Category:Press Clips
This interview with Minnesota-based illustrator Mike Hoyt, manager of the McKnight Community-Engaged Artist Fellowship at Pillsbury House + Theatre and a 2014 McKnight Visual Artist, was republished with permission from SSIR. It originally appeared in their July 30, 2026 newsletter. Subscribe to get future updates from SSIR.
“What was truly powerful about the response to Operation Metro Surge was how many people leaned into their creativity. During January and February, you could walk in our neighborhood and see protest art dotting every street, front yard, snowbank, telephone pole, and store window. Everyone became an artist in that moment to express and add to a collective refusal of the violence being thrust upon us.”– MIKE HOYT, ILLUSTRATOR
Over the past few weeks, Stanford Social Innovation Review (SSIR) has published a series of essays on the community response to Operation Metro Surge in Minneapolis. When we were searching for an illustrator for the series, our partners at the McKnight Foundation recommended Mike Hoyt, who was born in Minnesota and lives in the city’s Central neighborhood. Mike works at the Pillsbury House + Theatre in Minneapolis as the creative community director. He’s also an organizer and community-engaged artist, which he discusses below. We’re grateful to Mike for bringing his creativity and personal experience to the artwork in this series. You can also read a graphic reflection Mike created about Operation Metro Surge here (available in English and Spanish).
SSIR: What was it like living in Minneapolis during Operation Metro Surge?
Mike Hoyt: I work and live within a three-block radius in Central neighborhood, which was one of the top three targeted areas in the Twin Cities because of our high population of immigrant neighbors. In the morning, I would do constitutional observer walks around the neighborhood while responding to a constant thread of ICE sightings on Signal. When I would get to work, ICE would circle our building and our block all day long. People were abducted daily, in our alleys and on our streets, while hundreds of observers looked on and documented. My colleagues, neighbors, and I were subjected to tear gas and other chemical agents on multiple occasions, just for bearing witness to their madness.
One morning, my wife was the first on the scene of an abduction of a neighbor at the end of our block while walking our dog. Her whistle initiated our neighbors’ response, which eventually led to a large public presence. Renee Good was murdered less than an hour later, half a block from our home.
Our neighbors understood what it meant to jump into action. When a tragedy happens in your front yard, and the police and the state infrastructure stand idle on the sidelines, people rise up.
SSIR: How did that closeness to the subject of this in-depth series influence your illustrations?
Mike Hoyt: It was a little challenging to work on this project because of how close we are to what our community has experienced during Metro Surge—the frequency, the intensity, the unsettling and menacing shock and awe approach to all of it. And on the other end, we didn’t see some of our beloved neighbors for almost two months. Neighbors who we would talk to every morning and every day after work. Their families, their children who play outside, who attend our schools, who go to work. They disappeared from view, and it left an eerie quiet throughout our neighborhood.
The content and the tone of the five articles in the series were very powerful. So I wanted the imagery and illustrations to reflect that content and honor it. There was some tension between depicting courageous examples of resistance during the surge and the more unvarnished experience of the surge itself. The violence perpetrated on our community was real. There was harm done that continues to reverberate in our lives.
SSIR: How do you think about your art in relation to social change?
Mike Hoyt: I believe art can play a significant role in social and cultural change. And art and artists can steward a practice or pedagogy of being positive deviants. Over the course of my career, I moved away from being a studio artist and have spent the better part of two decades as an artist organizer and community-engaged artist.
I spend less time measuring excellence by traditional metrics or aesthetics. Today, I care more about things like openness, transformative impact, depth of engagement, and rigorous incrementalism.
I don’t believe that everyone is an artist by trade, but I believe every single person has a capacity for creativity, even if they never identify themselves as an artist. What was truly powerful about the response to Operation Metro Surge was how many people leaned into their creativity. During January and February, you could walk in our neighborhood and see protest art dotting every street, front yard, snowbank, telephone pole, and store window. Everyone became an artist in that moment to express and add to a collective refusal of the violence being thrust upon us. Every slippery, icy street became a museum or gallery walk of our outrage, our collective fear for our neighbors, and messages of hope for how we protect one another.
