Black, Brown, and Red Power in Minneapolis: A Conversation with James Curry and Dr. Jimmy Patiño

Black, Brown, and Red Power in Minneapolis: A Conversation with James Curry and Dr. Jimmy Patiño

Join artist James Curry and historian Dr. Jimmy Patiño for a conversation on the collaboration and connection between Black, Indigenous, and Chicano communities and their movements for autonomy, self-determination and liberation in both the civil and 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.

Curry and Patiño will discuss their own processes engaging with this history and how their collaboration transformed the scholarship across media into the exhibition soulforce: the movements of memory.

This is a participating event with We Want More History, a nationwide weekend of public history programming.

This activity 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.

About James Curry:
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 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.

About Dr. Jimmy Patiño:
Jimmy Patiño is an Associate Professor and interdisciplinary historian in the Department of Chicano & Latino Studies at the University of Minnesota. He is the author of the book Raza Sí, Migra No: Chicano Movement Struggles for Immigrant Rights in San Diego published by the University of North Carolina Press in 2017. He has also written on Mexican American desegregation, Black and Brown critical thought in hip-hop culture, the life of radical Chicano organizer Bert Corona and is currently writing on the Chicano Movement of the 1960s and how these activists conceptualized and practiced relationship to Black and Red Power Movements. Patiño teaches and mentors students in classes such as Chicano History, Immigration and the Latinx Experience, Chicano Cultural Studies, and Comparative Ethnic Studies. He is an advocate for Chicano-Latinx History and broader Ethnic Studies in the K-12 system in Minnesota, developing curriculum, and co-creating collectives of mentorship and dialog with teachers, activists and students. He is also the current director of the Center for Race, Indigeneity, Disability, Gender and Sexuality Studies (RIDGS) at the U of MN. Patiño received a B.A. and M.A. in sociology from the University of Houston and a Ph.D. in United States history from the University of California, San Diego.