Obie Award-winning performer, director and poet Laurie Smith Carlos, who made an indelible mark on New York's avant-garde theater scene before relocating to the Twin Cities in midlife and mentoring a generation of artists here, died Thursday of colon cancer. She was 67.
The Twin Cities artistic community was reeling Friday. "She's a remarkable artist and it's a big loss," said Philip Bither, the senior performing arts curator at the Walker Art Center.
A multidisciplinary artist, Carlos won accolades for her dynamic range of work, from a 1977 Obie for her role in the original production of Ntozake Shange's "For colored girls who have considered suicide/ when the rainbow is enuf" to two New York Dance and Performance (Bessie) Awards as a choreographer of her original plays, to a 2004 Bush Foundation artistic fellowship.
Carlos was a member of Urban Bush Women, the acclaimed contemporary dance company that tells the stories of women of the African diaspora, and was a stage director who premiered works by young playwrights who would go on to fame, such as Suzan-Lori Parks.
Her artistic career brought the New York City native to the Twin Cities throughout the 1990s, where she took the stage at the Walker and the Guthrie, before moving here for a position at Penumbra Theatre Company in 1998.
"There's no one that knew Laurie that wouldn't call her a singular individual," said Lou Bellamy, Penumbra's founder. "She was her own person, her own artist; she put the world as she knew it on stage with real style and understanding, and she lived her art."
As an artistic fellow at Penumbra, Carlos helped identify scripts to produce, with a goal of "bringing more feminine voices into the theater," Bellamy said.
From there, she continued to amplify the voices of other artists as a longtime mentor with Naked Stages, a fellowship for emerging artists, currently based at Pillsbury House Theatre.
