We Are Responsible for Each Other: Tish Jones on Protecting Artists Across Generations

In recent years, Minnesota has lived through one crisis after another. In May 2020, during the isolation and fear of the pandemic, the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis turned the state into the center of a global reckoning around race, policing, and collective grief. The years that followed never fully returned to normal. By late 2025, the Twin Cities became the center of civil unrest as Operation Metro Surge brought thousands of federal ICE agents into Minnesota, resulting in widespread racial profiling, aggressive raids, and the occupation of workplaces, neighborhoods, and schools. Minnesotans were killed and families were fractured while the rest of the country eventually moved on to the next headline. But for artists and organizers like Tish Jones, the work continues, and becomes even more important, after the spotlight moves.

Tish is a Saint Paul poet, MC, hip hop theater artist, and founder of TruArtSpeaks, an arts and culture organization based in Saint Paul, Minnesota that provides development opportunities for artists through direct mentorship, workshops, residencies, public events, conferences, and more. Tish was just 18 years old when she founded it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P_F56w8_cQM

What Inspired Tish Jones to Start TruArtSpeaks?

The mission of TruArtSpeaks is to cultivate literacy, leadership and social justice through the study and application of spoken word and hip hop culture. Back in 2005, Tish had a number of experiences that changed her understanding of how artists and art shapes communities.

That year, she attended the Brave New Voices International Youth Poetry Slam Festival, joining hundreds of young poets from around the world for a week of performances, workshops, and conversations. She found herself alongside artists from Trinidad, South Africa, Chicago, and Los Angeles.

That same year, Minnesota hosted the B-Girl Be Summit, the first international summit dedicated to women in hip hop. Tish worked alongside organizers and artists as activists, educators, dancers, poets, and musicians moved through the same rooms and conversations together. It expanded her understanding of what artists in Minnesota were capable of.

At the time, Tish was also working with a civic organization in Minneapolis where part of her role involved attending vigils for murder victims in North Minneapolis and reading poetry. By 2006, Minneapolis had one of the highest per capita murder rates in the country. Some of the young men being memorialized were people she knew personally.

The vigils kept happening. More names, more deaths. It was heavy. Tish wanted to do more so she organized a protest, bringing artists into direct collaboration with organizers and community leaders. That was the moment she understood what artists could do when they actually showed up alongside organizers and community leaders.

She started asking where the consistent space was. She wanted to provide a safe place where young artists could practice, grow, and figure out who they were before the world made the decision for them.

That became TruArtSpeaks.

What we Need to Protect Young Artists from

When you build a space that welcomes young artists, protection needs to be the foundation.

Creative spaces are not automatically safe spaces. Young artists are often underpaid, manipulated, overworked, or taken advantage of before they fully understand what healthy mentorship or fair compensation is supposed to look like.

A lot of young artists enter creative communities before they fully understand contracts, compensation, boundaries, or how to advocate for themselves. They are often surrounded by older people with more power, more experience, and more access. That imbalance can go wrong quickly.

Predatory mentorship, exploitation, and even abuse has been normalized for too long. Artists are often taught to feel grateful just to be invited into the room. Being asked to perform for “exposure.” Being expected to work for free because it is “good for visibility.” Being guilted into overextending yourself for the sake of community while everyone else is getting paid.

That is part of why spaces like TruArtSpeaks matter. The organization was built with the understanding that young artists need consistency, mentorship, structure, and access to adults who take their development seriously.

Young artists need spaces where they can try things, bomb, come back the next week, and keep going. They need places where experimentation is normal and where community is not tied to status or success.

A lot of artists can trace their entire career back to one room that made them feel like they belonged there.

The Importance of Elders

One of the things Tish kept returning to throughout our conversation was the importance of elders and intergenerational community.

American culture isolates people by generation. Young people are pushed toward speed, trends, and constant reinvention while older people are often treated as culturally irrelevant unless they continue producing something profitable. A lot gets lost that way.

Artists need elders. Not just as symbols or inspiration, but as active participants in creative communities.

Elders carry memory. They remember what movements looked like before social media flattened everything into content. They remember what communities survived before the current cycle of outrage and burnout. They provide context, perspective, and cultural continuity.

They also remind younger artists that creative careers are not linear. Rejection happens. Burnout happens. Reinvention happens. Entire systems will try to convince artists to abandon themselves for stability or approval. A lot of people need someone older to tell them to keep going anyway.

That kind of guidance can change the direction of someone’s life.

Intergenerational spaces also create a stronger sense of responsibility toward one another. Younger artists can learn craft from elders of course, but they can also learn how to exist in community, care for each other, and carry culture forward instead of treating art like an individual pursuit disconnected from everyone else around them.

As Tish put it during our conversation,

“We are responsible for one another.”

On Capitalism and the Pressure to Choose the Practical Path

At one point in our conversation, I asked Tish what she would say to her younger self.

Her answer was "good job not listening."

She was talking about the pressure so many artists grow up around. The pressure to choose the safer path. The more practical career. The version of adulthood that feels easier to explain to other people.

A lot of artists hear those messages early. Get the stable job. Have a backup plan. Make art on the side. Be realistic. Those kind of messages are why we started Art is the New Wall Street in the first place.

Most of the time, those messages come from people who love you. Parents want their kids to survive. Grandparents want stability for the next generation. Especially in working class families or communities where security was never guaranteed in the first place.

But something gets lost when creativity is constantly treated as secondary to productivity.

Tish described being an artist as inherently rebellious. Capitalism rewards conformity. It rewards speed, output, predictability, and profit. Art rarely moves that way.

Creative work is slow, uncertain, and emotional. It asks people to trust instincts that cannot always be justified logically or financially right away.

A lot of artists spend years feeling split between the life they want and the life they believe will make other people feel comfortable.

That tension shapes entire generations of creatives. People who were talented enough to pursue art seriously but were taught to distrust it before they ever fully committed to it.

It also changes the way people value themselves. Careers become identities. Productivity becomes self-worth. Rest starts to feel irresponsible. Making something just because it is beautiful or emotionally true starts to feel indulgent instead of necessary.

That is part of why organizations like TruArtSpeaks matter. They create environments where young artists are told their creativity is worth developing before the rest of the world teaches them to shrink it into a hobby.

On Creative Practice and Receiving the Spark

Tish does not approach creativity like a productivity system. She laughed a little when we talked about routines because for her, creative practice has never looked clean or consistent in that way. She does not wake up every morning at the same hour and force herself into a writing schedule. The work comes when it comes.

Sometimes that means stopping in the middle of a conversation to write something down. Sometimes it means scribbling ideas onto napkins, receipts, envelopes, or whatever happens to be nearby.

The important thing, according to Tish, is paying attention when the spark arrives.

A lot of artists talk about creativity like something they have to chase. Listening to Tish, it felt more like a relationship built on responsiveness. The idea shows up and you meet it there.

She also talked about staying in conversation with other artists. Reading constantly. Going to performances. Listening to poets and musicians. Paying attention to what other people are making and thinking about. Not from a place of competition, but from a desire to stay connected to the larger creative ecosystem around her.

That stood out to me because so much modern creative culture is centered around output. Algorithms reward speed and consistency. Artists are expected to constantly post, constantly produce, constantly brand themselves.

But poetry does not really work like that. Neither does deep creative work.

Earlier in our conversation, Tish described poets as people who move slowly through the world. People who notice details, ask more questions, and experience things emotionally and physically at the same time. That kind of attention requires presence, stillness, and enough space to actually hear yourself think.

Toward the end of the interview, Tish said she believes her ancestors guide everything she does creatively. Her job is to honor that and answer the call when it comes.

TruArtSpeaks is Celebrating 20 Years!

This year marks two decades of TruArtSpeaks.

To celebrate the anniversary, TruArtSpeaks is hosting the Urgent Emergent Performance Art Series at Icehouse every third weekend of the month. Each month centers on a different theme and brings together artists, musicians, poets, and performers from across the Twin Cities.

The organization also launched a community punch card fundraiser featuring local businesses that have supported TruArtSpeaks throughout the years. Record stores, breweries, restaurants, bookstores, print shops, and other community spaces across Minnesota participated.

That feels fitting for what TruArtSpeaks has always represented. Not just an organization, but an ecosystem. A long-running network of artists, organizers, educators, mentors, venues, businesses, and young people all shaping each other over time.