Seven Years in Our Twenties

I hope this introduction and contextualization of Tangible feels like a reflective essay and a commentary on how our thinking around the work and our place in the community has evolved over these last seven years.

Tangible Collective began in 2017 when my best friend Ricki Monique and I (Za’Nia Coleman), started hosting open mics. We found a frequency that felt good for us—a once-a-month vibe. Slowly, it turned into a community that came together once a month, a community of young, emerging artists who hadn’t necessarily found a space to self-declare, assert, or develop their practices. Tangible became that space, specifically through the open mic. Over the two or three years of our beginning, we realized there was a need or a void for spaces like ours. So we continued to be consistent, to check in with the folx around us, and to survey and get a feel for what people needed and wanted.

Organically, what our peers wanted, in terms of platforms, and what they needed artistically aligned with what both Ricki and I needed as emerging artists and young people trying to find our voice and how we wanted to contribute to the arts scene around us. 

A crowd ice breaker used to start our Open Mic:

Ricki: Okay, so, we holding a Black space, y'all. Look at all these Black faces in the room. Can you look to your neighbor and say neighbor? 

Crowd: Neighbor?

Ricki: You're looking beautiful tonight.

Crowd: You're looking beautiful tonight.

The icebreaker above was inserted to show how intentional we were trying to be about the spaces we held. As two Black femmes from Minnesota, we had often found ourselves in environments—more specifically, artistic environments—where the art or the performer was on display, and the audience was passively consuming the work. There was little auditory affirmation, and people were careful not to show too much emotion. I’m not sure if that’s just a Midwest description of an audience, but we wanted our spaces to feel different. That icebreaker was an example of how Ricki, who hosts our Open Mics, worked to prepare the audience for crowd participation. During her introductions, she always emphasized the idea that audiences don’t have to be merely extractive; together, we can create an environment that requires all of our energies—from the performer to the audience, to the host and the DJ.

There was an occasion when we were speaking to LA Buckner’s music class at North High School. After one of the students asked a question, we went down a rabbit hole about our community or network. We explained that, for us, community meant having someone for everything—we had DJ friends, poets, musicians, dancers, writers, chefs, beauticians, and more. The power came from us being able to pull our resources at the snap of a finger to just take up space, grieve, or celebrate. To this day, I still believe that Tangible is only as successful as the community that supports it.

We often get asked, "Who is ‘the Collective?’" Technically, it's Ricki and me, but all of our programs are designed to support the work of other artists and to create more spaces for Black expression. This means that the work we produce through Tangible isn’t focused on Ricki's and my individual practices; instead, we function more as producers and facilitators. In the words of Toni Morrison, “The function of freedom is to free someone else.”

2019

Ricki: Honestly, we just wanted to have a space for Black people to come, a place to make us feel good. 

Za'Nia: In terms of a lot of the work I do, I literally frame it off of other examples around me. I grew up in a Pan-African community, and one of the staples of the community that I remembered most was consistency. When you think about any black liberatory anything, it's about consistency. You have to be there when ain't nobody there, you have to be there when people are there. 

Ricki: It also comes down to the energy you bring. I feel like something we've been talking about a lot right now is people aren't stupid, people recognize good energy. People know where you're coming from when you talk to them about what you're doing and what's going on.

Za'Nia: Within three months of Tangible starting in 2017, people began to take themselves seriously. It was like, "I'm a rapper, I'm an artist, I'm a painter—I'm whatever I declare myself to be, and I'm owning it." I believe the space empowered people to confidently say, "Yes, I'm an artist," and to truly believe it, with the affirmation from those around them reinforcing that it's true.

As a Millennial-centered collective, we recognized that we, as Black and Brown folx, had lost many of the spaces where we could make meaning of our conditions and experiences. The intention behind our collective’s process of holding space was to create room for healing, affirmation, meaning-making, community building, and self-reflection through art. We were aware that the artist, the voice of any community, was fighting a non-physical battle between artistic capacity and resources. We constantly asked ourselves: How long could we continue to hold free community space, keeping it accessible while struggling to pay rent? How could we take the time to develop as artists without detaching from our community or relying on white institutions for support? How could our community support us in a way that made our practice sustainable when they themselves were not being sustained?

We believe our community has what it needs to repair itself and answer these questions and more. However, we need space and time as a community that isn’t solely spent trying to secure resources. In 2021, we got our first studio space in NE Minneapolis. This was huge because it gave us a solid foundation to build on. Up until that point, all of our funding was program-specific, which meant that every grant cycle, we were starting over. Having the space meant we could not only maintain our established programs but also start experimenting more and taking risks.

Meaning-making is central to the impact art has on its audience and community. By centering Black voices and experiences, we’re creating spaces where Black artists and audiences can fully see themselves—represented, and validated. At Tangible, we’re committed to keeping all of our spaces Black-centered, with programming designed for culturally specific engagement. We also offer BIPOC-inclusive spaces that foster cross-cultural exchange and solidarity. In everything we do, we’re working to decentralize whiteness, making sure our spaces uplift the voices of those who’ve been marginalized. From our experience, declaring a space as Black-centered not only gives more room for Black individuals to claim and express their identities, but it inspires others to do the same. These spaces act as catalysts for self-affirmation and community solidarity. Many of our Latinx and Native peers are doing similar work, creating spaces where their voices and communities can come together, share, and thrive.

2021 

Ricki: Something that we're doing intentionally now is playing with what mentorship can look like for us. What does it look like for us to pass down information that we have? And what does it look like for us to seek those elders and those people who have been in our shoes before?

Za'Nia: In general, our mission has stayed consistent. Initially, it was solely a space for Black people, Black millennials, specifically younger millennials, to have a space where we could come together, celebrate how we are. Give affirmations for people who were emerging artists and didn't really have spaces to perform or declare that they were artists at the moment.

Once we started and saw the community that came around us and supported us, we noticed there was a need for something a little more intentional. I think we started to curtail it to be more focused on artists' sustainability. 

Ricki: Asking the larger questions. What does that look like, to have a space where artists can develop within community while creating access to arts for our larger community? Our two pillars became expression and thought. How do Black folx want to express themselves? Then, what are the conversations that we need to be having that make our community stronger, our connection stronger, our relationships stronger and more intentional? 

As Tangible enters our seventh year of operations, the larger questions we're trying to answer revolve around growth, integrity, and sustainability. We're often confronted with these questions in real-time situations. For example, as we’ve gotten older, our social batteries and capacities have changed. So, one question we often grapple with is: How do we hold space in the ways our community is asking for, while honoring our evolving personal needs? Another big one is: How do we keep programming and events free, while creating sustainability for ourselves when most funding sources are focused on funding the art and not the artist? One way we’re working through this period is by opening up communication with the artists and community we serve through reflection-based dinners or activities that make space for collective brainstorming. Gratefully, we've been in collaboration with some amazing arts organizations like Public Functionary and Highpoint Print Center, who have been supporting us as we navigate these questions. When Tangible was founded, Ricki and I had just left college, with ample disposable time and energy to build it. Now, we are both working professionals, developing individual practices while nurturing our “baby” Tangible. Our trajectory mirrors those of our peers and friends who came on the arts scene with us.

We're now entering a season of reflection and reassessment of our community's needs, our own capacities, and how we balance that with our lofty desires to contribute to the Minneapolis arts ecosystem. A cornerstone of our support for artists has been providing space to develop. For many of our peers and ourselves, we started our practices with one idea of how they should look, and now we’re at a place where we're seeking more opportunities for education and experimentation, exploring new understandings and ideas for our evolving practices. This looks like residencies, information exchanges, and opportunities to rest. As mentioned previously, funding cycles often encourage new projects with every application. Many of us are now doing the work to break that cycle and create cohesive aesthetics, techniques, artistic language, and more that feel focused and grounded.

The longer we’re around, the more questions arise for us—responsibility to our community, and much more, both as individual artists and as an organization. Ricki and I do a decent job of not putting too much pressure on ourselves to have all the answers. Instead, we remain open to learning from each other and those around us. There’s often a moment after every event or space we curate when we feel like everything that could go wrong did, and there are just a few folx left. In that moment of clarity, we realize that the work we put in only takes us so far, and it’s our intention and the presence of those who experience the space that carries the rest. Some folx volunteer at various organizations, but Tangible is our act of service—our offering to the kind of world we want to live in. We understand that, as Audre Lorde so beautifully put it, "[Art] is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action." This idea—that art and expression are essential, not just to our survival but to our growth and transformation—guides us as we navigate these evolving questions. We work to ensure that Tangible remains a space where these hopes and dreams can be nurtured and brought to life, not just for ourselves but for our community.

Description: First Tangible retreat at Rootsprings in Annandale MN, Summer 2024. This was our first curated experience around rest.  

Black artists face numerous barriers in creating sustainable practices, whether using their art as their main source of income or as solely an expression. Tangible Collective is taking the next few years to evolve our practice to feel more grounded and intentional. The grant cycles often lead us to think that every time we receive funding, it has to be a new idea. This is the first concept we are pushing back on. With that pushback, we hope to facilitate opportunities for artists to deepen their practices by offering spaces for rest, experimentation, and play. Along with these opportunities, we aim to start building organic pathways to art collection, actively engaging in archiving as a now-practice rather than something related only to history, and promoting critical writing and reviews that have historically allowed artists' work to travel and expand beyond their local communities. As two Black Femmes from Minneapolis MN, we want to contribute to an ecosystem of cross-state and country exchange, building connections among Black folx no matter where they are located. This desire for expansion is pushing us to examine our resources and redefine what resources can look like.