Our Offerings.

A core understanding of Tangible Collective is that Black folx have all the tools necessary to engage and manifest liberation; Tangible Collective's job is, therefore, to hold space for that emergence where Black art can live and develop organically. Since Tangible started as just an open mic, our value is solely found in how well we support and make space for Blackness in all its expressions and forms.

We are a non-hierarchical artist community and, as such, our projects are undertaken collaboratively and center as many Black voices as possible.The intention behind the collectives’ process of holding space and creating platforms is to make room for healing, affirmation, meaning-making, community-building, and self-reflection through art.

  Tangible Thoughts:
Open Mic

Since our founding, we have held free Open Mic events monthly. Each of these events feature visual artists and merchants as well as open mic performers. We have welcomed between 100 and 200 attendees at every gathering. In this space, we welcome the crowd and performers to contribute by being present, supporting one another through affirmation and oral validation, and engage in sustainable community economics through recycling community dollars into community businesses. Tangible Thoughts is the physical manifestation of our mission to create a supportive sustainable ecosystem for artistic development and community engagement.

Blackness Beyond Performative is a dual platform with the aim of highlighting Black artists as essential to community sustainability and presenting Black art as a sacred creation rather than an asset created for consumption. We host a curated performance along with a panel with the intention of highlighting each artists’ WHY. This platform gives space to Black artists to express the inspiration, process, and root of their work as a way to encourage conversation about culture, creativity, and capacity. Blackness Beyond Performative is a space where we are intentional about leaving audiences with a deeper connection to shared work and opening up the floor for community dialogue.

Blackness Beyond Performative

Tangible Annual Showcase

For the last three years, our collective has hosted the Tangible Annual Showcase curated around five artists who consistently participate in our open mic platform. The artistic goal of Tangible Showcase is to hold space for community artists to showcase their practices and arts for the purpose of supporting, inspiring, and amplifying the thought and expression of Black Millennial artists. Each year, the Showcase grows in varying ways which happens to expand both the opportunity and the capacity of Black Millennial artists and curators to showcase their work in community and, as such, aids artistic development.

Inspired by Salons held by Black artists in Harlem and other Black communities in the early 1900’s, Tangible Salon is a platform built to make room for meaning-making, community-building, and self-reflection through art. Tangible Salon is an intimate platform which gives space to artists to perform, explain their practice and process, and workshop their work with community members.

Tangible Salon

The Collection Zine

We at Tangible pride ourselves on doing revolutionary work. We build every space, project, written piece, photo, etc. with the Black experience in mind. As a means to unapologetically express ourselves and showcase Black expression in the twin cities, we create. Currently, the Collective is working to publish a zine that acts as an extension of the physical space and supports voices that are not based specifically in performing arts. Our take, from the Black perspective, will tell a multitude of stories. The Collection Zine centers creatives who produce works for themselves, free of “the little white man on [their] shoulder” as the honorable Toni Morrison once mentioned. Paying Homage to our ancestors who lived, loved, danced, and wrote for true liberation, Tangible Collective built The Collection Zine to feature those in the Twin Cities doing just that. Submissions are open to local journalists, photographers, graphic designers, poets, illustrators, and other written and visual artists of color.

Teaching Artist Cohort

Along with the zine, the collective is developing a Teaching Artist Cohort that helps bridge the gap between community/ youth engagement and artistic development. Our structure of mentorship and teaching opportunities both create skills in teaching artists of color and create better, more accessible and relevant, arts programming for youth from marginalized communities. We recognize that artists are the storytellers of the Black community. It is critical during these times of social and racial transformation that youth have access to these storytellers to help contextualize and make sense of their current world. Through building relationships with youth, strengthening our relationships with community artists, and giving youth of color access to information needed to navigate being artists in Minnesota, we make room for meaning-making and self-reflection through art.