Weaving History: A Celebration of Minnesota Unraveled Storytellers

Weaving History: A Celebration of Minnesota Unraveled Storytellers

Join us for a free, family-friendly evening of food, live music, and community curated activities in celebration of the powerful voices behind the Minnesota Unraveled podcast, including host Dr. Chantel Rodríguez and guests from Seasons 1 and 2.

Attendees will also have an opportunity to view the soulforce: the movements of memory exhibition curated by producer, director, writer, and editor, James Curry, featured on podcast episode 110.

Catering for this event will be provided by BIPOC Foodways Alliance, a nonprofit organization that creates unity using food as a tool and their Immigrant Kitchen program, which provides a platform for women of color, immigrant communities, and elders to tell their cultural legacy stories through the lens of home cooking.

To request an accommodation or for inquiries about accessibility, please contact engagement@mnhs.org. For more information, visit our Mill City Museum Accessibility webpage.

About the podcast
Minnesota history is a rich tapestry, weaving together the diverse experiences, cultures, and events that tell the story of our state. It’s a story that affects—and includes—all of us.

Minnesota Unraveled, a podcast by the Minnesota Historical Society, pulls on the threads of the past to reveal new perspectives and expand our knowledge of the history we share. Host Dr. Chantel Rodríguez and her guests invite listeners to think like historians and recognize that learning about other people’s lives in the past can be a powerful way to reveal our place in the present.

About soulforce
The exhibition soulforce: the movements of memory explores the collaboration and connection between Black, Indigenous, and Chicano communities and their movements for autonomy, self-determination and liberation in the post-civil rights era in Minneapolis, the Twin Cities and the Nation. These three movements sought to address the societal and structural inequalities facing these diverse communities and neighborhoods with more immediacy. The North side of Minneapolis is primarily where all three groups' struggles intersected against the structural forces that sought to disenfranchise them.

Exhibit Curator Bio:
James Curry is a multi-disciplinary artist who grew up in Brooklyn Park, MN and studied at The American Film Institute and earned his MFA in Film from the Vermont College of Fine Arts. In 2021, as an editor at KSTP, he and his team were awarded the Alfred I. duPont-Columbia Award for coverage of George Floyd’s murder, uprising and aftermath. Also in 2021 he was awarded the Jerome Hill Artist Fellowship for Film for his fiction and non-fiction work and in 2022 the Arthur C McWatt Fellowship, he curated a social justice themed exhibit on Dakota County Black Pioneers. He has written a graphic novella comic based on his ancestor’s narratives with DC/Marvel illustrator Tom Nguyen called Hate Stings published in June 2023. He is chair of Building Remembrance for Reconciliation (BR4R.org) and has partnered with Dakota County Historical Society on the development of a Black Heritage Trail in Hastings. In 2024 he was awarded a Minnesota African American Heritage Museum and Gallery Fellowship and curated his second exhibit there last summer called soulforce: the movements of memory based on Dr. Jimmy Patiño's work on Red, Brown and Black Power in the Twin Cities. Curry is currently in pre-production for his next non-fiction work that has received a grant from the Minnesota Center for Humanities for a documentary based on soulforce.

This exhibit is made possible by the voters of Minnesota through a grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board, thanks to a legislative appropriation from the arts and cultural heritage fund.

Event Schedule:

• 6-7 pm: Open House, exhibit viewing, activities, social hour
• 6:30 pm: Exhibit introductory remarks from podcast guest, James Curry
• 6:45 pm: Live Bomba performance
• 7 pm: Opening remarks from podcast host, Dr. Chantel Rodríguez, storytelling & community meal with Immigrant Kitchen, a program of BIPOC Foodways Alliance
• 7:30 pm: Podcast listening party & social time