories of hardship and hope that he shared with that ride share passenger. The two have since reconnected, the passenger sharing later that Kur’s stories had helped.

Kur is thirty-eight now. He has not seen his mother, except through a device, in thirty-three years. And he still wants to put his master’s degrees to use, opening a school in his village back home in South Sudan.

“But one of reason I am here is hope,” says Kur. “You hope tomorrow will never be the same.”

Paul Deng Kur’s book Out of the Impossible: The Hope of the Lost Boy can be found of Amazon. Support for MinneCulture on KFAI comes from the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund. Illustration by Ryan Dawes.

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Painting of grocery shopper in hazmat suit infant of fruit stand

MinneCulture | From Aisles to the Art Gallery, Juxtapositions of Opposites

Somewhere between the denial phase, the panic phase, and the complacency phase(s) of the yet-to-be-resolved COVID-19 pandemic, was a distinct and frenzied hoarding phase. After the thrill of posting apocalyptic photos of bare aisles and empty freezers wore off, we realized we were out of toilet paper. And now, we have a new appreciation sacks of flour, Clorox wipes and paper towel.

The backdrop of these market deficiencies, where this run on staples was on full, shameless display, was The Supermarket. Minnesota-based artist Patricio de Lara grapples with the role supermarkets play in our lives in a multi-media art exhibition called Supermarket. KFAI’s Sheila Regan spoke with DeLara about the exhibit and about how his work reveals juxtapositions in consumerism, food marketing and the grocery supply chain. Listen here:

KFAI’s MinneCulture · From Aisles to the Art Gallery, Juxtapositions of Opposites

In the exhibition, De Lara creates the feeling of a supermarket, both with his paintings, but also with grocery products, like bananas, peppers, toilet paper, bottled water, and an assortment of junk food placed in proximity of the paintings, creating a feeling that the exhibition takes place in an actual grocery store.

“So while it is about food and health and nourishing ourselves, and how we’re being nourished, it’s also about the systems that we’re unaware of that really control and dictate a lot of our lives,” said DeLara. 

The exhibit runs three nights only in 2020, on October 22nd, November 5th and 19th, and December 3rd, from 5-7 pm, at the John and Denise Graves Foundation, located at 2929 Chicago Ave, Ste 100 in Minneapolis. Register at the exhibit’s Eventbrite link here.

Support for MinneCulture on KFAI comes from the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund.

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MinneCulture Podcast promo ad featuring illustration of hip hop artist Nur-D

KFAI’s MinneCulture

Discover stories about Minnesota arts, culture and history. Hear audio diaries, sonic portraits, documentaries and more about purring gorillas, forced Native adoption, polka, hip-hop, local food, Minnesota’s immigrant communities and, of course, Prince. In our latest season, hear stories about Minnesota artists working through the pandemic and the time of unrest since the killing of George Floyd.

Listen at:
Spotify
Stitcher
Apple Podcasts
PodMN
and at Soundcloud here>>>

Connect with KFAI’s MinneCulture editorial team at legacy[at]kfai.org. Arts press releases, underwriting opportunities and story ideas are always welcome.

Support for MinneCulture on KFAI comes from the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund.

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