When Renee Good was shot by an ICE officer on Portland Avenue South in January, it shook me. For 20 years, I lived half a mile away on 35th Street. I was always in that Central neighborhood—eating Korean barbecue at Midtown Global Market on Lake Street, creating community murals with artist Reggie LeFlore at Funky Grits on Chicago Avenue, and, as a TV news reporter, getting chased out of Prince and Mayte’s wedding at Park Avenue United Methodist.
As the videos of the grief and rage from the shooting came flooding in from friends and social media, I was engulfed by a strong sense of déjà vu.
I left Minnesota in the winter of 2020 for an invitation to new experiences and a new art scene in Southern California. Three months after I settled in, George Floyd was murdered. I watched helplessly as Lake Street went up in flames. I threw up twice. I checked in on friends, then finally pulled it together and organized a nationwide online discussion in the arts community about the impact Twin Cities artists were having on a pivotal moment in civil rights history. I wanted to help the people I loved and cared about process the pain and anger they were feeling and navigate the anxiety about what would come next.
I grew up in Chicago, but ever since Purple Rain came blasting out of the big screen in ’84, Minneapolis had called to me like a siren’s song. I ended up spending half my life there, long enough to fill a sociology book on Minnesotans. They are a complex but caring people. I learned that the phrase “How ’bout those Twins?” translated into guarded friendliness and that “Let’s do lunch” was just a polite way to end the long “Minnesota goodbye.” But I also learned about their big hearts and their introverted sense of compassion: Should someone in your family die, don’t expect a hug from a neighbor, but know you’ll find an anonymous hotdish on your front step.
It took years to break through that wall of Minnesota Nice, especially as a Black woman in a predominantly white town, and doubly so as a Black woman working in media. But the biggest lesson was understanding that while Minnesotans may befriend you, you’ll never quite be a “real” Minnesotan. So, I often sought refuge with other outsiders, finding a place in the Twin Cities’ overlapping multicultural scenes of art, food, and travel.
They were the first people I thought of when I heard stories about ICE agents arresting anyone who fit an immigrant’s vague physical description. I felt those old feelings rush in, that tension between having a deep love for this place that felt like home while getting mixed signals about whether you actually belonged. I knew I had to document their stories.
I immediately thought of how much I missed intimate moments, like meeting Katayoun Amjadi for afternoon tea. Amjadi’s Northeast Minneapolis ceramics studio is a minimalist, almost Bauhaus setting, but the warmth and attention to detail she gave to the preparation of the tea were so welcoming. Everything from the arrangement of pomegranates and dates on a small plate to the perfume of the black tea from her handmade glazed tea service revealed how central the feeling of being displaced from her home was for her and her work. Sharing tea with Amjadi meant sharing meaning—through memories of her childhood friends back in Tehran and the painful memories of leaving Iran for the United States with her family in 2002.
Now new anxieties, both in Iran and here in Minnesota, have replaced the warmth and peace in Amjadi’s studio. She’s not getting any work done for her upcoming group show at Northern Clay Center or on the lesson plans for the ceramics classes she teaches at the University of Minnesota and St. Olaf College.
New anxieties, in Iran and in Minnesota, have replaced the warmth and peace in Amjadi’s studio.
“School starts this week,” she says. “They’re taking it online for safety reasons, but I’m still very behind. I’m obligated because of the students—I have to pull it together, sit down, and work. But things are changing within an hour. So, I can’t disconnect. I need to know—so it’s working for five minutes and checking the news for an hour.”
Amjadi’s not only checking local news for immigration raids by ICE agents patrolling Central Avenue just a few blocks from her studio. She’s also glued to world news, hoping to get reliable information on her friends and family back in Iran, living in fear of attacks by either the Iranian government or the U.S. military.
Amjadi says she’s become an outsider, living between two worlds. “It was always between two homes—Minneapolis and Tehran,” she says. “But I feel like I haven’t managed to be my same self. Maybe my naivete went away. I tell my partner I left there and the dictatorship followed me here. The patterns are very familiar, unfortunately. Witnessing it and being part of it is very hard.”
On the south side of the city, Luis Fitch is mobilizing from his East Franklin Avenue office, using his graphic design skills to fight ICE. “I’m recycling ideas, putting up things on social media,” he says. “I’m helping my community through strategy—any way I can.” Fitch earned his street cred by wheat-pasting his brightly colored yellow, pink, and black skull posters all over Minneapolis. A magnificent fine artist, Fitch emigrated from Tijuana to California, attending ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena before coming to Minneapolis to found UNO Branding in 1999, one of the country’s most celebrated Hispanic marketing and branding companies. His is a quintessentially American success story.
Fitch and I have collaborated on several art projects over the years, in both Minneapolis and my new home in New Mexico. He’s exhibited everywhere from Flatland, my former gallery in Northeast Minneapolis, to the renowned Tamarind Institute of printmaking in Albuquerque, where I invited him to teach his signature style.
Now a rainbow coalition of his calavera skulls is seen along East Lake Street, accompanied by large, defiant block letters screaming, IMMIGRANT POWER BY RESILIENCE. Fitch is thinking of reissuing some of his sociopolitical posters from the past year and leaving them around town for folks to find and pick up—perhaps with magnets attached so nobody will be in danger of being arrested, by either ICE or MPD, for illegal wheat-pasting.
“Before I moved here, the USA felt like a promise: opportunity, creativity, and the idea that hard work and talent could open doors,” Fitch says wistfully, with a sadness in his voice. “I also knew there was a darker side: racism, inequality, and who gets protected versus who doesn’t. But I still believed the ‘rule of law’ and basic dignity were real foundations.”
When it comes to what it means to be an American, Fitch believes the rules have changed overnight.
“Even after years of building a life and contributing as an artist and business owner, there are moments when it’s clear some people will always see you as ‘other,’” he says. “That said, I’ve also experienced the opposite—neighbors, clients, and friends who treat me as fully belonging. Both realities exist at the same time.”
Photographer Steve Ozone is Sansei, third-generation Japanese American. Like many immigrants, he’s living in two realities: the one that’s storming his Kingfield neighborhood and the one that confronted his grandfather more than 75 years ago. Steve says ICE agents going door to door in his neighborhood asking people on his block to identify Asians in the area who could be illegal immigrants is eerily similar to how the U.S. government enacted Executive Order 9066—when Japanese immigrants like his grandfather and father were rounded up and put in prison camps during World War II.
It isn’t the first time Ozone has told me about his grandfather. He talked about him and the injustices he faced while we worked together on his installation in the skyway just outside of Terminal 1 at MSP Airport. Ozone’s portraits of immigrants are embossed on anodized aluminum sheets, giving their faces a ghostly aspect, like they’re embodied memories from his grandfather’s past. “When my grandfather was a teen, his dream was to come to America,” says Ozone. “He described going to America as the way to become ‘a proper gentleman.’”
Koichi Ozone was a farmer who loved photography and started a co-op among his fellow Issei (first-gen) farmers in Southern California. When his co-op failed, he saw it as an opportunity to try something new, so he sold real estate and insurance in Southern California, evoking the American ideals of sweat equity and self-made success. But the mounting racism and fear stoked during the WWII era branded him and his family dangerous outsiders. “Incarceration broke his spirit, and he never truly recovered,” Ozone says. They were sent to Manzanar, a makeshift camp in California’s arid Owens Valley, the first of the U.S. government’s 10 incarceration camps created in 1942. More than 10,000 people, including the Ozones, were forced to leave their homes before being shipped to Manzanar, where inmates were in barracks with shared toilets. They faced sweltering 110-degree temperatures in the summer and freezing cold in winter, surrounded by barbed wire and guard towers.
Steve Ozone’s father, Koho, was 20 years old, with two years of junior college under his belt. By the time the Ozones were released from the camp in 1945, Koho had his engineering degree from the University of Missouri—one of the few schools that accepted Japanese Americans. Koho moved his family to Chicago and swore he’d never live in California again.
Ozone sees the same fear and racism driving ICE’s punishing collective deportation. Since he knows anyone can be detained for simply being brown, Black, or Asian, he now carries his passport everywhere he goes in the Twin Cities. He knows it may not save him from a humiliating stop by agents, but his legal documents might keep him from mistakenly being arrested. “While the government’s forced incarceration of Japanese Americans was a horrible time in history,” Ozone says, “the violence and cruelty employed by ICE agents will be looked on as one of the worst periods in America.”
All three artists are conflicted about how they feel about America. They believe in its ideals, but they know those ideals aren’t always applied equally or fairly—the shootings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti are a dark stain that promises to linger. “My relationship with this country is no longer driven by blind optimism,” says Fitch. “It’s love mixed with disappointment and a demand that the ideals become real.”
Their feelings about their adopted home, however, are vastly different.
“The government’s attempt to force Minnesota to submit through abductions, illegal violence, and murder has been shameful,” says Ozone. “The response by the people of Minnesota has been an historic act of bravery—I’m truly proud to say that I’m a resident of Minnesota.”
“I think the mobilization I’m witnessing is even different from 2020,” says Amjadi. “More people are involved and helping with printing posters and 3D-printing whistles. And that’s just the most tangible aspect you can see. Many Northeast artists are on first-response Signal channels, patrolling the neighborhood.” And Amjadi is doing her own part. “A bit of grocery shopping for the people we know and also extended relationships,” she says. “So we are helping each other out in ways that may not be ‘artistic,’ but it’s part of how to show up for your own community.”
“The response by the people of Minnesota has been an historic act of bravery.”
—Steve Ozone
If you ask anybody familiar with their Twin Cities history, they’ll tell you in spite of all the government and media attention on the whistling observers and the thousands of protestors on the streets, the essential character of Minneapolis–St. Paul hasn’t changed. Midwestern stoicism was just mistaken for passiveness. Many forget Minnesota is home to what’s been called the most successful radical third political party in US history, the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party. The DFL is the result of a grassroots movement spearheaded by Nellie Stone Johnson, a Black woman from Minneapolis, and supported by then–Minneapolis Mayor Hubert Humphrey. When it was formed in 1944, it challenged both the Democratic and Republican parties with policies for civil rights, farmers’ rights, paid family leave, and social security. Seen through this lens, the uprisings in response to the murder of George Floyd and to Operation Metro Surge are a reawakening of those ideals, perhaps the first steps in a 21st-century civil rights revival. It’s given some of the outsiders and immigrants who have made Minnesota their home a cautious optimism about unity and democracy.
“The protests, rallies, and marches across the U.S. and the world give me hope for the future,” Ozone says quietly. “We can only hope this reign of terror ends.”
