Simona Zappas

In fall 2020, the Walker Art Center and Art Resources Transfer (A.R.T.) co-presented a residency with artist collective Studio K.O.S. Through workshops and a public event, the project foregrounded the group’s decades-long practice of collaborative pedagogy and its transformative social impact.

As 20-year head of Oxbow, Stephen Thomas oversaw the boarding school’s unique educational approach: inviting teenagers from across the country to spend a semester taking typical high school classes but within a fully immersive, arts-based curriculum. The school aims to empower students to create work with complex themes and engage with real-world issues. Thomas recently spoke with Youth Programs Coordinator Simona Zappas about how Oxbow is able to make this happen.

The Walker’s new Youth Programs Coordinator describes her experience being interviewed by teenagers as part of being hired for the job. “It was terrifying,” she writes, but it also underscores the real responsibility held by members of the Walker’s Teen Arts Council.

So, why look the Neighborhood Media Project, an early-’80s community screening program, now? What is the significance of remembering it? Simona Zappas concludes her four-part look at the Twin Cities–based mobile media group’s brief, yet storied history, and its ties to the Walker’s Adiós Utopia exhibition.

“A group of us got together and said, ‘What if we were using film as a vehicle so people could tell their own stories about taking control of their media?'” Gary Cunningham, Neil Sieling, and Denise Mayotte remember the genesis, growth, and ultimate dissolution of the Neighborhood Media Project (1979–1982).

The Neighborhood Media Project (1979–1982) took inspiration from both revolutionary Cuba’s mobile cinemas and from Cuban films included in its screening roster. Cuban cinema presented a chance for these beliefs to be presented not as an alternative to dominant culture but rather as the culture and politics of the nation itself—a truly exciting concept for a grassroots leftist community group.

From 1979 to 1982, the Neighborhood Media Project hosted some 60 film screenings at community centers across the Twin Cities. Created in conjunction with the exhibition Adiós Utopia, this series chronicles the project’s history, its mission of providing people of color and low-income residents with “media resources for their efforts to build community strength,” and its links to mobile cinemas of the Cuban Revolution.