Professional Portfolio
Healing Through Art Mural Fest
In summer 2023, Kate worked with a team of artists from North Minneapolis and a Northside-based nonprofit partner to promote the Healing Through Art Mural Fest. The event was a grant-funded community festival designed to activate a vacant lot for an event celebrating the creativity of the Northside. Kate designed all brand assets for print and social media, drafted and distributed press releases, and built out a mailing list of key media and community contacts. The event was featured in the Star Tribune and ten pieces of community-created art were created.
Lineas de Sangre
In fall 2022, Minneapolis-based artist Melodee Strong had her first solo exhibition. Titled Lineas de Sangre (Bloodlines), the show focused on Melodee’s experience growing up as a mixed-race child in Minnesota and honoring her Peruvian heritage. Kate worked with a translator to develop a bilingual press kit in both English and Spanish; built a mailing list for digital promotion of the show to key creative influencers, gallery owners, and media contacts; and designed digital assets for promoting the show across multiple social media channels.
Elevate Pride
In her work as Director of Foundation Relations and Strategic Communications for the PFund Foundation, Kate serves as the creative director and head of visual branding for the foundation. PFund is the only LGBTQ+ community foundation in the upper Midwest; as such, the annual Pride celebrations held in June are a huge part of the foundation’s outreach, communications, and community-building strategies.
For PFund’s 2022 Elevate Pride campaign, Kate worked with senior foundation staff to create a campaign that focused on queer joy, love, and resistance. Rather than emphasizing the barriers and challenges facing LGBTQ+ people in an increasingly-hostile political climate, the campaign stressed the strength, diversity, and solidarity of queer communities. A digital media campaign was supplemented by a one-minute video summarizing the work PFund Foundation does across the region. The foundation also curated Spotify playlists that dropped during Pride week as another way of celebrating Pride.
Redesigning Democracy
Kate Mohn has been interested in civic design since her years working in election administration as the Director of Office Administration to former Minnesota Secretary of State Mark Ritchie. When Kate left politics to work in higher education, she thought she was done thinking about voting systems, but she was wrong. In 2012, the City of Minneapolis approached Minneapolis College of Art Design (MCAD) to inquire if the college would be willing to serve as the polling place for Minneapolis Ward 10 Precinct 9. Kate volunteered to manage the project, and in November of 2012, the college hosted its first presidential election.
It was a mess. Over 1,800 voters turned out in person that day to vote, with some voters waiting over ninety minutes to cast a ballot. The MCAD Main building is also large and can be confusing to navigate; Kate noticed that voters were having a difficult time locating the polling place; others were in the wrong polling place or confused about what kind of documentation they needed to vote. The vast majority of the signage was in English in one of the most diverse neighborhoods in Minneapolis with a large populations of Somali- and Spanish-speaking people.
In preparation for the 2014 election cycle, Kate approached DesignWorks, the in-house design firm at MCAD, to begin a project of creating a better-designed voting experience. Working together on a $1,500 budget, the team devised a number of solutions to make the 2014 General Election a much better experience.
When staff from the City of Minneapolis Election Division saw what MCAD had done to improve the voting process, they asked if the college would redesign the directional and informational signage used in the over 100 precincts in the city each Election Day. Kate worked with the city to negotiate the contract (including an innovative clause requiring the City to allow wider distribution of the voting signage under a free creative commons license) for this public-private partnership and served as the administrative liaison between the MCAD design team and the City of Minneapolis. For the 2016 election, the DesignWorks team was able to expand upon its previous work for a unified visual communications system that prioritized information design and user experience.
The branding system designed in 2016 for the City of Minneapolis was then adopted for statewide usage by the Office of the Minnesota Secretary of State for the 2018 election cycle and Kate was interviewed in an Election Day news story on Minnesota Public Radio. The signage continues to be used across the state is available under a non-commercial Creative Common license for any election officials to adopt and modify for their use.
When asked about his experience of working on the voting signage project, Tim Schwarz, an election administrator for the City of Minneapolis and one of the main point people on the project, stated,"Kate's work with implementing enhanced voting signage at our MCAD polling place was phenomenal. Her vision and design aesthetic lead to a variety of wayfinding and informational signage (in multiple languages) that truly made the polling location the best in the city in terms of voter accessibility, education, and overall usability. Beyond that, she brought forward an idea to launch a collaborative effort between the City of Minneapolis Elections office and DesignWorks to create a package of shareable voting signage, utilizing simplified design best-practices, which resulted in the State of Minnesota adopting the group of designs for statewide use. As the point person on the project, Kate provided excellent leadership and enabled a seamless, efficient, and utterly enjoyable experience!"
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Kate secured funding from an individual donor to pay for all signage used to be translated into Spanish, Somali, and Hmong.
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The DesignWorks team came up with a novel solution to use directional tape to help voters find their way in an early design concept.
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Large signage was installed in the campus skyway to visually signal to neighbors where to vote on Election Day.
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An example of the branding system created for the City of Minneapolis and later adopted for polling places statewide.
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Signage welcoming voters to the polling place at MCAD on Election Day.
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A democracy enthusiast from the theater group Chicks on Sticks visited MCAD on Election Day to welcome voters.
Greater Minnesota Arts Initiative
A seven-year collaboration between the Minneapolis College of Art and Design and various partnering organizations around the state (most notably the MacRostie Art Center in Grand Rapids, Minnesota) the Greater Minnesota Arts Initiative was co-founded by former MCAD president Jay Coogan and Kate Mohn in 2011. MCAD experimented with a variety of approaches, including offering two undergraduate classes that collaborated with rural Minnesotan communities on community design projects and the creation of a summer student fellowship program that created opportunities for art and design students to live and work in rural communities. Jay and Kate also produced and curated two exhibitions as part of this program—an exhibition of MCAD student work in MacRostie’s gallery space, and an exhibition at MCAD featuring rural artists from across Minnesota.
Most recently, MCAD and MacRostie worked together to create two weeks of free summer arts programming for low-income youth in Itasca County and collaborated with GoodSpace Murals to commission a community-designed mural placed on the exterior of MacRostie’s building.
When MacRostie and GoodSpace organized community listening sessions regarding the mural, the natural beauty of the region was mentioned as something the community wanted to feature.
The community-designed mural is installed by the GoodSpace crew on the MacRostie building.
One of the participants in the 2018 “Art in the Park” class held for free in Grand Rapids MN.
Community-Designed Public Art
Since 2014, Kate and community-based artist and activist Melodee Strong have been collaborating on creating new works by and for underserved communities in Minneapolis. Projects included a mural completed in North Minneapolis during the 2015 FLOW Northside Art Crawl, a 2017 mural in the Whittier neighborhood of South Minneapolis celebrating the most diverse neighborhood in the city and completed during the Open Streets Celebration, and a mural celebrating indigenous history and culture on the Midtown Greenway in the Phillips neighborhood of South Minneapolis.
All murals have been designed in collaboration and conversation with members of the community in which the murals were created. A public school teacher in addition to an artist, Melodee has developed a variety of approaches for engaging youth and children to brainstorm ideas that are then incorporated into a unified design and the community-at-large is invited to help paint the mural.
Melodee served as the lead teacher and artist, with Kate handling project management, permits, partner relations, and program evaluation.
A community member helps paint a mural in Whittier during the 2017 Open Streets event along Lyndale Avenue.
Detail of the Greenway Little Earth Arts Project mural, completed in summer of 2017 in the Phillips neighborhood of Minneapolis.
“The Heart of Whittier” mural in progress.
Let’s make something cool happen.
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