Roger Cummings
Roger Cummings is a public artist, urban designer and social entrepreneur, whose work explores new ways to build relationships between people and places through art, design, entrepreneurship & collective wealth building.
He is the Chief Cultural Producer and a founding principal of Juxtaposition Arts, which employs 70 youth and 30 adult artists in visionary public art projects throughout North Minneapolis. Cummings, who dropped out of high school to become a contemporary artist, helped found Juxtaposition Arts in 1995 in order to support other talented youth who feel disengaged and dismissed by traditional educational institutions. Since its inception, the program has helped to mentored dozens of young creatives through visionary public art projects in long-neglected studio spaces and neighborhoods in Minneapolis.
Cummings has worked both individually and collectively to design and install dozens of works of large scale public and functional art over the span of his twenty-year career. He speaks frequently on public space, innovation and economic justice to groups at the University of Minnesota, Artplace America, Minneapolis Parks Foundation, Local Initiative Support Corporation.