Organizational Curatorial Statement

RED EYE: Organizational Curatorial Statement

Red Eye is an artist-run, community-rooted organization committed to collaborative, experimental performance practices. We operate as an interdependent network of core artists and collaborators who co-steward the organization through shared responsibility, mutual accountability, care, and relationship. We are motivated by a hunger for critical justices in our field.

Civic Practice

The values that shape our artistic choices shape how we operate: mutual support, transparency, collective learning, and accountability. We are guided by principles of permaculture—valuing resilience, reciprocity, adaptation, and deep attention to place and ecosystem.

Red Eye is a space for shared inquiry. We value artists building community, working in coalition, and practicing forms of cultural production that emphasize connection, collective practice, mutual aid, and shared authorship.

Curation in Relationship

We practice curation as relationship-building—sustained engagement with artists and communities over time. Our curatorial work is continuous practice of noticing, being in dialogue, building relationships.

Curation strengthens communities and connections. We connect people to each other—not just to Red Eye, but to other artists, other practices, other ways of working. We build from proximity, from the intersection of Red Eye's communities and the communities of artists and collaborators we work with.

Festival Producers, community leaders, and program alumni are co-curators—bringing their own practices of relationship-building, artistic inquiry, and curiosity, weaving networks of possibilities.

Process, Care, and Interdependence

We honor process as practice itself. We treasure the unwieldiness of difference in the room. Production exists alongside maintenance, care, and communal practice.

Sustainability comes from cultivating deep relationships, building structures of care, and investing in practices that sustain the whole ecology. We orient toward slow, deliberate work that honors interdependence and sustained care. We reach toward personal and ecosystem health, toward balance rather than productivity or growth for its own sake.

Persistent Inquiry and Heart Expansion

We're committed to persistent inquiry—deepening our capacity to see, hear, empathize, and be present with each other. Heart expansion: widening our field of view so we can see ourselves and each other more fully. See what we're implicated in, what we're complicit in. See how we give and how we receive. See what we take responsibility for, what we're accountable to.

This work challenges us. We reach toward more justice, more restoration, more sustainability, more equilibrium—not "more" as production or productivity, but deeper capacity for presence, accountability, and care.

Our container of practice is: iterative, ancestral, improvisational, unconventional, community-based, publicly engaged, material or land-based, collective, conceptual, imaginative, time-based, durational, oral, memory-based, skill-based, intuitive.

Who We Center

We center artists working from the edges of dominant culture—experimental performance, hybrid forms, artists whose lived experience, practice, or ideology places them in alternative relation to societal norms. We lift up artists working with social practice, community-engaged methodologies, and non-dominant cultural practices—especially marginalized communities including BIPOC, LGBTQIA+, disabled, and other historically excluded artists.

We prioritize artists engaged in coalitional and relational practices, artists testing methodologies, investigating form, deepening process, and co-creating meaning in ways that challenge dominant aesthetics and narratives.

What We Value

We value artists who are building community, who are connecting communities, who connect people, who connect to people. Artists interested in relationships, collective processes, in enriching how they relate communally, and how those processes create, reflect, or reshape civic and cultural ecosystems.

We value experimentation with integrity—risk over spectacle, processes. We value artists committed to non-dominant cultural practices, formal invention, and critical engagement. Artists working with methodologies of inquiry, including awareness of what is known, unknown, or intentionally unknowable.

We recognize collaborative creativity as essential community infrastructure, similar to shared gardens or mutual aid networks.

Commissioning as Partnership

Our commissioning model centers partnership over patronage. Artists co-cultivate their work in relationship with the organization and its finite resources. We emphasize mutual responsibility and shared authorship of process. Our model is circular—focused on long-term relationships, mutual learning, and evolving cycles of support.

We identify partnerships through relationships and building trust. We cultivate a national network of practice rooted in reciprocity, experimentation, and care. Commissioning involves shared responsibility—curators and collaborators commit to supporting artists beyond selection through resources, partnerships, labor, fundraising, or other forms of care and action.

Cultural Responsibility and Awareness

We reject colorblindness, neutral curation, or claims of objectivity. Dominant cultural paradigms, including whiteness, shape how value is assigned. We work to be conscious of that, and to curate toward equity, inclusion, and cultural specificity.

We ask those carrying privilege—particularly white privilege—to practice intentional humility, deep listening, and awareness of how cultural defaults might shape decisions. Curating means slowing down when dominant voices are most enthusiastic, allowing other voices to guide inquiry, noticing when dominant cultural norms are mistaken for artistic readiness or value.

This is part of the persistent inquiry—seeing what we're complicit in, what systems we're implicated in, taking responsibility and being accountable.

A Living System

Red Eye is working to seed itself more deeply in community so its work may be held, sustained, and shaped by that community over time. We are learning what it means to operate as a civic and cultural space—to nurture an ethos where no one carries the work alone, in Minnesota and beyond.

Red Eye is an evolving constellation of artists and collaborators cultivating deep, reciprocal relationships within our immediate community and across a broader national network. We strengthen communities by strengthening connections—so the interconnected, interdependent web can flourish.