Episode 118
CSCW's Art & Social Change Weather Report From Minneapolis
Summary
Weather Report: The Art & Activism Forecast from Minneapolis
In this episode, we kick off a new Change the Story feature—The Weather Report—where we check in with creative change-makers across the country to get a pulse on how art and activism are faring in their communities.
First stop: Minneapolis, Minnesota.
Our guest is David O’Fallon, a longtime cultural leader with deep roots in the Twin Cities and beyond. From his early days with In the Heart of the Beast Theatre to leadership roles at the Kennedy Center, National Endowment for the Arts, and Minnesota Humanities Center, David brings a wide-angle lens to the intersection of arts, policy, and social change.
Together, we dig into how Minneapolis artists, activists, and community groups are navigating the storm—from the unresolved tensions of George Floyd Square to the challenges of rebuilding trust in the face of political upheaval and media manipulation. We talk about the power of creative communities to imagine and build new futures, the rebirth of the beloved May Day Parade, and an emerging movement to reclaim America’s story—on our terms.
Along the way, we hit on big themes: resistance, reckoning, and resurgence. How do artists and organizers hold space for healing and action? How do we keep showing up when systems are designed to wear us down? And what does it mean to embrace practical, tactical, coalition-building work—without getting lost in ideological purity?
David shares his work with a Black-led healing and writing group in George Floyd Square, his thoughts on the political climate’s impact on the arts, and a vision for a People’s Celebration of America in 2026, where all voices, all stories, and all struggles get their due.
This is about more than survival—it’s about finding the creative, collective courage to build what’s next.
👉 Listen in, and let’s get to work.
Support the Show! If this conversation resonated, help us keep these stories alive. Check out our GoFundMe and consider making a contribution.
🎧 Next up: We head to Massachusetts for another Weather Report—so stay tuned.
Takeaways:
Top Takeaways from This Episode
1. Art as a Tool for Social Change – In Minneapolis, artists and activists continue to use creativity to respond to political and cultural turmoil, demonstrating that art is both a means of expression and a force for resistance and healing.
2. The Legacy of George Floyd Square – The community remains in deep tension, navigating unresolved challenges while creating spaces for dialogue, healing, and storytelling.
3. Media & Misinformation Challenges – Local news outlets have been dominated by conservative media conglomerates, making it harder for communities to access diverse perspectives and truthful reporting.
4. The Return of the May Day Parade – Once an iconic Minneapolis tradition, the parade is being revived by a new, diverse coalition of organizers, showing the resilience of community-led cultural events.
5. Building the America That Must Be – Instead of accepting a narrow, exclusionary vision of American identity, communities must take ownership of their own narratives—leading to efforts like a People’s Celebration of America in 2026.
6. Practical Activism Over Purity – Movements don’t have to be perfect to be effective. The key is to focus on action, coalition-building, and local organizing rather than ideological disagreements.
7. Show Up & Keep Showing Up – Long-term social change happens through consistent presence and trust-building. It’s about digging in, listening, and doing the work—no shortcuts.
Notable Mentions
Here’s list of all the mentioned people, events, organizations, and publications mentioned in this episode.
People
1. David O’Fallon – A cultural leader and arts advocate who has worked with organizations like the Kennedy Center, National Endowment for the Arts, and the Minnesota Humanities Center.
2. George Floyd – A Black man whose murder by police in Minneapolis in 2020 sparked worldwide protests and ongoing social justice movements.
3. Sandy Spieler – A visionary artist known for her leadership in the In the Heart of the Beast Puppet and Mask Theatre and the May Day Parade.
4. Timothy Snyder – A historian and author of On Tyranny, a book that explores lessons from history on resisting authoritarianism.
5. Ricardo Levins Morales – A political artist and activist, recently published a new book addressing social justice movements.
6. Marquis Bowie – A community leader and author involved in activism in George Floyd Square where he also leads a writers group.
Events
1. George Floyd Protests – A series of global demonstrations against police brutality and racial injustice, sparked by George Floyd’s murder.
2. May Day Parade – A long-standing Minneapolis cultural event featuring giant puppets and community-driven performances, originally connected to In the Heart of the Beast Theatre.
3. People’s Celebration of America (2026) – A proposed grassroots initiative to celebrate American diversity and history in response to government-driven narratives.
Organizations
1. Center for the Study of Art and Community – The producer of the Change the Story, Change the World podcast, focusing on the role of arts in social change.
2. In the Heart of the Beast Puppet and Mask Theatre – A Minneapolis-based theater company known for its puppet performances and social justice activism.
3. Kennedy Center – A leading performing arts institution in Washington, D.C.
4. National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) – A U.S. government agency that supports arts projects nationwide.
5. Minnesota Humanities Center – A cultural organization promoting community engagement through the humanities.
6. Braver Angels – A nonprofit working to bridge partisan divides and restore civil discourse in the U.S.
7. Sinclair Broadcast Group – A major conservative media conglomerate that owns numerous local news stations.
8. Fox News – A major conservative-leaning news network in the U.S.
Publications
1. On Tyranny – A book by Timothy Snyder offering lessons on resisting authoritarianism.
2. Langston Hughes’ “Let America Be America Again” – A famous poem cited in the podcast, advocating for a just and inclusive America.
3. North of 80 (Substack) – David O’Fallon’s blog, featuring reflections on arts, activism, and social change.
4. The Land Knows the Way– Recently published book by Ricardo Levins Morales discussing grassroots activism and social justice movements.
This Podcast:
Change the Story / Change the World is a podcast that chronicles the power of art and community transformation, providing a platform for activist artists to share their experiences and gain the skills and strategies they need to thrive as agents of social change.
Through compelling conversations with artist activists, artivists, and cultural organizers, the podcast explores how art and activism intersect to fuel cultural transformation and drive meaningful change. Guests discuss the challenges and triumphs of community arts, socially engaged art, and creative placemaking, offering insights into artist mentorship, building credibility, and communicating impact.
Episodes delve into the realities of artist isolation, burnout, and funding for artists, while celebrating the role of artists in residence and creative leadership in shaping a more just and inclusive world. Whether you’re an emerging or established artist for social justice, this podcast offers inspiration, practical advice, and a sense of solidarity in the journey toward art and social change.
Transcript
Hey there. In this episode, we'll answer the question, how is the weather for art and social change in Minneapolis?
And then explore how creative change agents there are responding. From the center for the Study of Art and Community, this is Change the Story.
Change the World's Art and Social Change Weather, a short and pointed journey of inquiry where we ask local community arts activists around the country to describe how they are faring amid the disruption and turmoil of the MAGA regime.
, way back in the spring of:David has a long history as a national and cultural leader.
He was an early instigator of Minneapolis's legendary Heart of the Beast puppet and mask theater, held senior positions at the Kennedy center, the National Endowment for the Arts, and directed Minnesota's Perpich center for Arts Education and the Minnesota Humanities Center. Given all that, he has a deep understanding of how both the national and local cultural weather systems interact and influence each other. So, onward.
So, David, my goal here is to get a weather report from community arts folks like you to get a sense of how local activists, artists and arts organizations are responding to the radical changes that are emanating from the nation's capital. So how do you see what's going on in the country and how is it affecting your backyard?
Speaker B:Well, I think the situation that we're in is one of enormous transformation on at least three different levels. One level is all that we are aware of that is happening at the level of the federal government in the usa.
And I think it is fair to say and accurate to say and realistic to say that it is a neo fascist takeover of that government and it is stripping away what we have understood to be the laws, the rules, the norms that have guided our democracy. I think at a second level is the convergence of that with incredibly challenging social, political, just on the ground work.
For example, to be concrete, I live in Minneapolis, Minnesota, one mile from George Floyd Square.
And I think probably everybody listening to this, I know you, Bill, know that when George was murdered by police, it tore apart a city and the seams still remain to be fixed. That was happening before the election. That's underway still, and that is work to be done.
But A third dimension is the convergence, I think never before in human history of the political, the social and the cultural with the climate, chaos and crisis of our times. We know that is real. People can deny it, but we know it is real.
We know that people are migrating because of climate catastrophes, corruption and turmoil.
We know climate catastrophes are making lives worse for many people in many ways, whether it's California, Ecuador, ether reports shows that is also true.
Speaker A:All of these things regular changes story feature where we'll interrelate local perception of the changing cultural, that all the political forces you've described are real and very threatening, and the human capacity and often the need to filter, obfuscate, deny bad news about seemingly insurmountable problems. And on top of that, a regime that is working full time, feeding that impulse for denial with a fantasy worldview.
How does the creative problem solving you and I have spent our lives supporting get any traction?
Speaker B:I think part of the answer to that, Bill, is that this is not just an individual choice.
Speaker A:So true.
Speaker B:We're confronting systems right now that are benefiting from the crisis and the chaos. Those systems will do everything they can, both to remain in power as long as they can and to profit from them as far as they possibly can.
They tell us lies. They mislead us.
An example in the USA and our government right now is to get people riled up about people's pronouns or DEI while they loot the treasury and deny that they are actually destroying the future of our kids and grandkids the way they are going to handle the climate crisis. So the systems, it's not just how I react personally or what I choose or am forced to see.
We are confronting institutions and systems meaning laws, regulations, tax policy and so on that are keeping in place an incredibly destructive way of living on this earth. Except a few people are getting really rich out of it and they don't want us to see that as clearly as we are.
Speaker A:So considering the rapid escalation of conflict and retribution, the dismantling of programs and institutions, the gutting of NEA and NEH community investments, how's this playing out close to home?
Speaker B:Well, my backyard is Minneapolis, Minnesota, but also the rest of the state. I work with Braver Angels and we go into small rural communities and have.
Speaker A:Conversations now, am I right? Braver Angels works in communities to bridge the partisan divide and reintroduce and repair our participatory democracy, right?
Speaker B:Yeah. So I'd say again, you know, it varies by person.
The people in George Floyd Square are almost all black Americans and as you know, Bill, from your own incredibly wide experience, it's not that there's a single black community or black voice, there are many. So what tore that place apart first is still in place.
I find a city government in Minneapolis that is unable to really understand and then to cope with what's happening there was the cry right after George's murder of defund the police. But six weeks later, some of this very same city council said, well, wait a minute, where are the police?
So on one level, it is still a city in tension and strain and trying to figure out what do we do. I've been involved in a lot of conversations about the future of George Floyd Square.
A community group met for hundreds of hours over many months and came up with a plan. And then a couple people on city council said, well, we don't like that plan. So now it's sidetracked again.
And then, in fact, and I think we have to emphasize this very clearly, for much of the state of Minnesota, their news outlet has been taken over by extremely conservative moguls, dominating by Fox News and Sinclair, which bought up many of the small community newspapers and radio stations. There is only one message they Democrats are bad. Everything they do is wrong. The system is broken. Vote for you know who.
You probably heard the phrase after the election, people weren't buying what the Democrats were selling. But I think an honest response, the response to that is many people never heard what the Democrats were selling.
So on the ground, it feels like we are still struggling and still becoming. And I think this is really important and I want to compliment you on your work, Bill.
There are incredibly numbers of people doing creative work, connecting across all the lines, you creating and imagining futures and possibilities and at the same time struggling to feed themselves, to take care of their family, to find a home in a neighborhood. All of this is underway at the same time.
Speaker A:So, David, the way I'm defining weather report is that it's documenting three major things, however people want to define the resistance, the reckoning and the resurgence. So the question is how is the creative community in particular in the Twin Cities meeting the enormous challenges in manifesting what's next?
Speaker B:Yeah, well, I'll give you again a couple of on the ground examples of this.
One of the things that is so meaningful to me on a personal level is that I helped start a black led healing and writing group right in George Floyd Square. We meet every other Tuesday from 6 to 8, and the last time we met, the room was flooded.
We usually have 10 or 12, maybe 15 people we had over 30 people there. And we're sharing our stories and our community. No one is selling anything. No one is trying to fix the square at that meeting.
It is simply people sharing what they write. And everyone is always surprised by what they write. One of the last prompts of that evening was, what are your survival skills?
So that community shared everything from man, I'm going to stock up on water to my survival skill is my family. My survival skill is my faith, and so on.
So that community, I mean, I wept at the end of that evening, Bill, because we're going to hold each other no matter what rolls downstream. That's one. A second one. And I know you know this territory pretty well, but I.
But I love this, which is, you know, I can't remember how many years ago I helped found a theater here that became in the Heart of the Beast Theater.
And part of that grew into, led by an incredibly visionary artist named Sandy Spieler, an event called May Day, which was a group of people taking a theme like Help make our world better. We walked down one of the city streets.
The first time we did it, we had maybe, I don't know, two or three dozen people walking and a couple hundred people watching going, what the hell is that? We carried giant puppets. We were inspired, of course, as you know, by bread and puppet up in Vermont, where I'd worked for a couple of summers.
When that ended a few years ago, we had 25 or 30,000 people watching. We had seven or 800 involved in making the parade. The parade always came up from the community.
And then given Covid and then given George Floyd, it kind of fell apart. It is back. We got funding. We're going to do it again. And it has nothing to do with Heart of the Beast Theater this time.
I want to underline that because that theater has seen its course. Blessings to all. Good work. This is being led by an incredibly diverse group of people.
One of the leaders is a small Hispanic oriented church right in South Minneapolis. They are now the home for the future of the May Day Parade. It's back.
Speaker A:That is fantastic. What a gift.
Speaker B:And we are beginning to talk and you are going to get involved in this, Mr. Cleveland, given your networks and your knowledge, I ain't going to let you out of this one.
So you know that I was at the Kennedy center for about four years in the Endowment for the Arts. Three, four years. And then he who shall not be named made himself the president of the Kennedy Center.
And then you've seen and I've seen the Purge of the guidelines for the endowment for the arts and the humanities. And I think that is the right word. It's a purge.
So this regime wants to use that money and that funding to create basically a five mile republic kind of public celebration of the America that they believe in. They see. Well, they might do that. I can't stop that.
e's celebration of America in:All the voices, all the colors, all the music, all the stories that they don't want anyone to hear or believe. We're having the conversation here. It's gonna go on. Given you your vision, Bill, the network that you have. We have to make this happen.
The people are gonna tell the that's beyond resistance. That is resurgence. That is creating our future.
Speaker A:Yes, that's exactly the kind of thing we need. The shock and awe tactics being used by this administration is designed to create paralysis so that the opposition will not know where to begin.
But this kind of clear, concise, collective ground up community celebration organizing event is absolutely the kind of thing that plants the seeds for dozens and dozens and dozens of other seedlings that are going to sprout up from that. That's community cultural based organizing. That's it.
Speaker B:That's exactly right. Exactly right. And Ricardo Lemons Morales, who just got a new book out, I went to the book launch and of course it was packed.
People could hardly breathe. It is the best thing. If you put that book together with Tim Snyder's book on tyranny, that is the textbook for where we need to be and where to go.
And Ricardo said two things that I'll just pass on right now. He said, this is no time for purity. He said, this is a time for practical tactics.
Do what you can and if somebody uses the wrong pronoun, just look the other way. He said, I don't really care if you're on Facebook or Blueski. I think you need to organize, envision, build coalitions, do that work.
But what are you doing in practice to build? Maybe it's just your neighborhood block, right? So practical and tactical. And Ricardo also said this will change in weeks and months to come.
But he said, you know, there is no grand movement right now. One might emerge from the bottom up, but we have to see meanwhile do that work.
Speaker A:Do the work and generate the trust. That's the stuff that we have to rebuild because the chaos they're creating breeds uncertainty and uncertainty erodes trust.
And the only way to get that trust back is to get in the proverbial trench with a shovel, with your partner, and dig that sucker to prove to yourselves that you'll stick it out and have each other's back.
Speaker B:I'm just going to give you a huge, big affirmation for that. That is exactly right.
as gone on for, I think since:But you have, my friend, a network of trusting relationships. You know, your interviews, your podcasts, it's beautiful. Seriously, what you're weaving together right now is critical and essential.
And I want you to hear that. My heart to yours.
Speaker A:Thank you. I really appreciate that. With this new feature here, this weather report, we're going to do a lot of check ins like this.
What's happening, what's working.
What I'm trying to do is not focus on the sky is falling, but the kinds of things you're talking about, people's mindsets, you know, they're in the cultural organizing gym and they're getting their imaginative muscles in shape. Yeah. Rare to go.
Speaker B:You know, I call myself an elder patriot warrior. Yep. And I use that word. And I like taking back that word patriot because I.
Oh, I've got to share one other story from the ready group in George Floyd Square.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker B:One of the prompts one time was talk about the American dream. Now mostly that room is black. And so the room went, oh, Jesus Christ. Okay, we'll talk about the American dream.
But at the end, Marquis said, if we don't have the American dream, what do we have? And the whole room went, oh, yeah. So there's the famous Langston Hughes poem that I put in one of my north of 80 podcasts.
We have to build the America that never was, but must be.
Speaker A:Yep. The American dream for sure.
And my friend, I think that's where we are right now, rolling up our sleeves trying to find out if we're up to meeting this moment.
So thank you, David, for your Twin Cities weather report and thank you for your own insightful writing on your substack north of 80, which we'll link in our show notes. Adios, my friend, Bill.
Speaker B:Take care. Bye bye.
Speaker A:So there you go, our first weather report. To those of you who have joined us, thank you for coming. And please come back for more our next Weather report.
I believe we'll be coming from the state of Massachusetts, so join us. And please don't forget to Click on the GoFundMe link also in our show notes and consider making a contribution.
Change the Story, Change the World is a production of the center for the Study of Art and Community. Our theme and soundscape spring forth from the head, heart and hands of the maestro Judy Munson. Our text editing is by Andre Nebbe.
Our effects come from freesound.org and our inspiration comes from the ever present spirit of UK235. So until next time, stay well, do good and spread the good word. And once again, please know that this episode has been 100% human.
