Visitors to “Mary Sully: Native Modern” at the Minneapolis Institute of Art may wonder about how Mary Sully would react to seeing her first solo exhibition, over 60 years after her death.

In season five, episode 10 of “Doctor Who”, the Doctor and his sidekick Amy Pond bring the iconic and embattled artist Vincent Van Gogh to a present-day gallery in Paris exhibiting his work.

Van Gogh, who created an immense and vibrant oeuvre despite struggling to sell a single painting, is stunned to see visitors in the crowded gallery admire and take photos of his work, and cries tears of joy.

Sully, a Yankton Dakota artist from Standing Rock Indian Reservation, South Dakota, blended the popular culture of the 1920s through the 1940s with traditional Dakota designs, producing one-of-a-kind colored pencil triptychs of vibrant colors and hypnotizing patterns that have only recently been uncovered.

“In the early 20th century, Sully quietly revolutionized Native and American art by forging connections between these seemingly distinct genres, ultimately transforming the field of American art,” said Katie Luber, the president of the Mia and director of the Nivin and Duncan MacMillan director, in a Feb. 6 press release.

In collaboration with the Mary Sully Foundation and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, “Native Modern” presents various pieces that Mia acquired in November 2023, according to the press release.

Sully’s most distinctive works are her personality prints, in which she provides a uniquely Indigenous perspective by translating the personalities and life stories of pop culture icons of the day into her signature triptychs.

In “Shirley Temple,” Sully translates the child actor’s bright brown eyes, golden curls and bubbly personality into concentric circles. The motif continues into her drawing of a blue flannel cape with Dakota beadwork and explains the connection in a handwritten caption.

“When blue flannel was first introduced, little girls wore capes of it, decorated with beads, like this one.”

The handwritten captions make Sully’s presence in the work feel tangible, showing how she used art as a lens through which to see the world.

While the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s take on Sully’s work revolves around her time in New York City, one goal of the Mia exhibition was to localize Sully’s art. According to Valéria Piccoli, the Ken and Linda Cutler Chair of the Arts of the Americas, this involved working with  Sully’s great-nephew Philip J. Deloria to incorporate Indigenous objects into the show.

“(Sully) is a part of the culture that the Twin Cities are embedded in,” Piccoli said.

Sully’s work also provides a valuable Indigenous perspective on life in the early 20th century, when Indigenous people had little to no political power and continued to be forcibly assimilated into white American culture.

Sully also created triptychs that visualize her social commentary with satire as compelling as her artistry.

Piccoli named “Titled Husbands in the USA” as a favorite, which pokes fun at European men who marry wealthy American women.

In the top panel, three men suck from the same milk bottle labeled with dollar signs, their straws branching out to connect cracked and broken hearts. The second panel zooms out to reveal a kaleidoscopic pattern of this complex dynamic, which the third panel translates into a stained-glass window that also blends Dakota quillwork motifs.

According to Piccoli, it uses an observational sense of humor befitting of Sully’s notably shy personality.

Sully’s artwork has gone unnoticed and misrepresented for decades. A looping Paramount Pictures promotional film from the 1940s playing in the gallery falsely identifies Sully as being from New Mexico, even though she can be seen drawing in full Dakota regalia.

Deloria, who published his great aunt’s biography “Becoming Mary Sully” in 2019, first encountered the work stashed away in the attic while unpacking them from a box with his mom. He didn’t think twice about it until two decades later, according to the Harvard Gazette.

Considering all that is known about Sully, it feels wrong to assume she made her art for people to see. She never tried to sell her art, unlike Van Gogh — instead, she used it as her own form of expression and interpretation of the world around her.

“People should come to discover an original artist with beautiful work that speaks to Dakota heritage,” Piccoli said. “The more time you give yourself to spend with the art, the more you’ll get out of it.”

Queer friends and lovers of all stripes swayed to Lucy Dacus’ sentimental indie stylings on her second night at St. Paul’s Palace Theatre on Tuesday.

Dacus, who turned 30 on Friday, sold out her Monday and Tuesday shows in support of her latest studio album “Forever is a Feeling,” a layered testament to the messy tenderness of queer love.

Performing from an ornate, Rococo-esque art museum set befitting of the Palace’s antique architecture, Dacus played an arrangement of the album’s 13 tracks interspersed with fan favorites and deep cuts that kept the audience engaged for 90 minutes even after two opening acts.

Emerging with her band from smoky darkness to the screeching strings of “Calliope Prelude,” Dacus began with “Hot & Heavy” from her 2021 record “Home Video,” then transitioned into “Ankles” off of “Forever.”

Screens hanging above the stage lit up with renaissance paintings of dancing women, cherubs and orange trees, evoking the lushness of new love, or at least the scenarios surrounding it we create in our heads.

Moody, atmospheric lighting completed each song’s vignette and rounded out Dacus’ poetic and poignant storytelling.

Besides shredding during energetic throwback “First Time,” which is also off “Home Video,” Dacus’ stage presence was reserved and serene, gently circling the set and taking a seat during “Limerence.”

Halfway through the set, Dacus transitioned into an intimate seating arrangement complete with a faux-Victorian settee and a cup of Throat Coat tea (someone asked what it was on night one).

“Sometimes I forget y’all are here,” she chuckled in between grunts as she helped move the set pieces into place.

Minneapolis indie pop artist Samia, who sang Hozier’s part on the wistful “Bullseye,” slouched into the couch when she joined Dacus onstage, raving about its comfiness.

Dacus’ band sat in a circle in the art museum-turned-salon with starry night sky visuals above the stage during a special performance of 2016’s “Trust.”

The stars became fireflies during “Bullseye,” evoking the unrelenting march of time despite nostalgia for a past relationship.

Still, the flashy visuals and ornate set design didn’t outshine Dacus’ grounded and gracious personality.

“My life is awesome, and you’re a part of it, so thanks for being here,” she told the audience before closing the show with “Night Shift.”

The opener to Dacus’ 2018 album “Historian,” “Night Shift” is an achingly angry ode to a toxic ex-lover, and seeing it live is a rite of passage for any indie rock fan.

It was only right to scream my throat raw singing along to the refrain: “You’ve got a nine-to-five, so I’ll take the night shift / And I’ll never see you again if I can help it.”

I cried my eyes out singing along to multiple songs, imagining I was singing them to my queer loved ones. I’m sure I wasn’t the only one.

The spirit of queer love was tangible throughout the night. Budding British indie artist jasmine.4.t opened the show with crooning love letters to friends, her trans lover and herself, a trans woman.

Katie Gavin played a set of songs from her debut solo album “What a Relief,” which evokes the country and folk sentiments of lesbian rock star Melissa Etheridge.

“I just feel like I have to say this: I love gay people!” Gavin said to raucous cheers.

If you were walking down the brick path between the Regis Center for Art and the Barbara Barker Center for Dance on Thursday afternoon, you may have seen about 30 people crouched near the rain-soaked ground and wondered what they were doing.

Armed with palm-sized triplet magnifying glasses, these people were on a lichen walk, examining local specimens as part of the University of Minnesota Department of Art’s first-ever Lichen Symposium.

From Thursday to Saturday, visitors from across Minnesota and the country convened to discuss and participate in activities surrounding the small, yet endlessly complex, organisms.

Lichen are ecological anomalies. As hybrid colonies of algae or cyanobacteria in symbiosis with fungus, they are plantlike, but not plants — fungal in nature, but not the fungus itself. 

The entangled nature of lichen led University professor Diane Willow and the CHANT collaborative, an intercollegiate group of artists and community health equity leaders, to create an event where people can come together across interests to discuss the unique organisms.

“(The Symposium) is both inter- and transdisciplinary,” Willow said the day before the Symposium. “There are some of the artists involved who are very interested in science and then there are a lot of scientists who are very interested in art.”

CHANT, which stands for Culture, Healing, Art, Nature and Technology, began in 2022 and is committed to researching creative interdependence at the nexus of each of those disciplines, according to its official description.

This research brought them to lichen and then to the book “The Lichen Museum,” published by the University of Minnesota Press and written by Alison Laurie Palmer, a professor of art at the University of California-Santa Cruz.

Palmer flew out from Santa Cruz for the Symposium and led the lichen walk, an activity that “The Lichen Museum” centers around.

“The lichen museum is absolutely everywhere, and all you have to do is look really closely,” Palmer said to symposium participants before the walk.

Under their magnifying glasses, participants observed shield lichen stretching across ridged tree bark and another species dotting concrete bricks encircling a rock garden that glowed orange under ultraviolet light.

A small child stomped around in rainboots and squealed with delight at each discovery. Lichenologists conversed about species and answered questions from other participants.

Other Symposium activities included screenprinting lichen-inspired bookmarks with Bohemian Press and small-group ruminations about the physical and metaphysical natures of lichen.

Participants wrote questions such as, “Am I a lichen?” “Do lichen taste like they smell?” and “Is God a lichen?” on pieces of paper laser cut into the shapes of different lichen species, which were taped to a wall in Regis East, arranged like a growing lichen colony.

Most interestingly, art professors Amy Youngs and Doo-Sung Yoo from Ohio State University led a two-part activity called Fungal Entanglements. Recreating a performance by the OSU Lichen Likers group, Youngs and Yoo helped participants create costumes by tying fabric scraps to lichen-covered tree branches.

The costumes ultimately became one interconnected piece, entangling the participants with each other. Youngs and Yoo then led the participants in a procession around West Bank that evoked the feeling of being in an interconnected web of life.

Second-year graduate student and CHANT member Mai Tran mostly stood on the sidelines taking photos, so she didn’t participate in Fungal Entanglements.

Tran, however, did contribute six, nine-foot-tall, 38-inch-wide woodblock prints, one for each color of the rainbow, that hung in the Regis East lobby during the symposium, a project she called her greatest achievement of the semester.

The prints depict the Star Rosette Lichen, a species that has been recorded in 75 of Minnesota’s 87 counties, according to MinnesotaSeasons.com.

Tran said the 32-by-72-inch block used to make the prints took two weeks of nonstop carving, a process she said would normally take her three to six months.

With assistance, the prints were created across two 12-hour days in the printmaking shop. A time-lapse of the process played on a screen in the lobby.

Tran sought to create something reflective of where she lives, and found that the black spots of the Star Rosette evoked Minnesota’s lakes and that its arrangement took the shape of a river, the same setting where she first found the lichen.

Overall, Tran said she came away from the Symposium with a new perspective on lichen and knowing a lot more about them.

“We don’t think of (lichen) as pretty or helpful, but now I want to pay more attention to them,” she said. “It’s good to open that to the public, and hopefully we can make the world better.”

Not understanding the hype of something is an alienating experience, and that’s how I felt among the general admission crowd at Djo’s performance at Palace Theatre in St. Paul Saturday.

Djo, pronounced “Joe,” is the musical project of actor and musician Joe Keery, best known for his role as Steve Harrington on “Stranger Things.”

Djo began as something of an alter-ego for Keery, a parody of a 1970s businessman/rock superstar. The psychedelic, glimmering rock sounds of that decade pervade his discography, particularly on his latest album “The Crux,” which came out April 4.

Keery broke through last year when the song “End of Beginning” off his 2022 record “Decide” went viral on TikTok.You’ll know it by its passionate refrain, “And when I’m back in Chicago, I feel it.” It’s an emotional whirlpool of a song about mourning one’s youth that resonates despite its ubiquity — it’s popular, but not shallow.

As a whole, Djo’s music makes for an engaging listen through headphones or the speakers of a record player, but Keery failed to translate his unique musical vision into his performance at Palace Theatre.

Keery made no attempt to play a character, dressed casually in a baseball cap, yellow cardigan, jeans and sneakers, but this didn’t lend itself to authenticity as one would expect.

Other than the courtesy “Thank you for coming”s, Keery made little effort to connect with the crowd, relying on flashing lights and booming instruments to generate excitement.

He offered a crumb of vulnerability by expressing his love for his band before performing the song “Fly” from “The Crux.”

“These are my great pals,” he smiled. The crowd cheered because, of course, they did, but the occasional “I love you!” cries always seemed to go unheard.

Earlier in the show, and just five songs in, Keery introduced his band members, which made it feel like he wasn’t trying to stay for long.

The emotional distance Keery kept from his fans came across as a sense of entitlement and undermined the earnestness that is, in fact, present in his music.

Ultimately, Djo shows are for devoted fans with established emotional connections to the music, not for newcomers looking to witness a new dimension of creativity.

Keery singing the chorus to “Basic Being Basic” felt like a Freudian slip.

“I think you’re scared of being basic / That’s ironic ‘cause it’s reading like you’re even more basic,” Keery sang.

To Keery’s credit, “The Crux” is an interesting concept album that explores a variety of sounds, from synthy psychedelic rock to introspective acoustic indie. Its lyrical themes center around The Crux Hotel, “a hotel housing guests who are all, in one way or another, at crossroads in their life.”

According to Keery, it speaks to the “community, collaboration, and character” found at those crossroads, and he wrote the record while he was away from home filming.

Keery sings about love and loneliness with both theatricality and vulnerability, but the story of “The Crux” still feels scattered and fake deep.

It stands in stark contrast to his older and more experimental records, “Decide” and “Twenty Twenty,” perhaps because back then, he wasn’t trying to ride on the coattails of his own algorithmic success.

Some genuinely good artists have achieved hard-won recognition because of overnight internet virality. Doechii and Chappell Roan both fit that bill, and lo and behold, they both won Grammy Awards this year. But this wasn’t just sheer luck, it’s also because they brought their whole selves to their craft, performance included.

If Djo wants more than a world tour, devoted fans and one memeified song, he should try being himself for a change.

As home to the art department, the Regis Center for Art is no stranger to spontaneous art installations, but the silver streamers lining its skyway do more than just beautify the space.

Created by University of Minnesota students Erin Jordahl and Jolie Schrage (pronounced “SHRAY-ghee”) for the fall semester 2024 Art and Ecology class, the streamers actually serve as a temporary bird strike mitigator, as detailed by posters on both ends of the skyway.

According to Ph.D. student Andrew Hallberg, creator of the Stop The Thud! initiative on campus, bird strikes happen because birds can’t perceive transparent or reflective surfaces, a key facet of the city landscape present in many campus buildings. They then fly into those surfaces, resulting in injury and often death.

Hallberg said external glass modifications are the best practices for bird strike mitigation.. Jordahl and Schrage said they knew that kind of effort was beyond the scope of their one-semester class, but that they hoped the streamers would be a step in the right direction.

“We just wanted to do something. We wanted to take some action that we thought might prove to be helpful,” Jordahl, a University Law School alum, environmental activist and artist, said.

Since the streamers went up on Feb. 28, Jordahl and Schrage were put in contact with Hallberg, who was excited for the streamers to test bird strike mitigation on the Regis skyway.

“I do think that there’s some promise to what they’ve done with the Regis skyway. By putting the streamers on the inside, I think that’s going to take away a lot of that transparency,” Hallberg said. “You also have a lot of movement, so it’s providing these reflections and fluttering in an air current, which could act as a visual deterrent.”

According to Hallberg, the Regis skyway is not the biggest problem area on campus — Stop The Thud! data only shows four reported strikes on the skyway — but bird strike mitigation is a crucial endeavor for a large urban campus like the University.

Hallberg added that it’s too soon to tell how effective the streamers are, since many bird strikes happen during spring migrations.

“These birds are migrating right through the heart of some of our biggest cities,” Hallberg said. “Figuring out ways to make it so that these birds can go from Central and South America all the way to Canada and make it through our cities safely is something we should all be working towards.”

The streamers not only serve their sustainable function, they also transform the skyway space. Their fluttering and shimmering adds a sort of magic to the ubiquitous Twin Cities structure.

It speaks to the layered definitions of sustainability that Assistant Professor Chotsani Elaine Dean, co-lead of the art department’s sustainability, space and building committee, seeks to engage with at Regis.

“What we’ve been working on long term is building a sustainability culture at the department, since you can’t use a word if there isn’t a culture behind it,” Dean said. “You can’t just get new buildings all the time.”

This has involved environmental initiatives such as bird strike mitigation and pollinator gardens as well as creating spaces that sustain students as artists with the inclusion of plants, comfortable furniture and spaces that are clearly marked for student use.

“People take bees for granted, and I think our culture takes artists for granted,” Dean said. “The different concerns of students and faculty all come together to create the culture of learning how to make art and the many different paths one can take.”

After all, it was direct action from art students that made the streamers happen and will set up Regis for a more sustainable future.

Since last November, artist and University of Minnesota alum Jackie Fay has been putting deodorant on what will eventually become The Armpit gallery, a new and unique iteration of Como’s DIY spirit.

Deodorant, of course, meaning white paint.

Located in the dingy garage of famed house venue Como Backdoor, though unaffiliated with the venue, the space, which is currently still bare bones, is a testament to the DIY spirit and Fay’s unrelenting passion for art.

Since graduating last spring, Fay, who uses both she/her and they/them pronouns, has found herself in a pattern familiar to many recently bestowed with an arts degree — working 25 hours a week at an exhausting retail job and making art in her closet while combating compounding health issues.

“I’m not concerned with exhibiting right now,” Fay said. “I’m just taking the time and space to focus on my craft and getting it to a unique and interesting state that I’m proud of.”

Primarily a painter, Fay graduated from people to landscapes to flowy, abstract, intuitively created dreamscapes.

“It’s what comes out of me, and then we think about it afterward,” she said.

Still, Fay said she wanted a larger space to be creative. With no luck yet finding a studio space, they turned to curation as an outlet, inspired by hole-in-the-wall galleries in Minneapolis such as Night Club, by artists Lee Noble and Emma Beatrez and Hair and Nails.

“I really admire businesses run by duct tape and a dream,” Fay said.

That’s when her friends at Como Backdoor hooked her up with their dilapidated garage last fall, and the rest is history.

Well, the history may not have started yet, but at least the doors have been scrubbed.

The doors do not open on their own, so Fay yanked the right door up high enough to enter when she showed me the space.

Leaves and dirt are still scattered across the floor, but at least they are not piled calf-high like Fay said they were in the fall.

Drywall has been put up and primed, but Fay confessed she was supposed to paint earlier that week but did not.

Its location in the middle of a neighborhood alley might not seem conducive to visitors, but proximity to Backdoor is likely to help, along with a sandwich sign Fay got from the University ReUse Program.

Still, Fay said this sort of liminal weirdness is what she’s aiming for.

“It’s right next to the mosh pit, but it’s still a little stinky and a little weird,” she said.

The Armpit’s inaugural show will open on Friday, May 16, at 7 p.m. Titled “seething: malding,” it is an exploration of intense emotions and coping mechanisms, especially in response to the sins of society.

“It’s giving fancy cursive letters with hard drugs and sex and punk rock,” Fay said.

Fay said there’s also an undercurrent of rurality and the Middle America experience in the show, reminiscent of pro-life, sex shops and fireworks billboards that line the interstate through Wisconsin.

The 12 artists featured consist of Fay’s good friends who were easily reachable and strangers she approached who were cool with displaying art in a space without electricity or air conditioning.

“I did a lot of coordinating, a lot of talking and reaching out to artists while trying not to look like a scammer,” Fay laughed.

Fay said she’s particularly excited about University Bachelor of Fine Arts senior and fellow painter Jack Drummond being in the show.

She said Drummond embodies the DIY spirit she’s looking for with his paintings recreated from blurry, pixelated and deep-fried digital images.

While investing in The Armpit has been a roller coaster process for Fay, they said they’re not afraid of potential ephemerality.

“There was an Armpit Gallery in San Francisco that was only open for a few months,” she said. “I could just be creating the next one.”

Fay said their ultimate goal for The Armpit is to create a surreal experience for people to stumble upon.

“I love the feeling of stumbling in somewhere and being like, ‘What the f–ck is this place?’” she said.

Independent Bookstore Day falls on the last Saturday of April each year, but Twin Cities literary organization Rain Taxi is giving local booklovers five whole days to celebrate with their annual Twin Cities Independent Bookstore Passport.

From Wednesday, April 23, to Sunday, April 27, the passport will be free to pick up at 37 bookstores across the Twin Cities. Getting a store’s stamp provides a coupon for a future visit, and the truly dedicated can collect stamps and be entered to win prizes.

“The Twin Cities are very fortunate to have so many great bookstores,” Rain Taxi executive director Eric Lorberer said. “I think people get really into how many stores they can visit and get turned on to new places that might not be on their normal path.”

Lorberer said some of his favorite stores are Magers & Quinn in Uptown, DreamHaven Books & Comics in Standish and Birchbark Books, the bookstore of famed Ojibwe author Louise Erdrich.

University of Minnesota students don’t have to go far to pick up a passport, since this year the University of Minnesota Bookstores are participating.

Independent Bookstore Day began as California Bookstore Day in 2014. The event expanded nationwide just a year later in 2015 with support from the American Booksellers Association, which took over management of the day in 2019, according to Shelf Awareness.

This year’s number of bookstores on the passport is record-setting, partly because this is the first year Rain Taxi has included used bookstores, like Dinkytown’s own Book House, on the list.

Co-owner of the Book House, Matt Hawbaker, said he had been trying for more than five years to get the store on the passport.

“With both our location and being on the second floor of our building, we’re always trying to think of ways to get more foot traffic here,” Hawbaker said.

Open since 1976, the Book House is somewhat of a last bastion of historic Dinkytown. According to Hawbaker, it is the last independent bookstore standing out of the five that were originally in the neighborhood.

Hawbaker also said being near the University influences the store’s inventory, with much of its inventory coming from cleaning out professors’ offices.

The result is an extremely wide variety of old and rare books, from leftist literature to smutty paperbacks.

“This is the place to dig for things,” Hawbaker said.

For all five of the passport days, customers with punch cards will get two punches for every $5 instead of just one. The Book House will also have a 20% discount on all books on Independent Bookstore Day on Saturday, April 26.

Another unique indie bookstore near campus is the volunteer-run Mayday Books, located in Cedar-Riverside near the eastbound Washington Avenue ramp.

Mayday, a subterranean shop which specializes in left-wing literature, has not sold books for profit for 50 years now, instead selling them 15-20% below their cover prices.

“We are an independent source of news and analysis, and we have stuff here you won’t find anywhere else,” said Craig Palmer, Mayday’s de facto manager.

Palmer, who has been a part of Mayday since 1980, said the store has been on the passport for about five years. Their limited hours of 1 p.m. to 5 p.m., Monday through Saturday, though, might make it more difficult to stop by.

Still, Palmer said Mayday is a unique store for independent thinkers.

“We’re an all-volunteer operation of people dedicated to making a better world,” he said.

Though it may be tempting to try to hit all 37 stores during the passport period, Lorberer stressed the importance of taking one’s time while visiting each store, which he said are important cultural institutions year-round.

“Our consumer culture takes where things come from for granted. We’re giving up more for convenience than we realize,” he said. “Books are the record of our humanity, and supporting these stores means supporting the real-life cultures of our local communities.”

Independent Bookstore Day falls on the last Saturday of April each year, but Twin Cities literary organization Rain Taxi is giving local booklovers five whole days to celebrate with their annual Twin Cities Independent Bookstore Passport.

From Wednesday, April 23, to Sunday, April 27, the passport will be free to pick up at 37 bookstores across the Twin Cities. Getting a store’s stamp provides a coupon for a future visit, and the truly dedicated can collect stamps and be entered to win prizes.

“The Twin Cities are very fortunate to have so many great bookstores,” Rain Taxi executive director Eric Lorberer said. “I think people get really into how many stores they can visit and get turned on to new places that might not be on their normal path.”

Lorberer said some of his favorite stores are Magers & Quinn in Uptown, DreamHaven Books & Comics in Standish and Birchbark Books, the bookstore of famed Ojibwe author Louise Erdrich.

University of Minnesota students don’t have to go far to pick up a passport, since this year the University of Minnesota Bookstores are participating.

Independent Bookstore Day began as California Bookstore Day in 2014. The event expanded nationwide just a year later in 2015 with support from the American Booksellers Association, which took over management of the day in 2019, according to Shelf Awareness.

This year’s number of bookstores on the passport is record-setting, partly because this is the first year Rain Taxi has included used bookstores, like Dinkytown’s own Book House, on the list.

Co-owner of the Book House, Matt Hawbaker, said he had been trying for more than five years to get the store on the passport.

“With both our location and being on the second floor of our building, we’re always trying to think of ways to get more foot traffic here,” Hawbaker said.

Open since 1976, the Book House is somewhat of a last bastion of historic Dinkytown. According to Hawbaker, it is the last independent bookstore standing out of the five that were originally in the neighborhood.

Hawbaker also said being near the University influences the store’s inventory, with much of its inventory coming from cleaning out professors’ offices.

The result is an extremely wide variety of old and rare books, from leftist literature to smutty paperbacks.

“This is the place to dig for things,” Hawbaker said.

For all five of the passport days, customers with punch cards will get two punches for every $5 instead of just one. The Book House will also have a 20% discount on all books on Independent Bookstore Day on Saturday, April 26.

Another unique indie bookstore near campus is the volunteer-run Mayday Books, located in Cedar-Riverside near the eastbound Washington Avenue ramp.

Mayday, a subterranean shop which specializes in left-wing literature, has not sold books for profit for 50 years now, instead selling them 15-20% below their cover prices.

“We are an independent source of news and analysis, and we have stuff here you won’t find anywhere else,” said Craig Palmer, Mayday’s de facto manager.

Palmer, who has been a part of Mayday since 1980, said the store has been on the passport for about five years. Their limited hours of 1 p.m. to 5 p.m., Monday through Saturday, though, might make it more difficult to stop by.

Still, Palmer said Mayday is a unique store for independent thinkers.

“We’re an all-volunteer operation of people dedicated to making a better world,” he said.

Though it may be tempting to try to hit all 37 stores during the passport period, Lorberer stressed the importance of taking one’s time while visiting each store, which he said are important cultural institutions year-round.

“Our consumer culture takes where things come from for granted. We’re giving up more for convenience than we realize,” he said. “Books are the record of our humanity, and supporting these stores means supporting the real-life cultures of our local communities.”

The world premiere of “Emily Dickinson: The Untold Verse” ran from Friday to Sunday at Ballet Co.Laboratory’s intimate Studio Theatre in a strip mall just west of the St. Paul Downtown Airport.

Despite the modest setting, the hour-long performance was a rich translation of Dickinson’s language of poetry into the language of dance. 

The setting fits the story of the 19th-century poet’s life — a seemingly lonely, reclusive lifestyle hiding a rich inner life and fascination with the world.

“While Emily’s nature was misunderstood, today we invite you to see beyond the myth,” Ballet Co. Laboratory artistic director Zoé Henrot and managing director Rachel Koep wrote in the program. “Step into Emily’s world — not the one history has constructed, but the one she created for herself.”

None of Dickinson’s poetry was utilized in the performance, relying solely on the graceful leaps, swoops and twirls of ballet.

Another layer of creativity in the production was setting the performance to “Das Jahr” by composer Fanny Mendelssohn, another 19th-century female creative who was not recognized for her work until long after her death.

German for “The Year,” “Das Jahr” sonically explores the ever-changing scenery and mood of a year, which “The Untold Verse” uses to represent various seasons of Dickinson’s life.

Choreographer Genevieve Waterbury arranged the performance non-chronologically, which created some narrative incoherence but also complexity as it evokes different years of Dickinson’s life.

The ballet began with a wounded deer prancing to Mendelssohn’s “January,” then transitioned into a young Dickinson being pushed into conformity by her father and society.

Then time jumps forward to Dickinson’s adulthood, where, set to Mendelssohn’s “Mai,” the poet falls in love with her sister-in-law, Susan Huntington Gilbert Dickinson, a bumblebee buzzing around them, welcoming the springtime.

It was refreshing to see queer love depicted in a traditional practice such as ballet. Rosa Prigan, who played Emily, and Henrot, who played Susan, revealed a palpable connection on stage together, holding each other tenderly and gazing wistfully at each other when Austin, Dickinson’s brother, leads Susan offstage.

“We have few surviving records of Emily’s life outside of her poetry and preserved letters. She really wasn’t all that obscure about her feelings in her writings — but I think the lack of queer visibility and acceptance in the world she lived wrote much of her story for her,” Waterbury said in a press release.

The ballet also engaged with Dickinson’s complex relationship with death, a prevalent theme throughout her poetry.

Represented by a swarm of flies, the death ensemble impressively imitated buzzing by rapidly stomping en pointe, or on the tips of their ballet shoes.

Dickinson’s first encounter with death, a movement named after the poem “I felt a Funeral, in my Brain” set to Mendelssohn’s “September,” reads as an intrusion while in the throes of depression.

By the end of the performance, in “We passed the fields of gazing grain” set to “Dezember,” Dickinson greets death like an old friend. Kit Ornelas, lead death fly, holds their hand out to her, and Dickinson tentatively takes it with a smile.

The finale’s title comes from a poem that begins with the lines: “Because I could not stop for Death – / He kindly stopped for me.”

The choice to end with this scene of death in “Dezember,” Dickinson’s birth month, evokes how life and death are intertwined, an awareness of which Dickinson shows throughout her poetry.

During the finale, after the dancers cleared the stage, pages from the old book props circling the stage started to rise into the air, signifying the main purpose of the ballet of lifting Dickinson’s life off the page and out of historical precedent.

With simple yet effective costume and set design, “The Untold Verse” was a brief yet successful exploration of an endlessly complex life and left the audience to ask themselves what they could learn about the world from someone who barely left her bedroom.

After three-and-a-half years as the Walker Art Center volunteer coordinator, former Walker Worker Union president Michelle Maser said she only got 10 minutes to clean out her desk.

Maser was elected to the president position three times before she was laid off last week, not long after former Union secretary Gabriela Bruner had been laid off. 

“I may have lost my job, but I have not lost my resolve to fight for justice,” Maser said to the crowd gathered in front of the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden during Thursday’s rally.

Over a hundred union and community members rallied for Maser and Bruner’s reinstatement, their bright green union colors contrasting the gloomy April sky.

People gathered around the entrance to the world-famous sculpture garden at the busy intersection of Hennepin Avenue and Vineland Place, chants of “union busting is disgusting” and “the workers united will never be defeated” ringing out over cars honking their support.

Maser and Bruner said their firings were the Walker’s latest move towards breaking up the union, which is represented by AFSCME Council 5. The current contract between the Walker and the Union expires next January, according to Maser.

The Walker said in a statement made to the Minnesota Daily that it “remains in full compliance” with its collective bargaining agreement and attributed “the creation and elimination of a small number of roles both union and non-union” to restructuring of its Visitor & Gallery Experience teams that began last fall.

“They’ve moved the volunteer work out of the bargaining unit and into the hands of managers outside of the Union,” Maser said in response. “I believe that proves that they did need me.”

A bargaining unit is a group of employees represented by a single labor union in collective bargaining, according to Cornell Law School.

Maser added that three former teammates whom she worked with in the box office were also pushed out, and those three workers were Union members.

According to the Union, 50% of its bargaining unit has been pushed out in the past year due to layoffs and cuts to hours.

Several union members spoke out last year against Walker policy requiring gallery attendants to stand at all times during their shifts. Chairs were a prominent theme at Thursday’s rally, with one protester holding a sign reading “Sitting doesn’t prevent me from doing my job, it helps me do it.”

Chants of “the people here deserve a seat” felt relevant and pointed.

Speakers also criticized the Walker for hypocrisy, saying that its actions against workers directly opposed its stated values.

“The Walker is more than just galleries filled with art. It’s a community of workers, patrons and neighbors who believe in the importance of art, education and inclusion,” Bruner said to the crowd. “The actions of the Walker have shown that those in leadership don’t share these values and that they prop up a false facade of being a progressive institution.”

Looming behind Bruner was a large-scale puppet shrouded in black with ghoulish gray hands and a black money bag for a head. The protest leaders referred to it as “management.”

“We all love the Walker and its art and we love our community there, but they don’t deserve your financial support right now unless they’re going to treat their workers better,” Bruner said in an interview.

Natalie Naranjo, an organizer for UFCW Local 663 and former Science Museum of Minnesota employee, spoke at the rally.

“Union busting in cultural institutions is its own flavor of disgusting,” Naranjo said. “(Museums) love to talk about how they’re a part of their communities. But what I really wanna know from museum workers, who makes the museum a part of their communities?”

“We do!” the crowd shouted in response.

Despite the bleak situation, protestors brought fun to their tactics. People jammed with a trombone, drum, tambourine, cowbells and rhythm sticks. Another person brought a chair puppet calling for the right of workers to sit.

Many of Maser and Bruner’s former co-workers, some joining the rally on their breaks, came up to greet and hug the two of them. Maser herself started tearing up during her speech, which was met with shouts of encouragement from the crowd.

“I came today because my co-workers have been unjustly terminated,” said Aster Ryan, an usher at the Walker and Union vice president. “I need (Walker executive director) Mary Ceruti and other senior leadership that it’s not OK with the workers.”