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Making Connections


        <h1> Making Connections </h1>
      

<h2 class="Mia-bold"> Black History at Mia </h2>
<p>Celebrate the exceptional historical and creative cultural contributions made by African American artists with exhibitions, virtual events, videos, stories, and more.</p>
<p><a class="uppercase button button-link bg-none padding-none bottom-border-hover" href="https://new.artsmia.org/art-artists/explore/making-connections/black-history-at-mia/">LEARN MORE</a></p>


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<h2 class="Mia-bold">Art by Women </h2>
<p>Celebrate the exceptional historical, creative, and cultural contributions made by women artists with exhibitions, virtual events, stories, videos, and podcast episodes.</p>
<p><a class="uppercase button button-link bg-none padding-none bottom-border-hover" href="https://new.artsmia.org/art-artists/explore/making-connections/art-by-women/">LEARN MORE</a>
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<h2 class="Mia-bold">Native American Heritage Month</h2>
<p>Celebrate and honor the rich and diverse cultures, traditions, histories, and important contributions of Native people.</p>
<p><a class="uppercase button button-link bg-none padding-none bottom-border-hover" href="
https://new.artsmia.org/native-american-heritage-month/">LEARN MORE</a>
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<h2 class="Mia-bold">Asian American Pacific Islander Heritage Month</h2>
<p>Celebrate the exceptional historical and contemporary creative cultural contributions made by Asian American and Pacific Islander artists with videos, stories, virtual events, and more. </p>
<p><a class="uppercase button button-link bg-none padding-none bottom-border-hover" href="
https://new.artsmia.org/asian-american-and-pacific-islander-heritage-month/">LEARN MORE</a>
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https://new.artsmia.org/asian-american-and-pacific-islander-heritage-month/

<h2 class="Mia-bold">Pride at Mia</h2>
<p>Celebrate the exceptional historical and creative cultural contributions made by the 2SLGBTQIA+ community with art, stories, virtual events, and more—curated by Mia’s 2SLGBTQIA+ Staff Work Group. </p>
<p><a class="uppercase button button-link bg-none padding-none bottom-border-hover" href="
https://new.artsmia.org/art-artists/explore/making-connections/pride-at-mia/">LEARN MORE</a></p>


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<h1>Making Connections</h1>
<p><span style="font-size:x-large;">Exploring the intersection of art and identity through exhibitions, events, and multimedia storytelling.</span>
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Dance Workshop: DANCEFLOOR DANCEFLOOR with Scott Stafford

Movies in the Park: Wig + Other Voices

Virtual Event: Star Gay-zing: An Astrology Poetry Reading for the Queers with Junauda Petrus-Nasah

Virtual Event: Transcripts: a podcast from the Tretter Transgender Oral History Project

<p><span style="font-size:x-large;">Mia&#8217;s 2SLGBTQIA+ Staff Resource Group is teaming up with Minneapolis Parks and Recreation Board for their summer Movie in the Park series. On Thursday, June 17th starting at 8pm, meet in Washburn Fair Oaks park for a screening of Wig (dir. Moukarbel, 2019), accompanied by the short film &#8220;Other Voices&#8221; (dir. S. Brown).</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size:x-large;">Movies will start at dusk. Please bring your own seating. Porta Potties will be available, as the museum will be closed. </span></p>
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<h3 class="Mia-bold">Other Voices (dir. Sweatmother)</h3>
<p>Runtime: 5min52<br />
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<span style="font-size:large;">Through a series of Other Voices, trans and gender non-conforming people express their experiences through art and conversation.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size:large;">Sweatmother is a latinx trans artist and filmmaker based in London. They use experimental techniques and hybrid documentary filmmaking in collaboration with non-professional actors to create counter-narratives from within their own communities and subcultures.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size:large;">Their work reclaims the often misplaced voice, body and gaze by repurposing femme and gender non-conforming identities in spaces where objectification is removed, and the agency and difference in the otherness is celebrated. </span>
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<h3 class="Mia-bold">Wig (dir. Moukarbel)</h3>
<p>Runtime: 1h 29m</p>
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<h3 class="Mia-bold">Watch the trailer </h3>
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<span style="font-size:large;">Spotlighting the art of drag, and centered on the New York staple Wigstock, Wig showcases the personalities and performances that inform the ways we understand queerness, art and identity today.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size:large;">For almost 20 years, Wigstock was the annual drag festival that glamorously signaled the end of summer for the New York’s gay community Late one night in 1984, Lady Bunny and a few friends drunkenly wandered from the Pyramid Club in the East Village to Tompkins Square Park and staged an impromptu drag show in the bandshell. This would soon become an annual drag bacchanal, which lasted until 2001. In 2018, Lady Bunny resurrected the festival, bringing together legendary queens with some of the new children of drag, creating one of the largest drag performances ever staged.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size:large;">Wig explores the origins and the influence of the historic festival through rich archival footage, and provides a look into the contemporary drag movement for which the festival served as a foundation. It’s a celebration of New York drag culture, and the personalities and performances that contribute to the ways we understand queerness, art, and identity, today. Wig features Lady Bunny, Charlene Incarnate, Flotilla DeBarge, Kevin Aviance, Neil Patrick Harris, Willam, Linda Simpson, Naomi Smalls, Tabboo!</span>
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<p><span style="font-size:large">In 2020, Mia welcomed Transcripts: a podcast from the Tretter Transgender Oral History Project with the launch of the podcast&#8217;s first episode, which focused on the political history of Black trans activism. This year, join a panel discussion around Transcripts&#8217; Episode 2: &#8220;“The South deserves people like me”, a deep dive into how trans Southerners find their place in the South, even if it means literally building the houses themselves. Learn how housing justice intersects with queer and trans rights issues and make local Twin Cities connections with housing justice artist-activists. </span></p>
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<h3 class="Mia-bold">Panelists forthcoming</h3>
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<li>TBD</li>
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<p><span style="font-size:large">To learn more about the Tretter Trans Oral History Project, please visit <a href="http://ttohp.umn.edu/">website</a>. </span></p>
<p><span style="font-size:large"><a href=" https://www.lib.umn.edu/tretter/transgender-oral-history-project">The Tretter Trans Oral History Project</a> is part of The Jean-Nickolaus Tretter Collection in Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender Studies at the University of Minnesota.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size:large"><a href=" http://ttohp.umn.edu/podcast/">Transcripts podcast</a>: A podcast of the Tretter Transgender Oral History Project at the University of Minnesota Libraries is generously funded by TAWANI Foundation and the Minnesota Humanities Innovation Lab.<br />
Event Host: Ameriprise Financial</span>
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<p>DANCEFLOOR DANCEFLOOR is a guided dancefloor movement practice focused on moving the physical body to engage and release in the energetic body &#8211; informed by qigong, 5Rhythms Technique, and the magic of club spaces. After a gentle warm up, we&#8217;ll ride a curated sonic landscape to encourage release, reconnection, and some dancefloor magic. All bodies are welcome &#8211; no experience necessary.</p>
<p>This is a FREE, in-person event that will take place outdoor in Mia&#8217;s Target Park courtyard. Please wear something you feel comfortable moving in. Following the City of Minneapolis mask mandate, Mia requires masks indoors. For the safety of other visitors, please also consider wearing your facemask outside in larger groups. If you are planning to visit the museum galleries, please reserve your ticket in advance at artsmia.org/tickets or call 612-870-3000.</p>
<p>About the artist:<br />
Scott Stafford is a Minneapolis-based dancer, movement director, and teaching artist. He views expression as vital &#8211; accessible to every individual, and necessary to every lifestyle. He is currently producing a new dance work titled, &#8220;Honey&#8221; : a dance landscape of individuals in pursuit of expression, inspired by the bodies, movement and music of club spaces &#8211; featuring an original sonic score by Grammy Award winning producer, David Morales. &#8220;Honey&#8221; will premiere July 1st at The Walker Art Center. For more information on Scott Stafford, visit scottestafford.com.</p>


<p>Friday, June 18th<br />
5:30-6:30pm<br />
Why do queers love astrology so much? Join author, poet, and astrology nerd Juanada Petrus-Nasah for an evening of astrology, poetry, Black queer love, and aligning ourselves with the stars.</p>
<p>Registration not required, Zoom link: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/89098463604 </p>
<p>About the author:<br />
Junauda Petrus-Nasah is a writer, a soul sweetener, runaway witch, and performance artist of Black-Caribbean descent, born and working on Dakota land in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Her work centers around wildness, queerness, Black-diasporic-futurism, ancestral healing, sweetness, shimmer and liberation. Her first YA novel, The Stars and The Blackness Between Them received a Coretta Scott King Honor Award. And she really, really loves to eat and write about delicious food. She is the co-founder with Erin Sharkey of Free Black DIrt a Black, experimental healing art collective. She is currently working on her second novel Black Circus,  set in the 90s about a young, Black woman studying circus with a mysterious Black elder former circus performer.  </p>


Upcoming events

The first gay art star supposedly succumbed to scandal—the truth is more complicated

Art and empathy: Four thought leaders explain the connection

Harmony in motion: Celebrating Mia’s Shiva Nataraja sculpture with dance

Making mud prints outside Mia to kick off Earth Day

Aparna Ramaswamy of Ragamala Dance Company dances before the Shiva Nataraja sculpture at Mia.

Making Connections

Making Connections

Content Collections

Black History at Mia

Art by Women

Native American Heritage Month

Asian American Pacific Islander Heritage Month

Pride at Mia