CURA’s Artist Neighborhood Partnership Initiative (ANPI) provides small grants to artists of color and Native artists working in neighborhoods in Minneapolis, St. Paul and the surrounding suburbs. ANPI grants recognize the valuable role that artists and the arts play in the work of fostering neighborhood wellbeing, and are intended to support the leadership of artists in these efforts. This grant program is particularly focused on directly funding individual artists or groups of artists working to build a more equitable Twin Cities.

We are…

Passion Project is a film project to initiate dialogue and collective action around the creative labor industry in Northeast Minneapolis. Created by and for BIPOC cultural workers who have a connection to Northeast Minneapolis, the film will document local cultural workers’ lived experiences and individual creative practices, and provide new spaces for mutual aid, resource sharing, and education around collective organizing in arts industries.

Prisons Ain’t Peace is an abolitionist, youth-centered public narrative shaping project. It’s based on the premise that Minneapolis youth deserve communities that are capable of ethically serving young people—that is, without a reliance on imprisonment and carceral violence. Pushing back on the current tough on crime moment in Minneapolis, Prisons Ain’t Peace is a zine that makes a case for youth prison abolition using philosophical, historical, and discourse-based methods. 

The ancestral practice of the Ohunkankan (“Making relatives by telling the stories”) is an inclusive and time-honored way for Dakota people to renew our relationship with Ina Makoce (Mother Earth) and all our relations by gathering together for the seasonal community theatrical sharing of mythic and contemporary stories. Participants will build and showcase their growth and learning of Dakota language and dramatic performance skills in devised community Ohunkankan, a staged storytelling production featuring an all-ages cast of Dakota language learners and speakers, at the Bruce Vento Nature Sanctuary in St. Paul, a sacred site of great significance known to Dakota people as Wakan Tipi…

The Eastside Stories production group formed to amplify the voices of BIPOC residents and business owners in East St. Paul to foster a deeper sense of community. Other neighborhoods in the Twin Cities have done an excellent job of sharing their stories and history like Rondo, the Northside of Minneapolis and Camden town. Yet the East side remains a bit of a mystery to those outside and even inside our community. People don't know what’s happening if the  stories are not being told, so a small group of us came together to tell these stories. So far we have produced 13 stories in the series, and we will create three new stories during summer and fall of 2021.

In “The Uses of Anger”, Lorde passionately states: “...anger expressed and translated into action in the service of our vision and our future is a liberating and strengthening act of clarification, for it is in the painful process of this translation that we identify who are our allies with whom we have grave differences, and who are our genuine enemies...Anger is loaded with information and energy.” (Lorde, 1981). This artist-led community art project, inspired by Audre Lorde’s essay, allows members of the Rondo Community in St. Paul to recognize and validate their feelings of anger constructively through artistic expression. The lead artist, paired with a team of dedicated artistic…

Artist: Geno Okok with the City of Brooklyn Park and Waterside Market

This project will address the issue of social exclusivity and lack of attention to diversity within the city of Brooklyn Park. With 54% of its residents being BIPOC and 30% being immigrants, Brooklyn Park is one of the most diverse cities within the State. However, these communities are not part of the focal point of the city, and are often not recognized by City officials or in the city as being an intricate part of the community. We will create a large scale public mural that promotes social inclusivity of immigrant residents by highlighting the various cultures and diversity that…

Kaysone and Sunny live in and/or have roots in Brooklyn Park, Brooklyn Center and North Minneapolis, where some of Minnesota's largest populations of South East Asians (SEA) live. The team will focus on engaging community members to explore the feeling of being stuck between two worlds - neither here nor there - and highlight the narratives of the diaspora voice and whether a sense of belonging can be found in their neighborhoods.

The artist team will engage communities in telling their stories through outreach of interviews, conversations, and gatherings. The project will conclude with a street theatre performance with the artist team and community members in…

The West Side of Saint Paul is a community that was able to create itself in its place, integrating and feeding the social, economical and cultural dynamics with new practices. And within that evolution the people have not lost their identity matrix. This identity is also a multicolored mosaic of identities of diverse regions of Central and South America that add and juxtapose each other to create the new reality of Saint Paul. In the face of anti-immigration policies of the present administration that attack basic humanitarian principles and break the community, the immigrant and the native communities of Saint Paul make efforts to transform their reality into a more positive…

The Frogtown and Rondo communities have two of the most well established identities in the City of Saint Paul. In the words of the artists, "We are known for being a largely working class, scrappy, artistic, incredibly diverse bunch of humans who have roots all over the planet. We brought the history, stories, tastes and smells to the heart of St. Paul to be shared, explored, and celebrated."

The story of these neighboring communities – two communities divided first by freeway, then by arbitrary district designation, and finally by train, is a story that must be told and preserved. Mychal and Tou Saiko will be creating a colorful, music - poetry - and dance-centered,…