Medcalf: Beauty of the neighborhood will be on display at Northside Arts Fest

Sometimes, Melodee Strong wonders how she ever became an artist.

When she looks back at some of her earliest work, she is not impressed.

“My earliest memory is in third grade,” she said. “That’s when I started winning poster contests in school and community contests, things like that. The fire department would have a poster contest and I would win, so that’s kind of how the momentum started.”

Today, Strong is not only a professional artist but a champion for other artists, especially for artists of color. She believes art can not only highlight those individual artists but also shift narratives.

As the organizer of the inaugural MPower Northside Arts Fest on Saturday, her goals are clear: to highlight the work of the talented individuals who will participate in the event and to show the beauty of north Minneapolis, which is often ignored, she said.

Saturday’s event will have activities for people of all ages, such as a scavenger hunt, craft stations and a community mural. And the installations along Broadway Avenue, Melodee said, will hold artistic, cultural and community value.

“Living on the North Side, teaching and working and being an artist on the North Side, but also living on the South Side for a portion of my adult life, I see a huge difference,” said Strong. “And I just feel like the North Side gets neglected. It just does. And I’m hoping that events like this will help change the narrative.”

As a writer, I have always been fascinated by the imprint of visual artists and their role in our narratives. An author can say something with a thousand words that an artist may express with more conviction through a few brushstrokes.

Those images have always shaped the perspectives and perceptions of BIPOC folks and granted them the power to tell their own stories.

I believe I was 7 or 8 years old when I first saw Jacob Lawrence’s work. The esteemed African American painter’s series on Harriet Tubman added depth to the emancipator’s life as I learned more about her.

But Lawrence — like Strong and the other BIPOC artists who’ve followed him – viewed his craft as a tool. He was a painter but also a messenger.

“I wanted to show how the Negro had participated — and to what degree the Negro had participated — in American history,” he said as part of the Smithsonian’s oral history project. “In fact I call it the ‘Struggle.’ As late as a few years ago in the 1950s, the Negro had not been included in the general stream of American history. We don’t know the story, how historians have glossed over the Negro’s part as one of the builders of America, how he tilled the fields and picked cotton and helped to build the cities.”

Her passion for north Minneapolis is not only the result of her living there, but it is also a reflection of her concern as a teacher who wants her students to know that they live in a beautiful place, too.

“I’m a teacher on the North Side,” she said. “I just want my kiddos to feel pride about the North Side.”

On Saturday, a collection of artists will tell stories through art in a place that is often depicted according to its greatest challenges and rarely according to its most compelling strengths.

That’s why Strong has invested her time and resources to create Saturday’s event, which succeeds the Flow Northside Arts Crawl that was canceled in 2023. If you attend the event, you might see Strong rolling around on a golf cart, dropping off water and snacks for her artists along Broadway. She’s more than an event organizer — she’s a hands-on leader.

Her goal is to turn MPower Northside Arts Fest — backed by a grant from the City of Minneapolis — into an annual occurrence that highlights the best the North Side has to offer. Because her community deserves that.