Announcing our 2026-27 Hub Residencies

Hub Residencies support deeply collaborative, community-based projects in the arts, humanities, and humanistic social sciences. These projects involve yearlong partnerships between an individual or community organization and scholars in the College of Liberal Arts. The Liberal Arts Engagement Hub serves as a support system and home base for residency projects, as well as a liaison between University and community spaces. We are thrilled to introduce seven new residency projects for 2026-27. 

Anchoring Creative Visions 

“Anchoring Creative Visions” is a collaborative initiative between Serpentina Arts and the University of Minnesota’s Art Department to host a series of six in-person and hybrid convenings for Minnesota Latinx visual artists during the 2026-2027 academic year. These convenings are intentional gatherings of artists, exhibition professionals, and University of MN faculty/students to provide culturally-relevant, highly participatory, action-oriented professional development.

Relative to Latinx demographic presence within the state, representation of Latinx artists within the Minnesota arts landscape is disproportionately low. One of the barriers, among many, is having the education and professional skillset. In addition, recently the Latinx community art production has suffered a severe setback in freedom of expression due to the repression from recent violence and hate towards immigrants and people of color. This partnership leverages the respective strengths of the University resources, such as space and technology, combined with professional staff /faculty /students with Serpentina artists’ knowledge and artist-led bilingual programming. To address systemic inequities and strengthen the artistic voice of Latinx visual artists, this initiative aims to strengthen artists’ portfolios by improving their professional exhibition skillset in art handling, packaging, shipping, and installation skill to be competitive in art opportunities.

GAAF: Dance as Living Archive and Diasporic Governance 

GAAF: Dance as Living Archive and Diasporic Governance is a year-long public humanities residency led by Maryan Yusuf and Nadira Hussein (The Saanta Collective). The project centers the Somali dance community in Minnesota and examines how Somali dance functions as a living archive—carrying memory and authority through embodied practice.

GAAF operates through intergenerational rehearsals, dance workshops, buraanbur circles, community circles, archival documentation, and performances at sites including the Barker Center for Dance. The residency will expand this work by consolidating a community-rooted archive of recorded movement, oral histories, and choreographic variations. All while creating a sustained space at The Hub for rehearsal laboratories, and public dialogue.

The project unfolds across two public iterations. The first, GAAF, returns to the Barker Center for Dance. The second, GAAF: The Prelude, turns to buraanbur as its central investigation: demystifying the form as a site of women's resistance and reclamation. The Prelude weaves in the Somali folkloric figures of the Qumayo and Araweelo. GAAF: The Prelude; aims to reframe those labels historically used to demonize and marginalize women. Asserting them as lineages of refusal and power through live buraanbur, film, and archival testimony from women practitioners.

The project culminates in an iterative performance and cultural heritage showcase integrating live dance, archival materials, and structured conversation about migration and authority in diaspora..

How We Gather When the World Burns: Devising Solidarity Across the Global South

What does it mean to create in times of destruction and bloodshed? How might everyday acts of care, for oneself and for one’s community, become seeds for collective creation? And how can performance sharings cultivate resistance and solidarities in the present moment? This project builds on long-standing relationships with artists and activists from India and Iran, alongside ongoing efforts to cultivate community among immigrants and allies in the Twin Cities. Through a series of collaborative workshops, we engage deeply with everyday embodied knowledge, as sites of reflection and resistance. In the context of violent regimes and normalized forms of everyday violence, these practices become spaces to gather, witness, and reimagine collective life.

Drawing from these workshops, we will devise a performance that foregrounds co-created knowledge through non-dominant methodologies. The devising process, rooted in sustained dialogue and embodied experimentation, will not merely comment on contemporary debates around immigration, solidarity, and authoritarianism; it will actively intervene in them. By amplifying immigrants’ and People of Color’s lived experiences and strategies of survival, the work generates new political and aesthetic imaginaries. Care among immigrants from the Global South is complex and often shaped by shifting notions of home, belonging, and identity. We attend to these tensions rather than smoothing them over, asking: how do we care for one another when geopolitics positions us against each other? Centering performance-making as inquiry, this project expands knowledge production beyond academic walls, creating a collective space to navigate grief, displacement, and resistance together.

Northland Digitization Project: Archiving Local Histories of Artist Organizing

We are a grassroots team of artists, archivists, and scholar activists documenting the 30-year history of a Minneapolis based radical print collective. From 1979-2009, the individuals who ran Northland Poster Collective designed, printed, and distributed thousands of posters which shared messages of progressive, left, and radical social movements. Responsive to events and organizing struggles of the moment, the full scope of themes and calls to action represented in Northland’s print archive reflect three decades of social movement history across the late 20th and early 21st century. In relationship with many other artists, community leaders, and national political organizations, Northland posters became widely recognized among organizers across the Twin Cities and the United States for distinct visual style and unrestrained political messaging.

During the 2026-2027 Hub Residency, we will continue our work to digitize Northland poster archives, conduct oral history interviews, and organize public history and printing workshops in collaboration with local artists and activists. In times of rising fascism, our goal is to demonstrate the critical role that artists and collectives such as Northland played in shaping the social and visual landscape of movement organizing history, and to activate Northland archives in support of liberatory political, creative, and scholarly work today.

Reversing Dissections

“Reversing Dissections” brings together a diverse group of artists, activists and scholars to acknowledge, grieve and reckon with the exploitation of marginalized bodies that has systematically operated within western medicine and its biomedical visualization. In medical research the noble goal of diagnosing and curing (often reserved to privileged bodies), has justified the use of violent, discriminatory and extractive practices of experimentation (often endured by vulnerable bodies). This project reverses the dissecting medical gaze by collectively demanding accountability, humanization and celebration for the anonymous bodies whose contribution helped countless people heal across times and geographies.

This project aims to:

• Draft new community-led paths to reconcile medical trauma with scientific progress.
• Recognize the impact these images have beyond the medical field, into mainstream representations of the body.
• Develop creative, empowered, collective language that responds to archives and accompanies biased historical material.

Where I’m From: Representing the Northside

The “Where I’m From: Representing on the Northside” project engages the humanities, and especially the arts, as a way for Near North and Willard-Hay residents on Minneapolis’ Northside to document and process the current moment (and the Northside’s unique circumstances within it) through representation: using seriously playful art- and word-making to proclaim “This is who I am. This is where I come from.” The project derives from Northside Residents Redevelopment Council (NRRC)’s longtime priority of engaging residents, identifying needs, and developing programs to address those needs. A NRRC collaboration with the Department of English and its Creative Writing Program, the project aims to provide opportunities for Northside residents of all ages to work with and alongside community and University artists and writers creating images and texts via cartooning and comics, collage, writing, doodling, and digital assemblage, all on the theme of representing one’s selves and one’s communities. This creative play of documentation encourages the preservation of Northside culture after the early 2026 crisis of federal immigration agent incursion as well as amid less visible but still urgent challenges around gentrification, health, public education, and housing precarity.

Youth at the Root: Political Study and Participation

Student Engagement at Minneapolis Public Schools seeks to embolden student leaders to engage in political study, analysis, and strategies towards school improvement. Transformative social change comes from the ground up. Hence, the need to nourish those closest to the root. It is their proximity to the root that makes young people uniquely positioned as knowledge producers and creative change agents. Political education can be integral, rather than peripheral to conventional educational practices. Our goal is to support youth in making connections between critical theories, political education, organizing strategies, and each other, in order to navigate and transform the systems that condition their material realities.

We will engage in what Stefano Harney and Fred Moten (2013: 11) describe as “black study” - “a mode of thinking with others separate from the thinking that the institution requires of you.” An indispensable aspect of black study is something done "with and for" (communities). Through this form of study, we will engage with deep reading and analysis that affirms students' lived experiences. Thus, this form of study becomes not just a site of learning, but political education, for both youth and adults. Connecting study to transformative and participatory action, we will use Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR) practices to connect youth to communities and towards change; having young people decide how to use their power is “the most powerful impact of YPAR is that it spreads seeds of change that inspire more action-based research” (Caraballo et al, 2017: 323). Political education has no endpoint because the struggle for liberation continues. Still, the sooner youth sharpen their analysis and practice collective participation, their political commitments and contributions grow deeper.