In the Twin Cities arts scene this weekend, Hmong New Year will kick off with two days of music, dance and more than 130 vendors at the St. Paul RiverCentre. Rondo residents and community members will create personal archives through collage-making at Golden Thyme Cafe, while three Minneapolis artists are debuting new sculptures, paintings and photographs at Hair + Nails gallery. 

New Year celebration honors 50 years of Hmong achievement

The United Hmong Family will host its annual Minnesota Hmong New Year celebration at the St. Paul RiverCentre this weekend — and this year isn’t just about ushering in the new year; it’s a collective exhale, marking 50 years of Hmong resettlement and community-building in Minnesota. 

The celebration will include a special video screening titled “Celebrate 50 Years of Hmong Americans Achieving Together,” along with competitive singing and dance showcases, a Mrs. Hmong Pageant, and Pov Pob, a centuries-old social icebreaker game. If you spot someone across the event who catches your eye, grab a ball and toss it their way. If they return the gesture, you’ve just initiated one of the most charming traditional ways to flirt. 

St. Paul residents preserve neighborhood history

The East Side Freedom Library is hosting “Reminiscing Rondo” on Saturday, inviting St. Paul residents and community members to bring family photos, letters and other documents to be scanned and preserved at Golden Thyme Cafe. Participants can also create collages and record personal stories in a mobile booth to connect with the history of the Rondo neighborhood before the construction of Interstate 94 in the 1960s.

Michaela Day, the program manager of the East Side Freedom Library’s community digital repository, describes archiving as a kind of  “receipt-keeping” in a world that often discounts oral histories from communities of color. Preserving records becomes a way to safeguard identity in the face of displacement. 

“The highway that was put through Rondo’s Black business district was repeated throughout the country, and it was by design to try to economically depress a thriving community,” Day said. “Most of our marginalized communities have similar paths of displacement that’s why it’s so important to tell and preserve our stories.”

The event builds on Day’s recent work with students at Maxfield Elementary, where she introduced them to the legacy of 19th-century Black entrepreneurs and abolitionists in St. Paul, including Moses Dickson. They used archival materials to create colorful collages imagining and honoring the thriving Black community that existed before Interstate 94. 

“Seeing students learn about any other culture and history outside of their own is a beautiful thing,” Day said. “I hope people stop and think about the value in preserving their stories. We don’t need to be prominent or affluent families for our stories to be valuable.”

Three artists, three rooms

Last week, Minneapolis-based artist Alexandra Beaumont recommended Hair + Nails as one of the Twin Cities’ most consistently surprising art spaces. This weekend, the gallery presents “Heavy Hitters,” an exhibit where three local artists each take over a room. 

Ojibwe artist Maggie Thompson reimagines the power dynamics between Native women and white men in her series “She Trains.” Cameron Patricia Downey’s sculptures turn everyday objects into portals of memory, while Emma Beatrez draws on her Midwest upbringing to blur the lines between domestic, playful and otherworldly spaces in her paintings and installations. 

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