Minneapolis’ “May Day Parade”, awash in a battle between white uperliberals and intersectional even-more-uberprogs, is “taking a year off“.
The decision goes beyond a year’s worth of funding. This year’s parade, held on a sunny Sunday in May, “was a wild success,” the nonprofit noted, that netted a $50,000 surplus. Instead, this break is meant to address bigger, structural issues — including the parade’s history of marginalizing and appropriating artists of color, Zoll said.
“The first word that comes to mind is gratitude,” said Minneapolis artist and author Junauda Petrus-Nasah. By taking a year off, Heart of the Beast is showing that it wants to do the “big, healing work” needed to transform. As a black, queer artist, Petrus-Nasah has experienced firsthand how the MayDay Parade “hadn’t genuinely made itself safe for people who aren’t liberal in a white, South Side kind of way.
a group of people walking in front of a crowd: The MayDay parade will be taking a year off so the nonprofit behind the annual rite of spring in south Minneapolis can reinvent it, improving it for artists and audiences of color.“There’s a lot of work to be done around the soul and identity of this space that goes beyond mission statements.”
Artists and neighbors heard the news Wednesday at a meeting at the theater’s home, the Avalon Theatre on Lake Street.
I would almost like to attend those meetings.
Under deeeeep cover, natch.
As “black, queer artist” Petrus-Nasah put it, the May Day Parade hasn’t “made itself safe for the people who aren’t liberal in a white, South Side kind of way.”
Huh? Surely Mx. Petrus-Nasah doesn’t mean “we black, queer conservatives are never welcomed at these puppet shows.”
I recommend moving the entire enterprise to the North Side. We welcome black, queer artists and have a safe and loving environment for them to thrive in. Besides, we’re in no danger of being “gentrified”.
How much loot must be laundered through these “nonprofits”? It has to be in the single-digit millions.
I do miss the good-old May Days, Leonid Brezhnev on the platform, resplendent in his uniform with medals gleaming in the spring sun watching over miles and miles of mobile missile-launchers
Junauda Petrus-Nasah
Now there’s a name worthy of a Berg dialogue.
The wife and I took the kids to a mayday parade years ago. We naievely thought, hey, puppets! What could go wrong?
Creepy is the best description of the vibe present. We left after about 5 minutes.
When Grand Old Days was canceled this year by the business group that ran the event, the group soon found themselves audited by the St. Paul Police, and now the federal government. I wonder if the May Day Parade organizers will be audited (there’s your chuckle of the day) now? There probably needs to be some big, healing work of distributing that excess $50k – and more – to help those who are liberal in a white, south Minneapolis way feel safe.
I enjoy it when the left gets so bored in areas it starts eating itself. If there is no conflict or crisis their reason for existing ceases.
Let’s use the $50 grand to pay some reparations to all the under represented POC in S Mpls. After all, 1619, slavery, white privilege. It’s all the same.