Creative Development: DeAnna Cummings

Photographs by Thomas Strand

DeANNA

CREATIVE DEVELOPMENT:

CUMMINGS

A major innovator in Minnesota’s creative economy, 2007 Bush Fellow DeAnna Cummings has spent nearly 20 years building Juxtaposition Arts and the North Minneapolis community that surrounds it.

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even years ago, DeAnna Cummings took a hard look at the high-traffic, under-resourced intersection in North Minneapolis where she and her husband Roger had planted their business, Juxtaposition Arts (JXTA), and realized the view still needed some improvement. “When we looked out the window at West Broadway and Emerson, we asked ourselves ‘is the community getting better?’ In some ways the answer was yes, but in lots of ways, it was no,” says Cummings. Securing a permanent home for the once nomadic arts group had been a longtime dream the couple started in 1995 with their partner Peyton Russell (2012 Bush Fellow). But now the expanded programs they’d once imagined in their new threebuilding complex didn’t seem to be generating enough impact for people within their immediate community—or showing the big “ I WANT PEOPLE TO SAY results that mattered to ABOUT ME THAT EVERYONE investors and partners. While the pair could point WHO’S WORKED FOR ME to plenty of success stories among the thousands of AND WORKED WITH ME IS teens who’d taken part BETTER FOR IT.” in their afterschool arts —DeAnna Cummings programs, they couldn’t

ignore the growing joblessness, widening achievement gap and dwindling opportunities they saw for the youth of color outside their doors. “I knew what I needed was to step away from the work and to see it from another angle,” says Cummings, who has served as JXTA’s executive director since its start, while Roger Cummings is the organization’s artistic director. But with two children in school and two incomes now tied to the organization’s survival, “The time was just never going to be there.” That’s when Leah Lorraine Nelson, a 2006 Bush Fellow and friend, challenged her to think about applying for a Bush Leadership Fellowship, a program Cummings wasn’t sure she was qualified for, having discontinued her undergraduate studies to start Juxtaposition. She made a nervous call to Martha Lee, Bush Fellowship Program manager, and asked if the Foundation ever paid for Fellows to go back to college. Lee admitted it was a long shot, but then asked Cummings if she’d consider setting her sights a little higher. “Martha said, ‘I suppose you could go back and finish that degree, but with the work you’ve done already, I bet you have bigger dreams for yourself,’” Cummings says. Lee suggested she learn more about

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