Arts Briefs: Awards a-plenty! Minnesota artists, authors and cornhole-players take home prizes.

Arts Briefs is a weekly roundup of Minnesota arts news compiled by the MPR News arts and culture team.

Poster power prevails

The McKnight Foundation has announced its 2024 Distinguished Artist Award. This award is given to an artist who lives and works in Minnesota and whose work has local, regional or national significance.

This year’s winner is Minneapolis artist Ricardo Levins Morales. The award includes a $10,000 prize, which Morales says will provide him a base of stability.

“All artists are used to seeing a lot of zeros, but usually there’s nothing in front of them,” Morales says.

Morales moved to Minnesota in 1976 and was one of the cofounders of the Northland Poster Collective.

He creates posters and other printed materials that represent issues of social justice.

Neon insight honored

The Minneapolis-based nonprofit Arts Midwest has announced the winners of the second annual Midwest Award for Artists with Disabilities.

Artist Virginia Townsend of South St. Paul is one of eight recipients. She is the only winner from Minnesota. Each artist will receive $3000 in unrestricted funds.

Townsend explores mental health institutions and treatment in her neon abstract paintings.

“My work is disability-and femme-centric non-objective abstract art,” Townsend says in her artist statement. “My goals are to explore my experiences of mental health unit hospitalizations, being ‘high need’ according to Hennepin County and navigating group homes and other facilities as a woman with trauma.”

Madison Rubenstein of Bloomington won the award in 2023.

Cultural crossroads in poetry

As reported last week, The Academy of American Poets named Minneapolis Poet Laureate Heid E. Erdrich a 2024 fellow.

Erdrich will receive $50,000. She will use it for her Poetry Service Announcement project. The project will commission poems about Minneapolis places by local youth and local poets who are Native American, people of color, refugees of genocide and those experiencing the city’s housing crisis.

“It’s really important to remember that Minneapolis is an Indigenous homeland, and I would like to hear the voices of Indigenous poets, and also people who have come here and come to make this an important place to their families, to their populations,” Erdrich says. “I would like to introduce them to places that are important to indigenous people, and see what poetry arises from that meeting.”

Erdrich will host a poetry event Aug. 29 and Sept. 13 at the Eloise Butler Wildflower Garden of Minneapolis.

Cornhole world champ

Dia Lee, a cornhole player from St. Paul Park, won the women’s world championships singles on Aug. 11.

Last week Lee traveled to Rock Hill, S.C., the site of the American Cornhole League World Championships.

“After I won, I felt really relieved, and I felt really shocked, and I just couldn’t believe that happened,” Lee said. “I think it’s finally setting in. Now what’s next?”

Lee also qualified for the first time to be an American Cornhole League professional player. She joins just a handful of Minnesotans who have gone pro.

Lee started playing cornhole with the Hmong Cornhole club just over two years ago.

Zine scene celebrates

The two-day zine festival Autopic is back in Minneapolis for its fifth run.

Ngoc Doan is helping to organize the festival and says the focus is on independent, creator-owned art.

“I think Autopic festival is an amazing festival to see what real, local artists are doing,” Doan says. “It’s also a great space for collaborative work if you are coming in with your own artwork that you’d love to share and kind of enrich our community.”

Over 100 artists will be selling prints at the festival and over 80 are local. Some of the special guests include Late Night Copies Press, a Minneapolis-based micro-press focusing on zines about LGBTQ+ history and arts, Blue Delliquanti, a comic artist and writer based in Minneapolis and Back of Beyond Press, a small Risograph print press from in Minneapolis.

Saturday’s events are at Coffman Memorial Union at the University of Minnesota campus and Sunday at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. The festival is free.

Last call for ‘English’

This is the final weekend for “English,” a play at the Guthrie Theatre that follows a group of Iranian adults studying for an English as a Second Language test.

Director Hamid Dehghani says the play invites audiences to connect with the characters through comedy.

“At the same time, it’s a very poetic play, very delicate play that talks about identity, language … and people who learn English as their second language,” Dehghani says.

Hot porch summer

Porches and yards across Uptown in Minneapolis will be alive with the sounds of live music 1 to 5 p.m. Saturday, Aug. 17.

It’s the annual Uptown Porchfest.

About 70 bands will perform across 33 makeshift stages for the neighborhood music festival. Local performers include the pop-punk foursome Couch Potato Massacre, the neosoul group Vinny Franco and the Love Channel, mass accordion band Dee Langley and the Masked Accordions and gothic jazz outfit King Sized Coffin.

The event is free.

Twin triumphs for Kritzer

Minnesota author Naomi Kritzer has won two major awards. Last week, the science fiction writer was honored with two Hugo awards for a novelette and a short story.

“I was in Glasgow for Worldcon, which is the event where the Hugos are awarded,” Kritzer says “I really was not expecting to win, too.”

Kritzer’s novelette focuses on themes of mutual aid and disabilities after a major disaster in Minneapolis, while her short story is about artificial intelligence.