Roger Cummings is a founding principal of Juxtaposition Arts, a visual art and cultural social enterprise center that mentors youth and engages community members in inner city Minneapolis. Cummings explores new ways to create relationships between people and place through art, design, entrepreneurship, and collective wealth building activity. Cummings’ work utilizes and at the same time pushes the direction of urban visual expression and places great value on creating works of art in public and private spaces that have personal and impersonal uses and provide meaningful interactions for people. According to Cummings:

“I examine and am influenced by architecture, urban design, and planning. I have produced large scale sculptures, pocket parks and functional enhancements to public space that facilitate urban people’s ability to see themselves included, represented and civically engaged in establishing the visual identities of their neighborhood. I am currently engaged in a deeper investigation of public art, murals, and large scale painting as cooperative models of community engagement that enliven social interactions in public space. This new direction has informed my choice of materials, as well as my conceptualization and execution processes. I have explored new ways of mixing an accessible medium like aerosol paint with steel, stone, recyclable found objects(new relationship with waste), and photo voltaics. I’ve experimented with using tiles and fabric to extrude and create 3 dimensional multi-media biomorphic structures that reference Hip Hop, urban design, and sustainability and construct place in dynamic environments such as parks, street corners and transit corridors.”

Roger has lectured and conducted workshops about his work at the Walker Art Center, Weisman Art Museum, Lincoln Land Institute, and the University of Minnesota. He studied at Harvard University Graduate School of Design as a Loeb Fellow where he explored new ways of reenergizing neglected urban neighborhoods through artistic interventions, people-centric design, and creative models of cooperative housing and business development.