- [Announcer] Funding for this program is provided in part by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund and the citizens of Minnesota.

Hi, this is Danielle Teal, and I am filling in for Nicole this week.

Due to safety concerns, KSMQ chose to film this episode remotely.

We'll see you in person next week.

- Coming to you from 125 Live, R-Town.

The story of Iraqi Minnesotans is as rich as it is diverse.

The Rochester Arts Center is hosting an exhibit and a cultural celebration to share the story with the community.

Here to tell us more is curator at the Rochester Art Center, Zoe Cinel, welcome.

- Thank you, thank you for having me and for highlighting this event that's really dear to the art center.

So the celebration will be on July 24th from 12 to 3:00 PM, and it will be hosted in our grand lobby.

It features several really interesting cultural opportunities for the public to learn more about Iraqi culture, so we will have Iraqi food, covered by Medina, which is a little restaurant.

We will have an artist market with craft and art by Iraqi community members.

There will be traditional music and then others activities such as calligraphy activities for people to learn to write their name in Arabic, and then some more fun things for kids.

- That's really neat and the food will definitely be very enjoyable.

I know personally, I enjoy Iraqi food as well.

What is the goal of the Iraqi American Reconciliation Project?

Can you share a little bit more about that?

- So the Iraqi American Reconciliation Project is an organization that bridges communication, understanding and support between Americans and Iraqis in response to the heads of sanctions of war.

So the ultimate goal is to highlight the story of Iraqi that live in Minnesota and in the U.S. and also bridge the gap with people that still live in Iraq and bring all the stories to an American public to build connections on bridges.

- Can you share a little bit more about the artists involved in this?

- So the IARP, so the Iraqi American Reconciliation Project is the sponsor and the organizer for this exhibition that it's called Home of Memories and Home of Memories was curated by an artistic collective called CarryOn Homes, which I'm part of and with other two members, Shinji Young, who's from Malaysia and Pengu who's from China.

And to discover this exhibition, which is also traveling exhibition, so we exhibit it already in Fridley and is going to travel to Duluth and St cloud and then to the cities, the Twin Cities.

So discover this exhibition is to highlight stories of Iraqi community members that live in Minnesota through the portraits and quotes.

Portraits are taken by two photographers, Jafar Nabi, who is based in New York, but grew up and has family here in Minnesota, and Achmed Datche who is based in the Twin Cities.

- That's amazing.

And you had mentioned that there's a postcard which kind of connects the idea of home, which is a central part of this exhibition.

What kind of conversations and reflections do you hope the exhibition will foster with these postcards and engagement?

- So the exhibition has featured portraits again and stories in three different languages.

So you can read in Kurdish, you can read in Arabic and in English.

The stories of the people were interviewed, and then you can see Jafar and Achmed's pictures.

But also CarryOn Homes is really invested as a curatorial team to engage the public in a more participatory way.

So we generally include something for the audience to do as a way of like reflecting on their experience of the exhibition.

So we have an interactive wall that's called the Home Wall in which people can take postcards they're provided and then write what means home to them.

And then this postcards are hung on the wall on a nice display, as it looks like at home and can read about other people's ideas what home is and share theirs.

So it's really nice to see so many, so many stories collected.

And then another part of this exhibition is a series of cultural artifacts that the community lent us to show more about Iraqi culture and objects that are dear to them.

- That's going to be a beautiful component to the exhibition.

Thank you for sharing more about that.

Where can community members learn more and register for the event?

- So the event, again, is going to be on the ground lobby of the art center.

You can find more information on our website, which is RochesterCenter.org or on our social media, so Facebook and Instagram, there's many information.

The event is free and we have other events connected with this exhibition on August 3rd, at 6:00 PM.

We have a virtual artists talk with Jofar, one of the photographer, and Anis, who is like one of the storytellers.

Again, the event is free and it's going to be on zoom, so is Jafar artist in a different state.

So yeah, I hope that everybody can come between 12 and 3:00 PM on Saturday at the art center and enjoy some Iraqi food.

- Thank you so much, Zoe, you're amazing.

(upbeat music) Be sure to stick around.

We have much more coming your way on Our Town.

We learn about the upcoming Olmsted County Fair from Scott Schneider and Holly Masek stops by to talk about all the upcoming events downtown.

But first, we learn all about Javier Ortiz' barbershop in this week's Our Culture segment.

- It was 2016 October 1st.

That was my opening and that was the time the hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico.

My name is Javier Ortiz.

I live in Rochester, Minnesota, and I own Javier Barbershop.

I started cutting hair 25 years ago.

My inspiration was my cousin in Chicago.

He was a barber and something very cultivating about that.

I would go to school to be a paramedic.

I finished, but I knew that was not for me.

And the way that my cousin interact with the clients and the people, I think that was a very good feeling for me.

I fall in love with the job ever since.

I have this previous day in New York where I used to work there, it was 17 barbers working under my wing.

And I say, "If I change, me working by myself, that's what I want to do."

I want to do like a one-on-one client, put more attention to detail to the person.

You cannot really replace that.

It's more like an old-fashioned way, but in the new era.

- I feel very comfortable coming here 'cause I feel like it's a more one-on-one experience and I feel like it's more home-like.

- I think I learned that for my grandma.

My grandma always, no matter what, people come to the house.

Everybody was welcome.

Is it my DNA's inclusively.

No matter what somebody come down here, I just tried to work with them the same way.

The haircut is another part of the story, but I believe that you do that to people, people immediately related with you.

Puerto Rico is a very small island.

You can row the island probably 16 hours, probably.

If I'm not misunderstanding, I think it's a hundred miles long, 35 miles wide, so it's very, very, very small place, but they had a lot of flavor, that's for sure.

You know, there's a lot of beautiful things over there.

I live for the south part of Puerto Rico so it's Juana Diaz.

For whatever reason, people have to immigrate for better opportunities.

Even though we are U.S. citizens, but their job is they're not really good.

They don't pay as good, so the island is so small, so, you know, you have to immigrate to some places, bigger place, more opportunities, more jobs.

I move here to the state in 2000, family in Rochester, New York.

I was living over there for at least 15 years.

My wife at the moment, she was a travel nurse.

She ended up working here in Rochester, Minnesota, and I fell in love with the place.

Like I really fall in love with the place and I decided to stay because it really, I really knew it's a very family-orientated, it's a good job around, good location and there's something about this place.

It reminded me a little bit of my home.

For example, at the Silver Lake, where I lived there was a little lake around our home, like a little trails, something like that.

It's something reminded me of my home and the mellow park, like this place very mellow.

I feel very, very, very comfortable in this place.

That's why I love Rochester, Minnesota.

I wish to move here sooner in this particular part of Minnesota.

It's a great place to live.

But you know, the past is the past, the future, I could move forward and hopefully I can finally to raise my little boy here in Minnesota and do all those great things in the future.

- [Announcer] For more information about this story and other Our Town features, connect with us on Facebook, Twitter @KSMQ#OurTown or KSMQ.org/OurTown.

(upbeat music) - Hi, I'm Danielle Teal, your moderator for the Our Town Spotlight, a brand new segment spotlighting businesses and organizations in Rochester.

With us today is Scott Schneider, Chair of the Olmsted County Fair board.

Welcome Scott.

- Thanks for having me.

- Well, we're excited to have you here because the Olmsted County Fair is just around the corner, so can you give us the details, where it is, how long it's going to be, and what is going to be happening there?

- We're located at the Olmsted County Fairgrounds in Rochester, across some Crossroads Shopping Center, by the big, all new corn on the cob tower that's been all redone.

We open, this weekend there'll be some 4-H projects being shown and stuff, but the actual carnival starts on Tuesday.

Food row gets set up Monday and some of them open Monday night, but the rest are all opened by 11 on Tuesday.

All the exhibits are open Tuesday through Sunday.

We have plenty of grandstand events.

Tuesday night we have the Gear Daddy's.

Wednesday night we have Great White and Chris Cozy, the one of the boys.

Thursday night we have a fiesta night in the grandstands.

Friday night we have bull riding, Saturday autocross, Sunday demos, we have lots to do.

We have a free stage in the midway next to the beer garden.

It has free music all day, every day.

We have tons of different food vendors.

We have a commercial vendors.

We have all the barns with all the animals.

We have anything from horses to dairy, to beef, the goats, the rabbits to you name it.

- Okay, Scott, are you bull riding then?

- I am not.

Maybe the mutton busting.

I might be a little overweight, but.

- Is there anything unique being offered at the fair that hasn't been in the past?

- Well, no, what we do offer for unique is we're the only fair in Minnesota that has a miracle of birth because even the state fair is not having a miracle birth this year.

Before it was just us and them, so we're the only ones with a miracle of birth.

We have a petting zoo.

We have a great draft horse show.

That is a big draw besides the carnival has changed because of the new layout that during the pandemic, with that old gravel area getting repaved and used as kind of a park ride for (indistinct).

Carnival used to sit there.

Now it's going to sit parallel to food row, from miracle birth to the old beer garden.

So our parking will be on the outside and the carnival and the food row all be kind of together in the middle.

So logistically it's going to be better and easier to get around and less dusty, less dusty too.

- That's good, that's always good news.

How can people find out more about the Olmsted County Fair?

- Go to Olmsted County Fair webpage and it has everything listed on there.

The premium booths, you can look in there for livestock and non-livestock to look at what times shows are for different animals, different projects, they're all showing right on there and also whatever entertainment we have.

- Great, thank you so much, Scott.

- [Scott] Thank you.

- And thank you for tuning into Our Town Spotlight.

This is Danielle Teal, your moderator, KSMQ Television.

Huge thanks to 125 Live for hosting, they're so amazing.

And also catch up with us on Facebook or Twitter KSMQ #OurTown.

- Hi, this is Michael LoJack with your Our Town rundown.

The very first night market went off last week and it was incredibly successful.

Huge congratulations to Tiffany Alexandria, her entire team for just trying something new in Rochester and seeing the public love it as much as they did.

It's estimated that over 8,000 people showed up, which was obviously put a lot of stress on a very small spot, but there are more opportunities to experience the night market.

There's two more coming up and you can find that at the link below, I encourage everyone to get out there and support something new.

Sometimes when these things become embraced and beloved by the community become more of an ongoing fixture and that certainly happened with Thursday's downtown.

It used to be Thursdays on first or Thursdays on first and third, and that is going on all summer as well.

It's a great opportunity now that we have a high vaccination rate, we can get out and start enjoying folks' company again.

There's live music at lunchtime every day and then also a couple of times in the evening.

I highly recommend that you get out there and meet some of the local vendors and just enjoy people's company again.

Also going on this weekend, the movie "Zootopia" will be playing in Central Park.

That is a free event on the evening of July 24th.

You can get out there and watch the "Zootopia" in Central Park.

And lastly, bringing me back to my youth a little bit, Smash Mouth we playing at Down by the Riverside.

If you've never been to one of these concerts before, it really is an experience, it's absolutely free.

Bring a lawn chair or something to relax in.

It's at Mayo park and again, absolutely free.

Smash Mouth is great, but also don't sleep on the openers that we have tremendous local talent that does the alternatives for these shows.

It's very much fun to get out there and just enjoy it.

So that's just a little bit of what's going on.

(mellow guitar music) - Hi, this is Danielle Teal with Our Town Walkabout.

I am at 125 Live right now.

We're scoping the scene, checking out what's going on because there's a lot to do here.

- A lot of our members join for not only the pool, but the fitness offerings as well as, I think a lot of people don't know the amount of social offerings that we have.

- The first question is, are you a poll shark?

- No, we don't play for money down here.

- [Danielle] It looks like it's a lot of fun.

Now who's winning so far though.

The other guy?

- You can't look at the table and say who's winning.

(balls crashing) I'm going to put the two ball in the side pocket.

- Oh my goodness, he is a pool shark.

So I do have one question.

Isn't the, that white ball supposed to just be all white?

Why are there dots?

- It's for look.

You can tell what the spin is doing.

- Now we're going to check out some other other areas and see what people are up to.

It looks like the quilters are here and they are putting together some of their quilts.

Wow, hello.

- We are the Castle Quilters.

We've been in business since '98 and I have 17 ladies.

We meet every Monday from eight to noon and we sew mostly for community.

We do have a couple of sales a year, but mostly we give to 18 agencies yearly.

- [Danielle] Awesome.

- [Mary] We have something for everybody, all occasion, anniversary, birthday, wedding, whatever they want to celebrate.

We have something for them.

- [Danielle] I see some beautiful bags over here that have intricate fabric.

Wow.

I can already tell you what my favorite is.

This one right here.

How darling is that?

- Then it has a little bag to go with it.

- Oh, 25 bucks, not bad at all.

I love the patchwork.

(upbeat music) After a difficult year, it's starting to feel a lot like summer in Rochester again, with Thursdays downtown in full swing, the Rochester downtown Alliance is gearing up for even more exciting events.

Here to talk to us about those events and continued efforts to ensure safe and fun community events are occurring is Holly Masek, Executive Director of RDA.

Welcome, Holly.

- Thank you so much for having me.

- We're glad to have you back and we know that Thursday's downtown has been in full swing.

Can you give us an update on how that's going?

The attendance, you know, the vendors, all that good stuff.

- Absolutely.

It's been great.

We are really happy with the attendance so far.

It's actually been more successful than we even knew to expect, which I think has been happening to a lot of events across Rochester and across the area this summer.

We don't have a perfect estimate, but based on what we've seen, we thing we're approaching some of our peak numbers from previous years, which generally flex between 15,000 and 20,000 people for an event.

- Wow, that's a lot of people.

- It's a lot of people.

I mean, we're running the event from 11:00 AM to 8:30 PM.

And so there's a huge lunch rush and that's more of a downtown working crowd.

And then there's a little bit of a lull in the afternoon.

But dinner time from, I'd say 4:30 to 8:30, we have two bands on each stage.

It is packed.

I'll send you a photograph after so you can see.

We go up to the skyway sometimes and take photos.

- Yeah, we'll include it in this as well.

We definitely want to see any images that you have of that.

Now I used to be downtown and I would obviously go and eat, you know, at the vendor's.

Such an awesome selection downtown.

Do you have the same amount of vendors that you've had in the past or are there more or less?

- There are fewer vendors this year for a couple of reasons.

One, space issues.

We had some limitations based on the construction in heart of the city, but when that's done, we're hoping to open up a few more vendor spots.

We've got a wait list going and people who want to join.

Second was some people were feeling a little risk averse coming out of COVID.

They weren't sure if they had the resources to commit to doing a full season, but maybe they will join us later on now that they see how busy it has been.

Third is staffing, which we're hearing across downtown, across the country actually that coming out of COVID a lot of bars, restaurants, hotels, service industry jobs are very short-staffed and so it's very hard for a business downtown to run their regular brick and mortar and have an auxiliary part or stand going as well so we tried to be as understanding as possible about that.

Disappointed that we don't see some of our favorites down here, but the ones who are here are doing, doing really well.

We hear they're selling out of food.

They have lines, lines, lines.

And so we're very happy that those who are in the event are having a successful experience, that's what we wanted.

And we also are excited to see that every single patio surrounding the event is full.

So for our brick and mortar restaurants who are here, they are, I hope growing new audiences.

- It's neat to see some semblance of normalcy come back around full circle, isn't it?

- It's neat, it feels really good.

- I was down there about two weeks ago and it was, it definitely felt good to be downtown and doing that again.

- Absolutely.

And what I'm really enjoying seeing, and even experiencing myself is I'll just take a walk through the events, say, you know, just to run some checks over to a band or something and I'll see 10 people I know, and it takes me a half an hour to get across the event.

And everybody's having that experience right now.

Like, "I haven't seen you in so long."

- Absolutely, I saw about that many people as well.

Yes, absolutely.

Well word on the street is that there is going to be a roller rink downtown coming this fall.

Actually I saw the press announcement, I saw the email.

- Yeah, it's not a secret when you saw a press release.

- But let's talk about that because I have been reading up on roller rinks becoming vastly popular again.

I think with the pandemic and people wanting to get active and get out there and do all those things, I think roller skating has come back.

And so here we are with the roller rink plan for the fall.

Can you tell us more about that.

- Absolutely.

This was an idea we'd actually tossed around last winter, pre-pandemic.

It was something that I thought would be kind of fun and unusual here, people hadn't seen before.

And then over the winter skating actually got quite popular.

I lived by Soldiers Field by the track that they flood and Sunday afternoons would fill up.

Sometimes bands would come and that was casually happening.

And so we really thought, "oh gosh, there's a, there's an appetite for this here.

Let's do this in the summer, let's have fun."

And what we love about it is that it's something that any age can enjoy.

I remember going to the roller rink when I was in seventh grade, but I could definitely see later in the evening, adults having a good time going out there and skating.

We really want it to be a very joyful event and a very welcoming, colorful, just kind of crazy exuberant event, so we're anticipating DJs.

We might have a band come later on in the evening, we're going to have disco ball lighting, we'll have skate rentals out there and a rented actual skate floor.

So it will feel like a rink when you're out there.

And you know, we're calling it a roller disco.

So I anticipate that we will be getting some Donna Summers, maybe some Saturday Night Fever.

I don't know, it's going to be really fun, high energy.

And we're just really excited to make people smile.

- How long will it be out there and where's it going to be exactly located again?

- TBD, so we have two possible locations.

The original vision was to do it on Broadway, which we've been trying to sell people on.

We know that's makes people nervous, but it would be really impactful to shut down the main road and just have all these lights all over Broadway.

Peace Plaza might be a lower hanging fruit, which we may do instead.

It kind of depends on who our main partner is, who signs on and where they want us to put it.

We're also trying to gauge crowd size.

If it's a really big crowd, it'll be easier for us to keep them contained if we do it in Peace Plaza.

We are planning on a one day event with different blocks of hours for kids and families, teenagers, and then adults later on.

I think we have the ring for two days though, in case of a rain date so there may be opportunities for us to expand the programs a little bit longer if we don't end up needing that rain date.

We are working those details out right now.

But for all of your listeners, if someone is excited by this idea and wants to sign on as the presenting partner, that opportunity is still open.

- Cool.

Well, I'm going to have to get some practice then because I don't know how to stake.

I've tried numerous times.

- [Holly] Oh, no.

- Oh, yes, I'm usually the person clinging to the side, waving at people.

- Well, there will be railings.

I will also teach you.

I'm the rollerblader.

- Yes, we'll do a walk about together, that'd be fun.

- Okay.

- Okay, so last question.

What other events are happening with RDA in the plans with what's in the pipeline?

- Absolutely, so movies in the park is ongoing.

The next one is a Saturday with "Zootopia" and then we have two more after that.

We'll also have dogs downtown in September.

We're excited for that roller disco in October.

Then we have some of our holiday favorites, here come Santa Claus, small business Saturday, but something new this year or newer, Hiawatha Homes festival of trees worked with us last year to put some of their decorated trees in a few of our vacant storefronts downtown.

I think we had about 30 trees last year.

They loved how accessible that made the event to the public and how families could walk around and enjoy it.

And so this year they're working with us to put 85 trees around downtown in the storefronts, and we're very excited to create this kind of magical main street feeling where people can walk around downtown, shop, enjoy the day with their friends and also see all these beautiful decorated trees.

- That's really awesome.

We'll have to touch base closer to that time.

Thank you so much, Holly.

- You're so welcome.

Thanks for having me.

- Awesome, yes.

Thank you for joining us today for more wonderful content produced right here in Rochester, please be sure to check us out on Facebook and Twitter at #OurTown.

Be well and stay safe.

See you next time at Our Town, the show about Rochester.

(upbeat music) (mellow music) - [Announcer] Funding for this program is provided in part by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund and the citizens of Minnesota.