October 11, 2025, — October 2027
De facto slavery was widely accepted in antebellum Minnesota. For years, Southern enslavers forced their captives to accompany them to the free state for business and pleasure. This ended in 1860 when one woman bravely fought for liberation and became the first and only enslaved person to gain their freedom in a Minnesota courtroom. Her emancipation became local lore and national propaganda, so much that she was largely excluded from her own narrative, one that reveals a remarkable journey of bravery and determination, and sheds light on Minnesota's complex relationship with slavery. Her name was Eliza Winston, and this is her story.
This namesake exhibit is based on the scholarship of exhibit co-curator Dr. Christopher P. Lehman, author and professor of the Department of Social Sciences at St. Cloud State University, and features artifacts from the museum's permanent collection as well as newly commissioned artwork depicting Eliza by local artist Christopheraaron Deanes.
Minnesota Spokesman-Recorder, the oldest continuously operated black newspaper in Minnesota, reviewed the exhibit on November 6, 2025. Click here to read the review by Binta Kanteh.
Image Credit: Christopheraaron Deanes, Freedom, 2025. Oil on wood panel, 11 inches by 14 inches. Commissioned for the exhibit, the painting will become part of the museum's fine art collection.
August 27, 2026, — October 3, 2026
We are living through a moment of profound cultural shift — a moment where the recognition and celebration of identity remain entangled with a history that privileges whiteness as the standard. This exhibition confronts that tension head-on, offering visual and conceptual investigations into race, culture, and heritage as dynamic forms of identity and resistance. This conversation is necessary for a healthy and whole society.
Through diverse mediums and personal narratives, these artists interrogate the ways we have both embraced and shunned culture — through acts of political engagement, fear, and lost hope. Their collective work serves as a meditation on what it means to exist within a society that simultaneously invites and erases difference.
As America grapples with its fractured sense of self, “Navigating the Shift” seeks to reveal the tearing away of collectivist ideology while illuminating expressions of hope, resilience, and renewal. The exhibition stands as both a reflection and an offered illumination — a call to reimagine our shared journey toward cultural wellness.
Throughout the stepping on American soils we have shared expected cultural norms and whiteness has become appropriated blackness.
OPENING- Thursday Evening August 27 evening
Artist Christopheraaron Deanes will share the personal and artistic experiences that have brought him to this work, discussing how his practice engages with community narratives, history, and collective memory. As part of the project, he will begin a series of ongoing interviews with community members, gathering stories and reflections that speak to the histories, experiences, and identities of the community.
These collected narratives will be documented and shared online, with QR codes available at the exhibition, allowing participants and visitors to access and engage with the stories throughout the exhibition experience.
September 12 – Community Engagement Workshop
The artist will collaborate with Tacoma Aiken and the community in a creative exploration of how spaces, stories, and cultural histories can be reflected, preserved, and passed on in the face of social and environmental changes that threaten collective memory. Through this community workshop, participants will connect with their own family histories while contributing to a large-scale abstract tapestry. The tapestry will incorporate patterns and visual elements that represent the diverse experiences, traditions, and histories that shape our lives and communities.
September 27 – Community Portrait Workshop
Christopher E. Harrison will engage the ETC community in a workshop centered on identity, representation, and the many dimensions of Blackness and the Black experience. Through dialogue, personal reflection, and collaborative portrait-making, participants will explore how individual and collective stories contribute to broader narratives of Black history and culture. The workshop will create space for meaningful conversation while inviting community members to contribute their perspectives and experiences.
October 3 – Farmers Market Community Event
Migration, Food, and Black Culture
How have migration, food traditions, and access to resources shaped Black cultural identity and community histories? Artist Seitu Jones will facilitate a conversation exploring the connections between food systems, food deserts, migration patterns, and the lasting impacts of redlining. Participants will examine how these historical and contemporary realities influence community narratives and cultural memory. Through discussion and hands-on art making, community members will engage with the artist in a creative process that reflects on food, place, resilience, and the stories that continue to shape our communities.
JULY 18, 2026, — October , 2026
Once upon these times — not once upon a time, safely tucked into the past, but now, in the tense and unresolved present — twenty-five Black artists working across painting, drawing, and sculpture come together to ask what has become of the body politic.
The phrase itself is old, borrowed from centuries of political and sociological thought: a society imagined as a single human body, its citizens and institutions functioning as organs and limbs, each with its own role, its own responsibility to the whole. When the metaphor works, it works because it insists on interdependence — the head cannot dismiss the hand, the heart cannot ignore the lungs, and no single part can claim wellness while another suffers. But metaphors, like bodies, can also fail. They can be broken, neglected, or turned against the very people they were meant to describe. Body Politic: Once Upon These Times takes that fracture as its subject.
This exhibition emerges directly from the current climate — political, social, cultural — as experienced by Black artists living and working within it. Rather than offering a single argument or a tidy resolution, the show gathers twenty-five distinct voices, each responding to this moment through their own visual language. Some works confront the body literally: figures rendered in tension, in protest, in rest, in grief, in celebration. Others take up the metaphor more abstractly, using color, form, and material to suggest fracture, erosion, resilience, or repair. Together, the works form something like a diagnostic image of the body politic itself — not a diagnosis delivered from the outside, but one made from within, by the very communities whose health has too often been treated as optional.
Roho Collective has convened this annual group show for years as a space where Black artists can speak plainly, collectively, and without translation. This year's exhibition continues that tradition while sharpening its focus. The artists gathered here are not being asked to illustrate a theme handed down to them; they are being asked what they are already seeing, feeling, and carrying — and the resulting body of work reflects the full range of that experience. There is anger here, and there is tenderness. There is exhaustion, and there is defiance. There is mourning for what has been erased, and there is insistence on what remains.
The title's temporal twist — Once Upon These Times, rather than Once Upon a Time — is intentional. Fairy tales promise distance: a story that happened long ago, safely resolved, available for moral instruction without personal risk. This exhibition refuses that distance. The times under examination are not once-upon; they are now-upon. The body in crisis is not a symbol borrowed from history — it is the body walking through this gallery, living in this city, reading this same news. By insisting on the present tense, the exhibition asks viewers to sit with discomfort rather than resolve it, to recognize the current moment as one still being written, still open to intervention.
At the same time, the show does not traffic only in crisis. A body under strain is still a body — still capable of movement, connection, and repair. Many of the works on view carry within them a quiet insistence on continuity: on ancestral memory, on community care, on joy that persists precisely because it has had to. This duality — rupture and resilience held in the same frame — is central to how these twenty-five artists understand the body politic today. It is not simply broken; it is being actively fought for, tended to, and reimagined by the very people most affected by its failures.
Body Politic: Once Upon These Times asks its audience to look closely — not away — at the condition of the body we all share, however unevenly its burdens and benefits are distributed. It is an exhibition built on the belief that Black artists have always been among the most precise diagnosticians of American life, and that their work, gathered together in this space, offers not just critique but a form of collective care. The body is not well. These twenty-five artists are here to say so — and to imagine, together, what healing might require.