Mint Condition and Twin Cities Secrets: On the Enduring Influence of Growing Up in Minneapolis

Jake Yuzna

Last time we spoke, we briefly touched base on how Minneapolis, and a sense of place, impact your work.

Cameron Downey

I do feel like I need to give a disclaimer that any “sense of place” I have is a combination of what I know to be true, what I’ve lived, as well as the things I’ve been told by others, whether true or not. What others told me about that place and what my family there. A kind of living history passed down through an oral tradition that usually doesn't seem like an oral tradition until after the fact.

The balance between the things that I’ve experienced, the stories about how we got here, and necessarily the blank spots in that history form a sense of place. Maybe this is broadly true for folks who are descendants of slaves? You only know so much about where you came from, and then blank spaces appear if you go back far enough.

But let’s see, I was born here [in the Twin Cities] and for most of my life grew up in north Minneapolis. After my parents got divorced, we moved in with my grandparents on 12th and Thomas. That was the house I lived in from when I was 6 to 16 years old. It was truly a family home, one where people got married and where we had had funerals. We even had church in that house because my grandpa was a pastor.

My grandparents were also both foster parents, and the house was always full of people. Across the street was Farwell Park, and we had this huge picture window that made that park feel really private. You knew it was a place that was mostly used by folks in the neighborhood. I felt safe, even though I would totally get into fights. I had my first and last fights at that park. (laughs)

I think back on my adolescence in storybook terms because there was always access to the outside world, and the inside world was bustling, full of people. As I got older and could go wherever I wanted to go in the city, there were a lot of other private places that I could find in the vicinity of where I grew up, which made it feel more tender.

JY

I can relate to that. Looking back at my own experience growing up in Minneapolis, I have a romantic view of running around the Twin Cities. It always felt like a concrete playground. I grew up in northeast Minneapolis. The older kids in the neighborhood would break into the old Bungee building [a 200-ft.-tall former grain elevator] and jump across the open pits. We’d go into the tunnels off the river or just hang out at the top of car parks. There is something about growing up in Minneapolis that feels special in that way.

CD

You can have the luxury of the concrete and abandoned industrial buildings to explore without it being too risky because it’s a small enough city. You probably wouldn’t encounter any danger that you didn’t make for yourself. You wouldn’t even consider it. I didn't.

JY

Absolutely. How did that impact your practice? For instance, with Hymn of Dust, you were nearly a teenager when you made it, right?

CD

Yeah, I was about 18, right after my senior year of high school. But, before that, in seventh grade, my grandpa passed away, and that was the first major death in my life. That also kicked off these looming feelings that I didn’t have words for at the time. My grandpa didn’t have health insurance or something along those lines and a recession had just happened. I didn’t know about it at the time, but my family was looking into getting mortgage assistance, which you have to fall behind on your mortgage payments to qualify for.

Suddenly that changed, and it became you couldn’t fall behind on payments. I didn’t really know what was happening. My family was trying to figure out how to keep our house, and I was told we would probably have to leave the family house.

That didn’t make any sense to me as a child. I thought, “How could we leave? We have so much stuff in this house.” (laughs) Our family had been in this house for thirty years at that point. They [my mom and grandma] were investigating who actually owned our mortgage. When my grandparents bought it, they got it for a crazy price, like $60,000, but they also got an ARM loan, which was an adjustable-rate mortgage. That basically allows the bank to change the interest rate to whatever, whenever, they wanted to (based on the market). Now I understand how those kinds of loans are a tactic often used in redlining, making sure that when poor communities or Black communities buy homes, they can be easily undervalued or that the costs can shift unexpectedly so that folks are forced to move away at any given time.

One day, at the end of summer before my junior year of high school, a sheriff came to the door and was like, “We’re evicting you. You have twenty days to move out.” I was just totally broken by it. I was feeling so much connection to this place and this house. So we ended up in Plymouth for a few years. I was just so angry and depressed about it. One thing that got me through living in Plymouth was making clothes to wear to parties. I felt like, “Even though I’m driving thirty minutes to get to this party, I’m still going to look good.” (laughs)

Towards the end of high school, I wanted to document the clothes I had been making. Hymn of Dust (avec Ize Commers, M Jamison, and Cooper Felien) started as a moving-image look book or a visual accompaniment to these pieces. I wanted to make some narrative around them and play with these tropes of horror, which I was thinking about at the time. I was influenced by the fact that the most horrible thing that I could think of at the time - losing my sense of home-had happened. 

Those first scenes we shot of  Hymn of Dust were shot at the Upper Harbor Terminal, which was already very much a post apocalyptic landscape with mysterious white dust, sand, and silos. That place felt like the end of the world, but also somewhere secluded and a place a lot of fun, too.

JY

Wait. Is Upper Harbor Terminal also called the Port of Minneapolis?

CD

Let me drop you a pin.

JY

That is incredible. It is the same place I shot the finale scenes for my own first film. We filmed in the piles of salt and mountains of coal.

CD

I mean, this is ridiculous because the Port of Minneapolis is exactly the place that I’m talking about.

JY

That’s crazy.

CD

Is this the queer capital of Minneapolis? (laughs)

JY

(Laughs) We must all be drawn there. I would have been shooting there in 2005 or so.

CD

Wow. So, Hymn of Dust was ten years later.

JY

I’m curious, how did you discover the Port of Minneapolis?

CD

At the time, I was working for the nonprofit Juxtaposition Arts [a youth-oriented nonprofit visual art center in north Minneapolis]. There was a lab called  tactical urbanism, where we did community engagement around city planning. That work also fed into why I knew so deeply it was wrong to have to leave our  house on 12th and Thomas. We would do community engagement and ask people what they want from the neighborhoods they lived in and how to keep cultural integrity i.e. invest in black neighborhoods without displacing the people that live there now, i.e. themselves. 

There was a lot of talk about redevelopment projects in the works, and redeveloping the Port of Minneapolis was one of those projects. There were plans to turn it into something with an amphitheater and a lot of other things, but it got derailed and delayed for various reasons. That’s how I discovered the Port of Minneapolis. I thought it was cool and would be gone pretty soon. I felt a sense of urgency to remember this place as was, even though it’s still there now.

JY

Another weird coincidence. That was the exact same reason I shot there a decade earlier. It was this magical place in the city that I felt couldn’t exist much longer.

CD

Before it goes away, yeah.

JY

How do you explain Minneapolis to people who have never been here?

CD

I mean, it’s diverse. Incredibly so. Another one of the really defining aspects of Minneapolis is its nature. We have some of the best parks in the country and access to the river that is almost always public. That kind of thing doesn’t just happen. It’s intentional in the city planning, and it paid off because some of my strongest childhood memories are of swimming and fishing in the city, trekking through marshes in Theodore Wirth.

The city feels like a metropolis but within it are so many moments of seclusion. North Minneapolis is at the nexus of all those things to me. The Walker is also one of those places on the edge of north Minneapolis, and a good ammount of my core adolescent memories took place at Free Thursday Nights. I think I had my first kiss at a Free Thursday Night. (laughs)

JY

Do you feel like the influence of Minneapolis stretches further into your work beyond Hymn of Dust?

CD

At the risk of sounding cliché (solipsistic?), I think really good artwork always has a connection to the artist’s experiences and that’s what makes it poignant, exigent. For instance, when it comes to photography, I love shooting at night, and that is probably influenced by having winter six months out of the year—dealing with that darkness. (laughs) Another example would be the kind of interiors I’m excited by probably derived from the house I grew up in, which was prewar.

JY

It’s the same with me. I love filming at night, and it always drives cinematographers nuts. I grew up in a Victorian house, and I think that is why I have this deep appreciation for the look of open plaster-and-lathe walls. You also mentioned being influenced by something that I’m really influenced by, too: horror.

CD

Yeah, horror was really on my mind. Before I had acquainted myself with theories of Afro-pessimism, I was thinking about my own lived experiences—losing our house, for instance, and the community engagement I was doing with Juxtaposition Arts. It felt like me and others in the community were always preparing for the worst and constantly knowing that tragedy had just happened or was about to take place. Those things influence my work when it comes to sculpture or other mediums, too. 

JY

Similarly, I started working at Intermedia Arts [a now-defunct Minneapolis arts nonprofit] when I was just finishing high school, helping with an experimental queer film and music festival. Those experiences in the local queer punk music scene had a big impact on shaping my own work.

CD

Local music was also huge for me, too. KMOJ [a community-oriented noncommercial FM radio station based in Minneapolis] was a pillar in understanding the world for me. Their slogan  “The people’s station,” was so community centric-dare I say Marixst. Minneapolis is a really soulful city. A lot of my coming-of-age experiences were at house shows where local musicians were performing.

I remember hearing that Prince lived over in north Minneapolis for a little while, and one of my aunties was one of his backup singers. He even  stayed in her basement for a while. One of my uncles was also a drummer for Mint Condition back in their early days. (see: 10 Million Strong.mp3)

JY

Mint Condition! I had forgotten about them. So good! That makes me think of that whole extended Minneapolis Sound scene. Everyone knows about Prince, but he was just the most visible part of something so much larger that encompasses people from Jimmy Jam to Fancy Ray. I remember Fancy Ray running for governor with his mom as his running mate and his local video store commercials. All of that is so specifically Minneapolis, and it is really only visible if you know where to look.

CD

This city is so random and I love it. Last summer  I picked up a book called Blues Vision, an anthology of Black Minnesotan writers. And it started with a chapter by Frank B. Wilderson III, a  forebearer of Afro-pessimism, at a used bookstore nearby. Turns out he spent some of his childhood up in Kenwood. It made so much sense.

That is just one example of how Minneapolis is a nexus of so much—the punk sentiment, winter horror, passive aggression, water and nature—that comes together in all these little secret places.

JY

I like to say there are these cultural ley lines running underneath the city that influence us in unseen ways.

CD

All of these under-the-radar secrets you can find within the city. Having to find the tenacity to explore and unearth them makes finding them all the more special.

JY

I’m curious: How does it feel to be working within the Walker now?

CD

I think I’m still figuring that out. Much of 2020 I was asking myself, “What happens to institutions when we get free? What is the premise of a museum?” There is this museum-specific history  of the hoarding of wealth and then displaying it on white walls with a certain air of rigidity. Some of the first museums were filled with objects taken during colonizing conquests and by virtue are necessarily white supremacist.

It made me ask myself, “What do we do with the museums we have in Minneapolis? How can they still remain useful? How can they remain at all?” That exists alongside [my] feeling a privilege for being chosen to work within the Walker–the same place I would go to see and learn news things as a kid. The Walker physically exists at a border of downtown and north Minneapolis, existing between those worlds and also at the center of the city.. That can make the museum feel like it isn’t enmeshed in any one place or community, but it is still a resource and quintessentially a public place. It is all of those things at once.

One of my main goals with this residency is to continue to open up the Walker and offer the kinds of intentional and care-driven experiences that made it special in my own life to folks who maybe haven’t had that available to them yet. I’m in the process of thinking about what is the best way to approach inviting groups of (particualrly Black) young folks who are into art or movies to watch the Ruben/Bentson Moving Image Collection films with me and talk about them.

JY

Earlier, you had also mentioned your current approach of only making things that are pleasurable, or at least that are pleasurable to create. Is this part of this?

CD

Absolutely, and for me, making with pleasure means feeling a certain measure of safety in order to take risks when you are making work. I haven’t thought about this before, but Minneapolis has a kind of safety and (intimacy?) other cities, even of the same size, don’t have. That safety maybe allows for this kind of work to be made.

JY

That tenderness you spoke of.

CD

Exactly. The tenderness found within these special, private, lush, watery places where everything converges and allows for this kind of work to be made. Maybe that is what really makes Minneapolis so special.▪︎