THE CEDAR COMMISSIONS NightOne:Deeq Abdi,Creekbed Carter Hogan,Trick Locket

The Cedar Presents

Friday, February 20, 2026 / Doors: 7:00 PM / Show: 7:30 PM

All Ages

Seated

This is a seated show with general admission, first-come-first-served seating. The Cedar is happy to reserve seats for patrons who require special seating accommodations. To request access accommodations, please go to our .

For Cedar-presented shows, online ticket sales typically end one hour before the door time, and then, based on availability, tickets will be available at the door. Tickets purchased at the door will include a $1 Eventbrite fee.

Tickets are not transferrable between night one and night two.

Two-Show Pass admits you to both Friday, February 20th and Saturday, February 21st, 2026 Cedar Commissions concerts at The Cedar at a discount! You can find those, .

The Cedar Cultural Center presents the fifteenth annual Cedar Commissions, on February 20 and February 21, 2025 featuring all new works by Deeq Abdi, Creekbed Carter Hogan, Trick Locket (Bryn Battani), Gregory Bess, Mikey Marget, and Valentine Lowry-Ortega

Each evening, three artists of the 2025-26 cohort will present their commissioned work on The Cedar stage:

Night 1 - Deeq Abdi, Creekbed Carter Hogan, Trick Locket (Bryn Battani) 

Night 2 - Gregory Bess, Mikey Marget, Valentine Lowry-Ortega

The Cedar Commissions is a celebrated program for local emerging artists made possible by a grant from Jerome Foundation. Since 2011, the Commissions have showcased new work by over 90 Minnesota-based emerging composers and musicians, including Dessa, Aby Wolf, Ritika Ganguly, Maria Isa, deVon Russel Gray, Joey Van Phillips, Gao Hong, Dameun Strange, Vie Boheme, and many more.

Deeq Abdi was born in Somalia, a nation celebrated for its rich poetic heritage. From a young age, he found his voice through poetry, learning the intricate craft of Gabay—a traditional form of Somali verse—from his uncles. After moving to the United States, Deeq expanded his artistic expression, embracing spoken word and hip-hop as dynamic tools for storytelling and cultural connection.

Growing up in a multilingual household, where the blend of English and non-English speakers has shaped his worldview and deepened his appreciation for the city's diverse cultural fabric. This unique perspective fuels his work as a poet, rapper, youth worker, and community organizer.

Deeq uses poetry and hip-hop to engage and empower young people, particularly in the Cedar-Riverside neighborhood of Minneapolis. His creative journey began in his early teens and grew from poetry into music. He became a member of the rap group True Mutiny and later released his solo project, Southside Somali, Northside Nomad, while working at Franklin Library.

Creekbed Carter Hogan is a trans musician, writer, and educator who channels their passions for history, labor organizing, and queer community into folk music that aims to build solidarity, connection, and hope. “Bread & Roses” is a new union song cycle that will draw from Minnesota’s labor history, as well as from the long tradition of labor music. Featuring a band of musician union members from the Twin Cities United Performers (TCUP), this work seeks to bring the ordinary poetry of the fight for a dignified life into a somatic performance space, reminding us all that while we may not see total systemic change in our lifetimes, there's nothing more beautiful and lasting than giving it a shot anyway.

Bryn Battani is a Texas-bred writer/performer who loves to say the opposite of what she really means. She supports her “persona pop” songs with genre-bending arrangements colored by her folk-rock roots and theatrical background, heightening her shapeshifting stage presence with props and costume changes. Her work oscillates between tongue-in-cheek melodrama and raw vulnerability, examining social politics, thorny entanglements, and other modern absurdities.

This February, Bryn will deliver a rock operetta exploring themes of credibility and authority in an age of algorithms, educational censorship, and commodified desire. Morphing between unreliable narrators influenced by hidden agendas, blatant biases, and genuine intentions, she playfully questions where we get our information and who we trust. This new work punctuates character-driven songs with short scenes and musical interludes, utilizing pop idioms and misleading appearances to disguise deception and challenge the audience’s assumptions of the singer-songwriter as an “authentic” voice.

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