Missions & Values

Mission

Red Eye is a vital artistic hearth supporting liberatory investigation, tending voices from periphery and emergent futurisms, weaving constellations across experiences and geographies. Seeing ourselves as a vital part of the many iterative ecologies in the Twin Cities, Red Eye offers sites for communal dreaming, foregrounds visceral knowing, and advocates for systemic transformation, healing with the land through performance and art making.

Red Eye cultivates vital developmental opportunities, incubating practices and making space for all of us to navigate our own creative constellations. Grounded in resource stewardship, reciprocity, and radical discernment, Red Eye operates as a platform for multi-faceted contemporary performance communities—a space for profound shared densities that ignite connections between people, practices, and felt propositions for new worlds.

Developing new work

For over three decades, Red Eye has supported over 1,000 artists and presented over 200 shows, including work by Christina Ham, Sibyl Kempson, HIJACK, Rosy Simas, Marcus Young, Lisa D’Amour, Emily Johnson, and many more.

Collectively led by artists

Red Eye was founded in 1983 and was led for 35 years by Steve Busa and Miriam Must. Since 2019, Red Eye has been led by a collective of Co-Directors.

Values

All of Red Eye’s work emerges out of the following long-term values:

Equity, Inclusivity, Care

Red Eye will cultivate a hive for artists pursuing liberatory exploration, especially those tending voices from periphery and emergent futurisms. We aim to foster a deep sense of belonging, creating a culture of anti-ableism where all are valued and supported. Recognizing that systemic forces are always at play, Red Eye is committed to cultivating the discernment needed to work effectively with communities toward a more just future. This involves a continuous process of understanding our shared humanity and building bridges within our collective.

Artists as Leaders

Red Eye will be led collaboratively by working artists and will engage artists in all aspects of decision-making. Red Eye values the multifaceted knowledge, experiences, and expertise of artists as civic leaders who carry community, as part of our resource stewardship and reciprocity.

Thoughtful Risk

Red Eye is committed to ongoing communal discernment, artistically and organizationally. Red Eye will encourage artists and audiences to converge around daring investigation and visceral knowing, taking responsibility for ourselves and accountability for our actions within community, challenging the normative and deepening our understanding of ourselves, our interconnectedness, and our potential for transformation through relationship and shared accountability.

Artistic Process

Red Eye recognizes the importance of creative constellations and will remain nimble and responsive, supporting artists' shifting needs in a changing world. We understand artistic process as expansive—a vital point of interaction, connection, sharing, and relationship building. We honor and prioritize felt and lived experience as relational practice, where artists work in process with one another, creating through shared accountability and collective wisdom. Processes can be iterative or incomplete and different—these are the things that reveal ourselves to each other and bring us together.

Testimonials

“Red Eye is so palpably artist-led, artist-driven, and artist-centering. Those values and the actions that they foment are greatly needed in Minneapolis, and deeply felt by all us artists who feel seen and supported and uplifted by Red Eye as a community space.”

— Red Eye Artist

“There’s a value placed on artists helping other artists create their work, through feedback, support and encouragement.”

— The Star Tribune

“I had so much room to play, so much room to experiment. I faced failure, I faced challenges. I was experimenting with so many relatively new elements to me. I have always felt this with Red Eye, that one’s creativity can run as wild as one desires.”

— Red Eye Artist