(upbeat music) - [Announcer] On this episode of Postcards - There just aren't many places like this in the world.

- The violin has definitely taken me through a journey through life, because I started so young.

- I don't think people realize the movement is led by artists, we're the ones who document.

We're the ones who write poetry, we're the ones who give exposure to an international audience, like that is true.

Artists are the reason why history is shared and shown.

(Soft instrumental) - Postcards is made possible by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund and citizens of Minnesota.

Additional support provided by Margaret A. Cargill Philanthropies, Mark and Margaret Yakob-Joulin on behalf of Shalom Hill Farms.

A retreat and conference center in a prairie setting, near Wyndham, Minnesota, on the web at shalomhillfarm.org.

Alexandria, Minnesota, a year round destination with hundreds of lakes, trails and attractions for memorable vacations and events.

More information at explorealex.com.

The Lake Regions Arts Council Arts Calendar, an arts and cultural heritage funded digital calendar showcasing up coming art events and opportunities for artist in West Central Minnesota.

On the web at lrac4calendar.org.

Playing today's new music, plus your favorite hits.

96 7 kram online at 967kram.com.

(upbeat music) - [Announcer] One of the joys of craft is the connection between the skill and the resource and the landscape.

North House is lucky to sit on the edge of Lake Superior, the largest body of fresh water in the world.

Your campus sits on the Harbor and grand Moraine, Minnesota.

You look out across the waters to the horizon that connects you to every point in the North.

(upbeat music) We were started 1997 by a group of community volunteers who believed there were stories in the North that need to be told.

They got together to create a school, where hands-on learning and lifelong learning and curiosity and community would be at the heart of what happens every day.

- This campus has a particular feel.

The buildings are painted really bright, welcoming colors.

There's lots of little touches of handmade items from our instructors that fill both the inside and outside of campus.

And so as you walk onto campus it really peaks your curiosity.

What is that building?

What do they do in there?

That clanging noise coming from the building with five chimneys?

What is that place?

There just aren't many places like this in the world.

- So the mission of North house folk school is to enrich lives and build community through the teaching of traditional Northern craft.

What does that mean?

Well, it means bringing people together to be curious about the world and to grab onto it with their hands.

- Making things is part of who we are as humans.

It's in our very DNA.

It's what makes us different from other animals is that we use tools to make things that we're going to use a really great North House class is not simply steps one through 40 to make yourself a pair of shoes or whatever the object is.

It's an experience that's full of story and full of knowledge and cultural background.

- You can come here to make moose hide mukluks.

You can come here to build your own timber frame sauna.

You can come here and build in 10 days your own Cedar strip canoe and literally paddle it away into the Northern wilderness.

(upbeat music) - I was five years old when I started the violin.

I was in kindergarten.

First time I ever played for a lot of people was in for my kindergarten class and my teacher I played twinkle twinkle little star.

The first year when I played violin, I wasn't allowed to actually play it.

I was learning all the different mechanics of the violin and bow, but after that, it definitely took a few years to get into actually playing because you'd sounded really really scratchy.

And my mom and dad always didn't like listening to me play because of how bad I sounded at first.

But after a while, it sounds really beautiful.

And I love playing.

(violin playing) Violin is actually a really complex instrument to play.

It's one of the hardest instruments to play.

Basically there's four strings on the violin which is the G string, the D string the A string and the E string.

And it's one of the higher instruments out of the orchestra group.

There's also a bow with horse surge which you're not allowed to touch.

And you put rosin on the bow and basically the Roslyn makes the notes come out of the violin through the F holes.

You can go many different octaves throughout the violin I started playing at the events like weddings and funerals from families that asked me throughout the community.

And then I started getting into bigger events.

Like I played the national Anthem at the university of Minnesota girls basketball game.

I was at center court at the Williams arena and that was super fun experience.

And then I also played at the MSH ESL girl state basketball tournament which is also at Williams arena.

It was very scary playing in front of thousands of people at the Williams arena.

Overall, it was a really fun experience because I haven't done anything like it before.

(violin playing) My favorite song on the violin is Hallelujah because I it's very pretty and I love using vibrato and when I play it outside or at different places it echoes throughout the whole entire place.

What I like about orchestra is the different melodies and harmonies.

You can play with the different instruments with violin Viola, bass, and cello.

You can make different harmonies and music and you learn different styles of and playing together watching the conductor.

And it's a lot of fun to play with different people that you don't know.

And also people you do know.

(orchestra playing) - You come a long ways.

Look at all the rewards you've gotten.

I remember when you class started.

(violin playing) - The violin has definitely taken me through a journey through life because I started so young.

I've been playing for as long as I can remember and I have done many different events played with many different orchestras.

It's really shown me and helped me in different life lessons.

It has also, I feel helped me in school in some ways because I have been having to memorize and play songs for from a young age and it helps me memorize schoolwork.

And it has really helped me get through life.

And it's been with me for forever.

(Guitar playing) - You know, I'm very sincere and you either like, love me or hate me.

That's kind of like the way that it works.

(Guitar playing) Even me being black and being a more masculine queer person.

I get called aggressive all the time.

Even when I'm just being opinionated it carries as confrontational.

When, you're just another aggressive black person.

- (Say His Name) - George Floyd We call it dual consciousness.

Like you're floating in these multiple worlds of like how do I try to exist in a workplace in this setting, in this setting, compromising my identity and trying not to make waves or make people upset.

(yelling) (live rock music playing) My family is originally from, from Minneapolis.

My mom specifically is from North Minneapolis.

I was born in Germany in 1993.

I stayed until I was about five years old.

I went to Montessori school.

So my first language was German, but I learned English when I was around five, and then my parents got a divorce and they moved back to the United States.

(live rock music playing) And then I bounced kind of to, and from the United States and Europe where my mom was deployed when she got remarried.

So I grew up in about five different countries my adopted dad's wife, he's Scandinavian.

His grandmother came as an immigrant.

My mom is Kenyan and her grandfather's from Nairobi.

(singing) Growing up my brothers are all half white and half black.

In America in the nineties, when we were in first Southern Virginia my younger sibling got spat on, you know like for being mixed, like all types of like very intense racism in 1999.

Like I was six years old in the first grade.

And I remembered being in first grade and immediately being like, Oh America does not like, like mixed people.

There were so many immediate racial tensions that I saw being a trial that when I contrasty lived in Europe, there was also racism but it manifested in a very different way.

I would say, if anything I got exotified a lot and fetishized a lot.

So I got a lot of like, Oh, you're like you're pretty for a dark skin person.

And a lot of those types of comments where it's like it's still racism, but it's more tokenization.

And it's more masked as like a compliment being masked as like being fetishizing, which still feels better than just someone like spitting on you.

Racism is it's like a thing that you're always walking out into the world navigating and figuring out is what I dressed, dressed today.

Going to get me hassled is the way I talk today going to get me going to get me hassled.

(birds chirping) I've been openly queer since high school.

I actually like was outed.

I was like a church kid.

So like, I really didn't want to be gay.

I was one of those kids like that definitely like tried to pray the gay away, like all of those things.

Cause I came from a very religious family, my mom and my grandmother, really, religious just when I got outed and I went to college, I went to a liberal arts school.

I was like, Oh, I wanna I wanna like, you know, explore my queer identity.

One of those things was I used to have really long hair like down to my back.

I did the big chop and I also like wanting to look gay.

So I was like I'm going to cut my hair short and be stereotypical.

And when that happened, there were a lot of people who were like, you know, are you transitioning?

Are you this?

Are you that?

And it was the first time that I really was started to analyze my gender expression because I realized I'd grown up with all boys.

I'd grown up with two older brothers and mostly male cousins and male influence that I started to realize that I I did view a lot of aspects of my femininity as a costume or as being very performative in a way that like my mom or church wanted me to like play into these certain ideas of what, like what woman wood was.

I do love my femininity a lot, but I just didn't like the constraints of what it meant to be in this box of femininity.

And so when I cut my hair, I kind of got to get agency.

I got to choose who I wanted to be.

When I went to college it was the first time I met people who were trans.

I think that I'm that, but I don't think I'm like a man.

You know, I don't really identify with this conditioning of what it means to be a woman either.

And then somebody said, well, that's gender non binary.

And I was like, Whoa, that's a thing.

And once that became like my reality, it just, it just freed up so many aspects of how I identified and how I characterized so many aspects of like what we consider masculine and feminine.

I always say like, if you really love me you'll use they them pronouns because it's more of a do you see me in my wholeness?

You see the spectrum of identity for me, it's like my gender non binary newness encompasses both the feminine and the masculine equally (rock music) I did a show called femme fatale.

That was like featuring basically artists who were men who were gender non binary.

I really wanted to highlight women musicians.

Ever since then, I've been trying to do show curation that center trans black queer bodies and identities of that nature.

So my whole life, you know, I grew up with music being a pretty central part of it.

It was very important to my mom and it's kind of the unifying element that bonded me and my siblings together as well.

Because I think like, as I've traveled as I've been had this nomadic existence of living in different countries, music has been like that one unifying element that has been language like to communicate and bond me closer to people in, I mean in any cultural society ♪ I'm emotionless ♪ ♪ Yeah there's ♪ nothing but scars ♪ ♪ Feel it in my soul ♪ ♪ Nothing left in my heart ♪ ♪ Can you really tell me ♪ I'm trying too hard?

♪ I didn't grow up with someone being like don't pursue your art.

I grew up with someone actually being like pursue it because like this could go somewhere and I actually had a lot of self-doubt and I had a lot of like, I don't think that that's like a, you know, viable path to go.

And I know success holds a lot of different, you know meanings for different people.

But for me, success is like being able to make art sustainable.

I never thought like five years ago I was going to be able to get like a grant through just the art that I made.

♪ Why are you so [-_] critical?

♪ ♪ Run it up the elliptical ♪ ♪ Politics in my centerfold ♪ ♪ You keep running nigga ♪ ♪ You gone catch a cold ♪ ♪ My brother dead in ♪ the streets alone ♪ ♪ You bringing guns to ♪ the mother[-_] capitol ♪ ♪ Don't call the call the ♪ cops on your [-_] phone ♪ ♪ My world is gone yours ♪ is business as usual ♪ My mom taught all of us how to play the piano we were around four.

Cause she wanted us to from a young age should know how to play music and she never liked teaching any of us.

We were really bad students.

So she eventually ended up just getting us all separate tutors.

Then I played flute when I was around eight and I did that for a while.

And then when I was around like 14 that's when I like started playing the guitar and I've been like super in love with the guitar ever since then (guitar playing) I was really, really shy.

I didn't like taking control of the stage like that.

But then the first show that we did at Seaberg, just kind of stuck.

And then now in the last two years it's been Seaberg in the black velvet punks because I added a sort of black collective that I consider.

Like I don't want it to just be me writing all the music and making all the music.

Laughter is the only thing I follow.

And it was all about, I drank from the of the bottle.

I drank the Kool-Aid.

I did everything I was told, you know from a young age I went to school, I went to college but then I graduated and I couldn't find a job out of college.

And I was homeless a few times.

I don't know if it was worth it.

I don't know if it was worth it to go to school.

If it was worth it to kind of like play into these societal expectations that had been cast on music.

♪ Used to be fearless, ♪ now I'm afraid ♪ ♪ Is my all that I've got ♪ ♪ No, I don't really know ♪ ♪ No, I don't really know ♪ I actually moved here to this specific house on 35th of Chicago two days before George Floyd was murdered.

(wind noise) I've definitely known people who have experienced police brutality and who have been murdered by the police but I haven't ever been in proximity this close before.

So I think it definitely had an added element of being like this is in my literal backyard.

You know immediately my work started a food donation drive that week.

They were supplying food to places that had been boarded up and giving it to immigrant families that didn't have transportation to be able to go to a grocery store in the suburbs.

We did a bunch of donation drives but eventually we were like, we want to do something more.

And so we said, well, why don't we do what we do best?

Let's throw a show.

My whole lifetime has been heavy.

I'm not going to lie.

It's been heavy having a black body and trying to trying to actualize and have people try to respect your existence.

Yeah.

I've tried to have people be like validate who you are.

So I'm glad that y'all are here.

I'm glad that y'all are being present.

You know, being appreciative, not appropriative, you know learning and understanding each other's truth.

Cause that's what it comes down to.

That's how we can really build.

So we got together, you know, these like 10 or 12 like artists, a lot of them, black arts organizers, all around the cities, they donated tables and food and things like that.

So we also made it like a community potluck.

Universe rebuild people who boarded up the businesses they built our state.

(live rock music playing) It was cool to see this really unified really solid community network just come together in a week and just cultivate this really cool event.

I don't think people realize the movement is led by artists.

We're the ones who document.

We're the ones who write poetry.

We're the ones who give exposure to a national and international audience.

Like that is the truth!

Artists are, the reason why history is shared and shown.

We are the revolution.

We are the revolution!

We've been kind of doing DIY arts programming ever since that.

Downstairs in the basement is where we're also doing the DIY community album called The Art of the Revolution with a lot of the artists we featured on the Georgia Floyd and black lives matter fundraiser concert.

- That's his first song mentions hesitation a lot.

And you know, I feel like black people have to hesitate before they can fully open themselves in a lot of spaces in America.

You know the songs about how if you hesitate to love yourself and love the people around you, that energy fades.

So let's just keep it going.

- It's literally like we wanted to do programming for artists by artists.

So everybody who's helping on the community album is an artist.

One thing about the black lives matter movement.

The fact that black voices are being heard and validated is like much, much more.

I haven't ever seen this like actually black musicians being centered because they're like we should be centering your voices right now, guaranteed.

A lot of it's performative because like Starbucks.

So there's like a half performative element and there's like a half like, no we're actually listening to black artists now and black people in general, when they speak up Would you all be down if I did one more tune and then I-- (crowd cheering drown out the speaker).

I've become like an ambivert or like someone who can like sometimes look like I'm more extroverted than I am.

I think like this community work is very important to me and gives me like a renewed sense of really feeling close and unified with people in a way that I sometimes am shy around.

(upbeat music) (upbeat music) - Postcards is made possible by the Minnesota arts and cultural heritage fund and the citizens of Minnesota additional support provided by Margaret A. Cargill Philanthropies, Mark and Margaret Yigal Julienne, on behalf of Shalom Hill farms a retreat and conference center in a Prairie setting near Windom, Minnesota on the web@shalomhillfarm.org, Alexandria, Minnesota a year round destination with hundreds of lakes, trails and attractions for memorable vacations and events.

More information@explorealex.com The Lake Region Arts Council's, arts calendar and arts and cultural heritage funded, digital calendars showcasing upcoming art events and opportunities for artists in West central, Minnesota on the web@lracfourcalendar.org Playing today's new music.

Plus your favorite hits 96 seven kram online at 967kram.com.

(upbeat music)