Legacy Awards 2025
At this year's Frogtown Arts Festival, we're not just celebrating local art, music, and culture. We're celebrating the people who grow flowers in our neighborhood (literally and figuratively), whether they just started or whether they've been working for 40 years!
Eternal Impact: Melvin Giles
Melvin is in a class of his own; his impact on our neighborhood was vast, and there are few people in Frogtown and Rondo who can't name some way he changed their lives. Community gardens, peace poles, and bubbles carry his memory here forever. For this reason, he is the only person nominated in the "Eternal Impact" category.
Living Legend: Dr. Darlene Fry
Dr. Fry is a Rondo Transplant by way of Chicago. She has had the pleasure of working with over 10,000 young people with the Irreducible Grace Foundation since 2012. Making the community a safe place for youth is her life calling!!!
Living Legend: Jan Mandell
Jan is a teacher, artist, activist, yoga instructor, mother and partner. Her passion is fostering youth voice through the arts. Jan taught theater for nearly 40 years at Saint Paul Central High School, where she worked in partnership with young people to devise original social justice plays that toured locally and statewide. Jan retired in 2015 from Saint Paul schools
Currently, Jan works with Irreducible Grace at BYHAC as program director where she mentors young people into leadership positions and co-creates youth-driven pop-up performances with poetry and healing tools as outreach and community engagement.
You will often see Jan biking though the neighborhood, connecting with community or writing in poetry lab with Danez Smith, in yoga class with Hope Lockett or with sister Patrica in Afro fusion dance class. This is what brings her joy, the arts, community, and family!
Living Legend: T Mychal Rambo
T. Mychael Rambo is a 3-time Mid-West Emmy Award winning actor, vocalist, arts educator, author, community organizer, and public speaker, who has made an indelible mark here in the Twin Cities performing principal roles on virtually every main stage on both sides of the Mississippi. Nationally and internationally his stage credits include Carnegie Hall and performances abroad in Africa, Europe and South America. He has appeared in local and national television commercials, feature films, HBO mini-series and other television programming. T. Mychael has embarked on a new project. His most recent endeavor has been a collaboration with New York Times Best Selling Author, Resmaa Menakem to co-author, a companion children’s book to Mr. Menakem’s book “My Grandmother’s Hands” entitled “The Stories from My Grandmother’s Hands.” Rambo, is also an accomplished auctioneer/emcee, recording artist, residency artist and affiliate professor in the College of Liberal Arts, Theatre Arts and Dance at the University of Minnesota.
Legacy Builder: Davu Seru
Davu Seru is an improvising musician, composer and scholar known primarily for his work on drums. For the past 20+ years he has worked with musicians such as Milo Fine, George Cartwright, Nirmala Rajasekar, Douglas R. Ewart, Michelle Kinney, Dean Magraw, Paul Metzger, Evan Parker, Didier Petit, Babatunde Lea, Nathan Hanson, Mankwe Ndosi, Rafael Toral, David Boykin, Donald Washington, Guillame Seguron, Tony Hymas, David Boykin, Chris Bates, Catherine Delaunay, and Nicole Mitchell Gantt. Davu is a member of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) and is Curator of the Givens Collection of African American Literature at University of Minnesota. You can find more of his work at https://davuseru.com/
Photo taken by by Seitu Jones