On Monday October 2nd at the Ritz Theater starting at 6pm with an after party at Rogue Buddha Gallery. We honor five visionaries whose talents, passion and dedication to the Arts in the Minneapolis community and beyond. Here are bios about the honorees of Vision Awards bestowed by Northeast Minneapolis Arts District. Please RSVP or show up the night of. The event is free.
Dr. Barbara Bridges
In 2018 Barbara founded the nonprofit Art to Change the World. In five short years including all of the Pandemic, ACW went from thin air to staging over 50 well attended events and programs. ACW has more than 400 members; 200 are artists, ranging in age from 18 to 103 and representing many cultures and divergent points of view.
ACW worked with the developer of the Huxley Apartments, engaging them to purchase over 200 small works from ACW artists.
ACW is a collective. The mission is to see that artists are paid, social justice seminars are delivered and art is employed to build community. The ACW Board of Directors is 50 percent BIPOC to ensure that all voices are heard and at the table to be part of the decision making.
Barbara Bridges has been an artist and a teacher/college professor for over 40 years. Her social practice sculptures have been exhibited in Maine, Miami, the Virgin Islands, Maryland, Chicago, Mexico, Spain, Canada, and throughout Minnesota. Barbara taught K-12 art in Minnesota, Maine, and the Virgin Islands. She created and eventually retired from an online program of teaching art teachers at Bemidji State University. She was voted Art Teacher of the Year twice in Minnesota.
John Hock
NE SCULPTURE I Gallery Factory is located in the Casket Arts Factory building. Founder and Executive/Artistic Director John Hock has brought 27 years of skills, knowledge and finding resources to run multiple sculpture parks and finding funding for artist fellowships and public art.
John worked with the talented artist Peyton Scott Russell whose internationally acclaimed portrait painting of George Floyd was made at the Casket Arts Factory. In 2020 John created the Social Justice Billboard Project at George Floyd Square exhibiting billboard art of 30 BIPOC artists on three billboards over three years.
He has been essential to the Northeast Minneapolis Arts District bringing and retaining talent. John worked with the city of Minneapolis, developers and neighborhood groups to get public art by Arts District artists placed in Hook & Ladder Apartments, Jefferson Right-of-Way (J-ROW) Sculpture Park, Huxley Apartments, Timber & Tie, and other developments around Minnesota. John has developed an Intern Artist Fellowship program that gets young artists to experiment and exhibit in the Gallery Factory from all over North America and England with an emphasis on BIPOC and LGBTQ+ artists and others who might not have a voice. John Hock has been an essential part of the Arts District to help elevate the work and community to the next level.
State Representative Diane Loeffler, posthumously
Diane Loeffler not only showed up for community and the arts, she was from the community, part of the community and she surrounded herself with arts. Famous for gift-giving, she often gave art in its many forms – visual, literary, performance. Her Minnesota State Representative’s legislative office was full of art she’d purchased or learned to make.
Representative Loeffler – Diane – brought resources to Northeast’s parks and the Mississippi River. She knew and used the political levers in tireless advocacy for the elderly, the differently-abled, and other underrepresented voices.
Except when she was deep in the legislative session, Diane Loeffler and husband Mike Vennewitz would be out at community events and arts events, accessible and enthusiastic for the community she loved.
Herman Milligan Jr., PhD
A managing partner with The Fulton Group, LLC, an independent consultant firm specializing in marketing research, competitive intelligence, non-profit organizational development, and culturally-specific initiatives, retiree of Wells Fargo Corp., Herman Milligan Jr. worked in its Enterprise Marketing Division – Customer Insights and Analysis Division.
Herman has a huge, unparalleled footprint in the arts of Minneapolis and beyond. Among many examples of board service: Milkweed Editions during the co-creation of Minnesota Center for Book Arts.
His own arts and interests include photography and music, talents exhibited in his co-curation with Howard Oransky of the acclaimed exhibit, “A Picture Gallery of the Soul” at the University of Minnesota’s Katherine Nash Gallery.
Herman helped raise millions of dollars for non-profit arts and social service organizations locally and nationally, including providing funding for the early years of Art-A-Whirl® via support from Norwest Corporation at the request of the late City Council members Walter Dziedzic and Alice Rainville.
An advocate and/or board member for two dozen arts organizations and artists including the Northeast Minneapolis Arts District; Artspace Projects; The Givens Foundation for African American Literature, Art to Change the World, Soo Visual Arts Center, FilmNorth (MN),The Minnesota Museum of American Art, The Soap Factory (past), The Guthrie Theatre Community Advisory — Herman Milligan, Jr. has been at the forefront of development of the art community for decades. His advice is sought by established and up-and-coming groups. A true pillar of the arts community.
Piotr Szyhalski
Piotr Szyhalski is a MCAD professor and an artist using multidisciplinary methods, moving between fine arts (painting, photography, drawing, installation), sound, media art, and design. He has a studio in the Casket Arts building. His work has been exhibited worldwide at such venues as the International Center of Photography, the New York Expo Film Festival, Siggraph, ISEA Paris, the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago, the San Jose Museum of Art, and Experimenta Design in Lisbon, Portugal. Pieces are in the collections of the Walker Art Center, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and others.
Piotr’s work hit a watershed moment during the Pandemic in which he worked under the pseudonym Labor Camp adopted in 1998. In response to the global COVID-19 pandemic and political and social upheaval in the United States, Szyhalski drew and inked a poster a day from March 24 until the U.S. presidential election on November 3, 2020. Each of the 225 appeared daily on Instagram. Some were printed by followers and pasted on walls in Los Angeles, Minneapolis, Baltimore, and Philadelphia. The entire series was published as a book. The New York Times said the series used “the style and language of propaganda posters to capture the pain and absurdity of the pandemic, with heavy doses of sarcasm and rage at the federal government’s response…The works are meticulous but piercing, like a carefully released primal scream.”
A major retrospective at the Weisman Art Museum in 2022 showed how Piotr Szyhalski has been educating artists for decades.