A Community Project for the 38th Street Cultural District of Minneapolis, MN, funded by the City of Minneapolis Arts & Cultural Affairs Department. Sauna sessions are offered FREE to the public.
Stoking the Future is a creatively narrative sauna experience where a rotating selection of local artists will share reflections of the future and engage small groups of visitors in reflections and discussions on connection, community, collaboration, environment, and revolutionary visions for the future. October 9-11, 2026, hosted at the Pillsbury House Commons (3529 Chicago Avenue).
Neighbors can attend one sauna session of the six daily sessions during the three day project. Each one-hour session will engage four neighbors or artists, one Minneapolis artist, the facilitator, and a fire tender in a cycle of introduction, storytelling, and forecasting in collaboration with one another.
The cycle begins with 13 minutes in a wood-fire heated sauna, as we acclimate ourselves and introduce ourselves to one another. There will be a 7 minute relief and refreshment period, and then we will embark on the storytelling session back in the sauna. The storytelling section will be led by a local artist whose work considers community, environment, and the future. The next relief and refreshment cooling period will be followed with a period of self-reflection and forecasting led by me, taking each neighbhor through an interview. This interview allows them to embrace a treasured part of themselves or their community and imagine it as it changes or grows in the near future, and the distant future, and then how they might contribute to or embolden their community now, in the present, in order to encourage the future they wish to see come to fruition.
Four slots are available per one hour long session, and one session per person for the duration of the project.
Featured Artists
Tish Jones is a poet, emcee, and Hip Hop Theater artist from Saint Paul, MN, with a deep and resounding love for Black people. Her work explores themes of Black love, liberation, politics, and Afro-Futurism. Jones has exhibited her work throughout the United States, and abroad, as a public performance artist for over two decades. Her writing can be found in We Are Meant to Rise (University of Minnesota Press), A Moment of Silence (Tru Ruts and The Playwrights Center), the Minnesota Humanities Center’s anthology entitled, Blues Vision: African American Writing from Minnesota (Minnesota Historical Society Press) and more.
A 2026 McKnight Culture Bearer Fellow and Sally Award winner, Tish is grateful to have been supported through numerous grants, fellowships, and awards throughout her career. Including, but not limited to, a Jerome Hill Artist Fellowship, an Arts Matters Fellowship, a Springboard for the Arts Fellowship, The MN State Arts Board, and more. That generous support has allowed her to excavate the kind of stories and cultural and liberatory practices that chart new worlds. Jones also serves as the Founding Executive Director of TruArtSpeaks, an arts & culture organization in Saint Paul, MN. For all of it, she is eternally grateful.
Mankwe Ndosi is a Minneapolis based performer, producer, and culture worker. Her work is centered in sound and ceremony, drawing from Diasporic legacies of Creative Music, Hip hop, Soul, Afro-indigenous sound traditions, liberation singing, performance art, theater, public art, and improvisation. Her performance work weaves the energies of Black Women’s Ritual performance with the liberatory explorations of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM). Her unique sound blends genre-stretching techniques with social and ecological inquiry. She’s created sound works for the stage, the studio, the garden, the zen center, the street, and now the sauna!
She is an active relationship-builder and produces creative series for connection and regeneration among humans and with the land. She is currently the Resident Community Engaged Artist at Pillsbury House and Theatre in Minneapolis. She has been a non-profit arts leader (Center for Independent Artists), produced sites and processes for community ceremony (Unburdening Ground at Say Their Names Cemetery), and musical series celebrating Black Creative Music Legacies (Black Music Mondays at Icehouse).
katie robinson, PhD (any pronouns) is a writer, facilitator, scholar, and interdisciplinary artist devoted to the exploration of what is present and possible outside of the white supremacist colonial imagination. Their creative literary work, including poetry and essay, engages individual and collective trauma as a gateway to alternate realities and ways of being. Their recently completed doctoral research, entitled “Toward a New Metaphysics of Political Struggle: Explorations into Abolitionist Subjectivities”, explores abolitionist praxis as an ontological project — examining how Minneapolis-based abolitionists enact decolonial, relational worlds through creative anti-carceral practice amid escalating political violence. In partnership with Leah Garza, they co-founded Living Systems Consulting to help organizations, businesses, and individuals adapt to our rapidly reorganizing world by centering our inherent relationality, and our irrevocable belonging to the planet. To learn more about katie’s artistic, professional, and literary work, visit katie-robinson.com .
Facilitator
Cole Sarar (she/they) is a writer, photographer, and tech-artist. She writes plays, web-based and traditional fiction, and both “page” poetry and “stage” poetry. She’s won Urban Griots Spoken Word, Minnesota State Arts Board Artist Initiative, VERVE, and Emerging Writer awards and grants for her performed and tech-poetry. Cole has created public, interactive literary pieces in collaboration with local writers, using phone technology and simple physical design. She’s featured at Poetry & Pints, Convergence, Cheap Theatre, Encyclopedia Show, Not So Silent Planet, Midstream Reading Series, Minnesota Fringe Festival, The Racket, and Silverwood Park. She’s the creator of Cole Sarar’s Sci-Fi Reading Hour, a live reading series featuring new science fiction from Cole and special guest writers, underscored with futurist soundscapes by accomplished musicians.
Cole’s creative work envisions possible futures and alternate presents, employing under-represented characters and situations as a way of making space for us to imagine ourselves existing in the future, having roles, and doing things other than what has been written for us in the past. Their work falls along the intersection of technology and literature. They might use code and tech behind the scenes, or simple physical items like paper, flags, and our cell phones to create surprising, interactive fiction in physical space. They thrive in collaboration and prefer to spend more time listening than talking. Cole served on the board of directors for Art Shanty Projects, and moonlights doing tech, communications, and design work for various arts organizations. They are first generation Turkish-American.
Why are you doing this project?
As a writer, performer, and installation artist for over 20 years, I have specialized in creating community engaged projects with both groups of artists and the general public. My ethic and perspective in terms of art-making focuses heavily on inviting others to bring their authentic selves and experiences, to collaborating a lot, and encouraging other artists to cross-pollinate their work with others who work in different mediums. I also have a strong desire for audiences to see themselves within art, and to tie their experiences of specific art pieces with physical spaces.
I believe in asking open questions, and listening very closely to the answers that people give you. I believe that accessibility serves everyone, and during my tenure on the Art Shanty Projects board of directors, I advocated for the organization to maintain its commitment to accessibility and to increase diversity and access beyond audiences, but also in our artists, staff, and board.
Sauna culture is thriving in Minneapolis, but the cost of participation is steep, with sessions ranging from $26-85/hour per person. This activity provides FREE access to a healing space to people within the 38th Street Cultural District. The only requirements to participate are that the visitors wear a swimsuit (all cultural and gender affirming swimwear options are welcome) and that they live or work in the cultural district. We seek to host people from any background, and the facilitation of discussion will welcome differing perspectives and opinions.
Actively imagining the future has been shown to fight depression, and having small groups of people witness your hopes and joy creates social bonds. Building these intimate moments gives us hope in ourselves and each other, and gives us each other to be accountable to actually work towards sustaining things we value and building things we want for ourselves and each other. 38th Street has had so many outside voices telling us who we should be and how we should be, giving residents a place where they can be the ones imagining what we want for ourselves, however big or small those things are will be empowering.
Location and Transportation
The #5 bus going north stops right in front of the Pillsbury House Theatre at the southeast corner of 35th and Chicago. The southbound bus stops at the northwest corner. The parking lot is free and located south of the Full Cycle Bike Shop at 3515 Chicago Avenue. Our neighborhood also has a lot of available free street parking, including parking on Chicago Avenue and 35th Street.
The sauna will be parked behind the Pillsbury House Commons at 3529 Chicago Avenue, Minneapolis, MN 55407.
