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Walkers are &#39;practitioners of the city,&#39; for the city is made to be walked. A city is a language, a repository of possibilities, and walking is the act of speaking that language, of selecting from those possibilities. Just as language limits what can be said, architecture limits where one can walk, but the walker invents other ways to go.&rdquo; ― Rebecca Solnit, <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/1419449-wanderlust-a-history-of-walking" target="_blank">Wanderlust: A History of Walking</a>

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During the annus horribilis that was 2020, more specifically between the vernal equinoxes of 2020 and 2021 (and aren&rsquo;t these years of pandemic, racial violence, and political destabilization starting to bleed together?), artist and curator John Schuerman went for a walk. Many walks, in fact. &nbsp;

He did the walk a friend often takes. He and another friend started from their homes and stopped when they were six feet apart. A long-time participant in the annual Mayday celebration, he ventured to the parade route and pondered the festival&rsquo;s absence.

After George Floyd was murdered, not far from Schuerman&#39;s&nbsp;Minneapolis home, the artist went to the memorial site. &ldquo;I got to the mural of George Floyd, appreciated the beauty, and kept walking,&rdquo; he writes in his recently released&nbsp;book Unstillness: A Book of Walks. &ldquo;I saw rampant destruction and thought about the losses. Dreams up in smoke, deep costs&hellip;.&rdquo; &nbsp;

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<img alt="" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/file_container/RmlsZUNvbnRhaW5lch4fMjU0OTAwMDAz/full.jpg" />A hand-drawn map of Schuerman&#39;s walk along Lake Street after the uprising in June of 2020, past the 5th and 3rd police precinct buildings,&nbsp;the sites of protest and destruction, and the relative calm of the neighborhood south of Lake. Powderhorn Park is noted in green and blue.

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Such ponderings inspired Schuerman to investigate the &ldquo;repository of other possibilities&rdquo; the city held as he continued his walking practice, expanding the parameters as he delved more deeply into &ldquo;other ways to go,&rdquo; as Solnit put it. As evidenced in Unstillness, he&rsquo;d already begun pairing his walks with photographs, drawings, and reflections. Then, Schuerman decided to walk the perimeter of the Third Precinct in Minneapolis, several times &mdash; not the abandoned police&nbsp;building, but the whole&nbsp;section of the city it oversaw. &nbsp;

The book records how he negotiated the concrete edges and sharp corners of the built environment, made art from &ldquo;arsonist ashes,&rdquo; filtered water from lakes and streams to drink, tented at a former homeless campsite, and drew colorful sketches of places he encountered (sometimes while sitting on a stool made from refuse nearby). &nbsp;

He posted much of this material on Facebook &mdash; along with his comments on the destruction he found, police defunding efforts versus the rise in violent crime, gun-toting vigilantes safeguarding a block, a city-sanctioned homeless encampment, and his own intentions. Unstillness is a record, an archive, of those posts. &nbsp;

&ldquo;I felt like I had to do this walk,&rdquo; he writes at the end of his first precinct venture. &ldquo;It wasn&rsquo;t pleasant, but it was real. I took some risks to reckon with things. I&rsquo;m left with many questions. How much safer was I on this walk because I&rsquo;m male? Because I&rsquo;m white? Will dis-empowering and demonizing the police lead to more violence in the long run as it has in the short run? Can police reform happen with a corrupt union in place? (A&nbsp;problem not exclusive to the police.)&nbsp;Is America capable of working for its collective? Or are we bound to a culture of self-interest? Am I?&rdquo; &nbsp;

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<img alt="" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/file_container/RmlsZUNvbnRhaW5lch4fMjg4ODkwMDAz/full.jpg" />Self-portraits drawn with &quot;arsonist ashes,&quot; from Schuerman&#39;s walk around the border of the Third Precinct.

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While he doesn&rsquo;t provide any answers, he asks the right questions. Some of which deserve an unequivocal &ldquo;yes&rdquo; in response; others are part of ongoing public discussions as well as private self-reckoning. Paul Klee&rsquo;s quote, &ldquo;A line is a dot that went for a walk,&rdquo; comes to mind, not least&nbsp;because Schuerman is an artist with formidable technical expertise (see his exhibition drawings), a proclivity for material innovation, and a keen eye for organizing space and symbol as an abstractionist. &nbsp;

He&rsquo;s also a person of depth and commitment. Being male and white certainly protected him, as it does in almost any area of the United States. But being thoughtful, compassionate, respectful, open, and observational didn&rsquo;t hurt either. &nbsp;

Fear, grief, violence, destruction, and threat permeate Schuerman&rsquo;s entries. What he&rsquo;s recorded, in essence, is a practice of walking as witness. That word, from the Old English, says an online etymology dictionary, means&nbsp;&ldquo;attestation of fact, event, etc., from personal knowledge.&rdquo; Circa 1300, to &ldquo;bear testimony.&rdquo; Twenty miles over 24 hours; that&rsquo;s how long the Third Precinct walk took. That&rsquo;s a pilgrimage. Late 1300s: an &ldquo;act of journeying through a strange country to a holy place.&rdquo; Strange, indeed, the Third Precinct had become; apocalyptic, contested, full of sorrow and heartbreak, with a memorial, a holy place, at its core. &nbsp;

At the same time, as Michel de Certeau wrote in The Practice of Everday Life, &ldquo;if it is true that a spatial order organizes an ensemble of possibilities (e.g., by a place in which one can move) and interdictions (e.g., by a wall that prevents one from going further), then the walker&nbsp;actualizes some of these possibilities. In that way, he makes them exist as well as emerge. But he also moves them about and he invents others, since the crossing, drifting away, or improvisation of walking privilege, transform, or abandon spatial elements.&quot; &nbsp;

In his entries and&nbsp;his book, Schuerman curates his walking practice with a visual history that includes his doctored maps, his artistic responses, photographic documentation, and images of himself looking solemn or perplexed. As such, it&rsquo;s an extremely personal or subjective take on this experiment; also one that pulls us back into a time period of tremendous anxiety and recognition. &nbsp;

It&rsquo;s a relief when&nbsp;Schuerman&nbsp;turns to his own block, drawing his walking practice inward with a geographical tightness that feels safer, more familiar. Soon enough, though, he starts walking to places in the Third Precinct where more recent crime has occurred. The most haunting image in the book is of a sheet for covering the deceased, still unused, crisp and folded. &nbsp;

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<img alt="" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/file_container/RmlsZUNvbnRhaW5lch4fMjc4OTEwMDAz/full.jpg" />

<img alt="" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/file_container/RmlsZUNvbnRhaW5lch4fMjg2ODkwMDAz/full.jpg" />Top: Schuerman&#39;s photo from a walk to the site of a recent murder in Minneapolis. Bottom: A Trump sign with footsteps, seen on a walk into Scott County, south of Minneapolis.

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Schuerman takes a stand: &ldquo;I think we need to expect better of our city council and our police department. Neither choice we are being offered is acceptable: a police force built on systemic racism or the lawlessness and rising violent crime without police presence. There are better options. If the city council can&rsquo;t find these, vote them out.&rdquo; &nbsp;

He also walks to Scott County (17 miles away) after the January 6th&nbsp;insurrection to experience Trump Country: &ldquo;I did not expect to figure anything out on this walk. Just needed to do it.&rdquo; He walks in search of waterways not impeded by storm sewers, roadways, or development. He walks to Accent Signage Systems, where he used to work, reflecting on the mass shooting that occurred there, then continues on to other former workplaces &ldquo;remembering the playful hard work that happened here.&rdquo;&nbsp;He ends with a pilgrimage to the Brooklyn Park Police station, joining people gathered in memory of Daunte Wright. &nbsp;

He also includes, in Unstillness, a line drawing he created of his driveway, &ldquo;where I started my walking projects a few years back. I memorized this line drawing and practiced walking it out step by step on a driveway,&rdquo; making his artistic practice a walking practice, and vice versa. That&rsquo;s just one part of a frayed and fragmented, holey and holy urban fabric Schuerman records in Unstillness, woven in skeins and patches from physical endurance and bold need, its entirety &ldquo;a long walk thinking&rdquo; as Schuerman writes, a testament of witness during a long, dark&nbsp;period in the city&rsquo;s history.&nbsp;<span style="-webkit-text-stroke-color:rgb(237, 22, 144); background-color:rgb(250, 250, 250); caret-color:rgb(237, 22, 144); color:rgb(237, 22, 144); font-family:roboto,helvetica,arial,sans-serif; font-size:15.75px; letter-spacing:0.1686825007200241px">◼︎

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<img alt="" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/file_container/RmlsZUNvbnRhaW5lch4fMjcyOTIwMDAz/full.jpg" />A recent painting that&nbsp;Schuerman posted to Facebook: &quot;For solstice I walked in circles on the frozen lake seeking stillness, which came after a while. Marking time, the cycle of light, the orbit of the earth, and all the other circles that guide.&quot;&nbsp;

Unstillness: A Book of Walks is available for purchase directly from the artist. You can connect with him and see more of his work at&nbsp;his website:&nbsp;<a href="https://www.schuermanfineart.com" target="_blank">schuermanfineart.com</a>. And you can follow him on Instagram <a href="https://www.instagram.com/instinctmpls/" target="_blank">@instinctmpls</a>.

Banner image: Schuerman&#39;s&nbsp;imagining&nbsp;of the nonexistent 2020&nbsp;Mayday Parade, with the artist shown at right. All images are courtesy of the artist.

The recently published book collects drawings, photos, and thoughts from the artist's ongoing practice of walking through the urban and suburban landscapes

'Unstillness': A review of John Schuerman's Book of Walks

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The waning days of every calendar year entice us to look backward. To catalogue the year that was, to seal it in amber through news recaps and &ldquo;best of&rdquo; lists and Spotify Wrappeds; to judge, in their passing, what the last twelve months meant to our history and our culture. It&rsquo;s a brief pause to our ever-forward march &mdash; a moment of leisurely, short-range nostalgia inside our daily scroll past the endless New. &nbsp;

One of the true pleasures of this past year &mdash; something that set 2021 apart from its more grueling predecessor &mdash; was seeing artwork in person again. Screens are great and all, but getting to meet objects face to face again has been a joyful rediscovery, a gift even, allowing us the chance&nbsp;to experience their scale and texture and presence in living color. And it&rsquo;s a shame that this review comes so late, after your chance to see Yvette Mayorga&rsquo;s Monochromatic Dreams at Law Warschaw has come and gone, because up close her pink cake paintings really come to life. &nbsp;

Armed with a piping bag and a palette knife, Mayorga lays down paint the way a cake decorator pipes on icing, creating thick, opulent, maximalist canvases that vibrate with life. They are messily precise &mdash; gooey and sensual but well-ordered and symmetrical &mdash; each square inch of canvas celebrating the stuff of life and culture with an overabundance of frosted pink detail. In between the decorative florets you&rsquo;ll find flip phones and fake nails, Nikes and gold chains, butterflies and bags of junk food, all produced from the nozzle of a piping bag. They&nbsp;are the details of daily life, specific to Mayorga&#39;s Mexican-American experience, collaged together with loving care. Throughout these flattened dioramas, green plastic army men point their rifles and cackling snakes lash out their tongues, mixing some menace into the playful nostalgia, commemorated together as a sheet cake hung on the wall. Up close, in person, it&rsquo;s uncanny. You really want to cut a fat slice off the corner and dig in. I almost wished at least one of the paintings was exhibited&nbsp;flat on a table with plates and forks, just to complete the illusion.

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<img alt="" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/file_container/RmlsZUNvbnRhaW5lch4fMjY2OTYwMDAz/full.jpg" />

Portraits of the Forgotten (detail); acrylic piping, collage, glitter, rhinestones, porcelain, and textile on canvas; 2021.

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Mayorga&rsquo;s mother worked as a confectioner, and&nbsp;her grandfathers worked&nbsp;at a Tootsie Roll factory, so cake-decorating is as much a part of her autobiography as all the other details. The rendering here is crude (I wonder what the artist could achieve if she took as much inspiration from&nbsp;fondant as from frosting) but impressive and impactful.&nbsp;It&nbsp;creates&nbsp;a balancing act between the light-hearted and the laborious that pushes us to teeter on the edge of the ethics of enjoyment, to marvel at Mayorga&#39;s&nbsp;patient hand certainly, but also to reflect&nbsp;on what it took to make all of the trinkets and objects she is recreating.&nbsp;The exploitation that is sewn into cheap garments and&nbsp;cooked into cheap food; those are&nbsp;part of our culture as well. Right now, as I write this, cake-makers for Rich Products &mdash; which provides cakes and desserts to Baskin Robbins, Walmart, and Cold Stone Creamery, among others &mdash; <a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/CXnDz3uL2PW/" target="_blank">are striking for</a> better pay, an end to forced overtime, and decent treatment by their employers. One striking worker, Cristina Lujan, describes the&nbsp;dizzying pace on their assembly line, saying that they are expected to finish&nbsp;13 cakes every single minute. Most of the workers, as it happens, are Latina.

Here you see the contemporary politics of food, labor, and identity baked right into Mayorga&rsquo;s work. In <a href="https://youtu.be/jYOPGviJOCg" target="_blank">an online discussion</a> with scholar and curator Dr. Jillian Hernandez, Mayorga explained: &ldquo;The lusciousness, the impermanence of frosting, is a way for me to reference the impermanence of citizenship, the impermanence of the idea of the American dream, while also talking about feminized ideas of labor, of women&rsquo;s work, and dismantling that through my subject matter, which is political and powerful in nature.&rdquo; &nbsp;

But Mayorga&#39;s interests are not limited to the contemporary.&nbsp;Also peering out from in between the icing is an art history lesson. In Pinknologic Anxiety, a printed portrait of Madame de Pompadour is seen on a cell phone&nbsp;gripped in a pair of frosted hands with&nbsp;golden talons, drawing&nbsp;a direct line between 250 year old beauty standards of the French high society and today. The painter, Fran&ccedil;ois Boucher, also inspired Mayorga&rsquo;s gorgeous pink portraits of her mother and father, each one lovingly rendered inside an ornate, gold-trimmed tondo, surrounded by the everyday objects in their home. It&#39;s a lovely,&nbsp;impactful diptych, a pure celebration of each individual parent captured in the same singular&nbsp;home. A king and a queen in their palace, each sitting squarely in their own&nbsp;power.

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<img alt="" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/file_container/RmlsZUNvbnRhaW5lch4fMjY0OTMwMDAz/full.jpg" />

Portrait of the Artist&#39;s Parents (After Portrait of the Artist&#39;s Daughter&nbsp;Fran&ccedil;ois&nbsp;Boucher, c. 1760), acrylic piping on canvas, 2020.

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This is Mayorga&#39;s reimagining&nbsp;of the Rococo.&nbsp;Aside from these explicit references (as well as some sumptuous riffs on 19th century&nbsp;vases and urns), the&nbsp;work in Monochromatic Dreams as a whole embraces the period&#39;s aesthetic of excess.&nbsp;A French movement of art and architecture, Rococo took the stately drama of the Baroque period and doused it in an overbearing floral perfume of decorative flourish, dominating the mid- to late-1700s between the death of King Louis XIV in 1715 and the execution of Louis XVI in 1792. It was like a mouthful of cake so rich,&nbsp;the sugar hurts your teeth. And it was&nbsp;the last, long gasp of overwrought, unapologetic luxury before the doors of the Bastille were pulled off their hinges.&nbsp;

There was also, however, mixed among the trappings of extreme privilege, a surprising humanism to the period. In <a href="https://www.vulture.com/2021/03/the-frick-on-madison-finally-lets-you-see-fragonard-up-close.html#_ga=2.107683330.1059955815.1640105490-906956577.1589263380" target="_blank">his review</a> of a collection of paintings by Rococo artist Jean-Honor&eacute; Fragonard, New York Magazine art critic Jerry Saltz writes: &nbsp;

Rococo imparted something to western painting that had never quite been there before: the unbearable lightness and gladdening mercy of being alive, expressed in loose brushwork at small and medium scale &mdash; for the enjoyment of private owners. This wasn&rsquo;t an art of kings, queens, and the church triumphant. It was first and last meant for pleasure, decoration, celebration, and love. &nbsp;

Rococo embodies a gleeful tackiness, a sophisticated excess that has trickled down over time, most commonly found nowadays in plastic and porcelain figurines, knick-knacks, and tchotchkes. For Mayorga, the Rococo is not distant or abstract in the least; it was part of her childhood. &nbsp;

&ldquo;I&rsquo;m referencing the Rococo in the interior of the home,&rdquo; she told Hernandez. &ldquo;These objects hold value although they&rsquo;re made of plastic and widely affordable&hellip; These objects &mdash; this idea of the Rococo &mdash; becomes a marker of &lsquo;making it&rsquo; in America, [of] having an indulgence within your home, similar to your car.&rdquo; &nbsp;

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<img alt="" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/file_container/RmlsZUNvbnRhaW5lch4fMjU0ODgwMDAz/full.jpg" />Jean-Honor&eacute;&nbsp;Fragonard,&nbsp;The Progress of Love: The Pursuit, oil on canvas, 125 x 85&quot;, 1772. The Frick Collection.

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Fragonard&rsquo;s paintings are themselves like birthday cakes: capturing a moment, setting a mood, telling just a snippet of a story. One series of large scale works, The Progress of Love,&nbsp;depicts different stages of playful courtship, giving a surprising amount of power and agency to the women at each painting&rsquo;s center, at least for the time period. The characters are set small against a gigantic, lush landscape, rendered vertically like a portrait. Nature appears stately, voluminous, and benignly dramatic, looming in soft, cumulonimbus towers of foliage and clouds above the flush-faced actors below. &nbsp;

&ldquo;The landscape is this place of pleasure and leisure,&rdquo; explains Mayorga, reflecting on Fragonard. &ldquo;Leisure is something that my family did not have much of. A Rococo aesthetic [in contemporary homes] inserts leisure into a domestic space where folks are working constantly and doing very physical forms of labor.&rdquo; &nbsp;

Home, then, becomes &ldquo;a space of dreaming, a space that can signify wealth, or [that signifies] that the voyage was worth it.&rdquo; &nbsp;

On the floor in the gallery lies a large black and white checkerboard, the familiar vinyl kitchen floor pattern of so many houses and apartments (I had one for two years in Chicago myself). Spread out almost like chess pieces on the board are a variety of&nbsp;shoes &mdash; boots, sneakers, sandals, stilettos &mdash; each&nbsp;decorated in pink and white frosted plaster. Shoes are the quintessential metonym (as in &ldquo;boots on the ground&rdquo;), the go-to stand-in for the people who would stand in them. Here they reference class, age, and occupation, each one camouflaged to varying degrees in thick, pastel ornamentation. Most are in pairs, but some are alone, like the ones you occasionally see on the side of the highway, making you wonder after the story behind the object.

In <a href="https://youtu.be/dwht0znzgMo" target="_blank">another recent online conversation</a>, this time with Mia curator Robert&nbsp;Cozzolino,&nbsp;Mayorga&nbsp;is explicit: &ldquo;The work is attempting to monumentalize the amount of migrants who have crossed the US-Mexico border and lost their lives in doing so. Shoes are objects that are often found along the border.&rdquo;

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<img alt="" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/file_container/RmlsZUNvbnRhaW5lch4fMjY0OTIwMDAz/full.jpg" />

<img alt="" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/file_container/RmlsZUNvbnRhaW5lch4fMjcyOTAwMDAz/full.jpg" />Top: Installation view of Monuments of the Forgotten&nbsp;(foreground) and&nbsp;Portrait of the Artist&#39;s Parents (After Portrait of the Artist&#39;s Daughter Fran&ccedil;ois Boucher, c. 1760). Bottom:&nbsp;Monuments of the Forgotten&nbsp;(detail); plaster piping, acrylic piping, donated and found shoes; 2020.

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There is an undercurrent of escapism throughout the show&nbsp;&mdash;&nbsp;representing actual, attempted, and aborted escapes&nbsp;&mdash; made most literal in the&nbsp;embellished footwear in&nbsp;Monuments of the Forgotten. These are real items&nbsp;with real histories, donated to Mayorga&nbsp;(and in some cases decorated during community workshops)&nbsp;by real people.&nbsp;But somehow more effective, I think, are the long, pink slides cutting through Mayorga&rsquo;s&nbsp;painted tableaux, slipping past the wrought-iron gates and around the armed army men. These slides, in the artist&#39;s words, are &ldquo;a marker of being able to escape or to dream within these moments of militarization.&quot;

Another perk of seeing artworks in the flesh is that you also see them properly in situ. A painting inside a room creates a dialogue with the&nbsp;space itself, informing and being informed by the wall color, the lighting, the furniture or lack thereof. It creates &mdash; good, bad, or boring &mdash; a vibe. Anyone who&rsquo;s ever done the math on a sixty inch center knows the impact that place in space has on a work of art. Saltz mentions it in his gushing over the Frick, remarking, &ldquo;In the mansion, the Fragonards are installed &mdash; even swaddled and segregated &mdash; in a wonderful Rococo drawing room, with attendant panels over doors and next to windows. Here [at the Frick]&hellip; up close and at eye level, the work is reborn as these huge heraldic thunderous paintings, visually vehement and emotionally commanding.&rdquo; &nbsp;

And here, at Law Warschaw Gallery&nbsp;on Macalester&rsquo;s campus, Mayorga&rsquo;s recreations of Mexican-American domesticity hit a little different. The&nbsp;large works are dwarfed by the gallery&rsquo;s generous ceilings, and I wonder how one&#39;s experience of them would change on view in the closer quarters of, say, a bakery or a living room. In this setting though, as well as by virtue of the fact that they are Fine Art Paintings, Mayorga&nbsp;brings together studiously and carefully&nbsp;what we lazily term &ldquo;high&rdquo; and &ldquo;low&rdquo; culture &mdash; and this is precisely what has kept me thinking about this show since I saw it three months ago. &nbsp;

&nbsp;

<img alt="" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/file_container/RmlsZUNvbnRhaW5lch4fMjY2OTcwMDAz/full.jpg" />Polly Landscape, acrylic piping on canvas, 2019.

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Whether we&rsquo;re talking about Fragonard or Mayorga or any of the rest of&nbsp;us serious artists, there is a certain mystique of automatic importance. This is the &quot;high.&quot;&nbsp;I&rsquo;m not sure if it&rsquo;s the pricetags or the artist statements or just a force of habit, but our work is elevated almost by default, put on a clean, white pedestal above the muck of pedestrian life. Meanwhile the artisans who sew our clothes, paint our nails, detail our cars, and cook our food are left invisible. If we see them at all,&nbsp;we might not even think to qualify their work&nbsp;as the&nbsp;&quot;low;&quot; that&#39;s the realm more of cartoons and kid-stuff, things you might see in a clever Pop Art painting (which, if you&#39;re keeping track, is once again&nbsp;&quot;high&quot;). We live our lives at a distance from our food, our land, our industry, and each other.&nbsp;The&nbsp;problem speaks to our embrace of the individual at the expense of the collective and to the degree to which market forces impact our imaginations. In most cases, what we eat does not have an author in the way that a painting does, so its worth somehow&nbsp;deflates.&nbsp;But&nbsp;food&nbsp;is inextricable from culture, intrinsically woven into who we are as peoples. Also woven in&nbsp;is our exploitation of the people who farm our food, who bake it, decorate it, and deliver it to our hungry mouths. &nbsp;

This year has helped me fall back in love, truly, with other people&rsquo;s art. At the same time, it has also left me wondering just what the point of all these pictures is. Not just Mayorga&#39;s, I mean, but all of them we&#39;re out here making. Are paintings made to look like cakes really that much more&nbsp;&quot;important&rdquo; than the cakes themselves? More to the point, are the people breaking their bodies to make&nbsp;those&nbsp;real&nbsp;cakes actually&nbsp;unimportant?&nbsp;Surely not, right? It is something to consider moving forward,&nbsp;perhaps as a prompt for resolutions if I may be so bold:&nbsp;we are what we eat.

Right now, though,&nbsp;the sun is setting on 2021, as it did already on Monochromatic Dreams and on the indulgent age of Rococo before it. We find ourselves looking back on the past twelve months, on the last two years of plague, and on the decades and centuries of dysfunction before them that led us to this strange, wondrous moment. We&rsquo;re all hurtling down the winding pink Barbie slide of history, past kings and&nbsp;queens&nbsp;and guillotines, again and again. We have not had our cake or eaten it, either; we are baked into the damn thing whole, each of us. And the next one is coming up fast, right behind us on the assembly line, looking pink and perfect.&nbsp;

But how will it taste?&nbsp;<span style="-webkit-text-stroke-color:rgb(237, 22, 144); background-color:rgb(250, 250, 250); caret-color:rgb(237, 22, 144); color:rgb(237, 22, 144); font-family:roboto,helvetica,arial,sans-serif; font-size:15.75px; letter-spacing:0.1686825007200241px">◼︎

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<img alt="" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/file_container/RmlsZUNvbnRhaW5lch4fMjcwODYwMDAz/full.jpg" />A Vase of the Century 7 (After Century Vase c. 1876), acrylic piping on canvas, 2019.

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Monochromatic Dreams was on view at Law Warschaw Gallery from September through December, 2021. To see more of the artist&#39;s work, visit&nbsp;<a href="https://www.yvettemayorga.com" target="_blank">yvettemayorga.com</a>&nbsp;or follow her on Instagram <a href="https://www.instagram.com/yvettemayorga/" target="_blank">@yvettemayorga</a>.

For more info on Law Warschaw Gallery, visit <a href="https://www.macalester.edu/gallery/" target="_blank">their website</a> or follow them on Instagram <a href="https://www.instagram.com/lawwarschawgallery/" target="_blank">@lawwarschawgallery</a>.

Banner image:&nbsp;Pinknologic Anxiety (After Fran&ccedil;ois Boucher, Madame de Pompadour, c. 1755)&nbsp;(detail), acrylic piping and collage on canvas, 2020. All images taken by the author unless otherwise noted.

Editor&#39;s note: this piece has been updated to correct a mistake. Previously, the article incorrectly stated that the artist&#39;s father worked at a Tootsie Roll factory, when it was her grandfathers.

In her recent solo show, Monochromatic Dreams, the Chicago-based artist lays it on thick, combining her lived experience of Latinidad with the aesthetics of Rococo

The Opulence of the Everyday: Yvette Mayorga at Law Warschaw Gallery

Reviews

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Liminal is the state in which many of us find ourselves right now, as the certainties of western life, what we might call the givens, increasingly fall away. As all that we might have assumed to be &ldquo;solid melts into air.&rdquo;

There&rsquo;s more to Marx&rsquo;s celebrated phrase, and it&rsquo;s worth quoting here with a few annotations to bring its meaning into 2021: &ldquo;All that is solid melts into air, [i.e., jobs, careers, financial security, health care, physical safety], all that is sacred is profaned, [ex: government, democracy, common decency, personal agency] and man [sic] is at last compelled to face with sober senses his [sic] real conditions of life [climate change, ongoing pandemics, white supremacy] and his [sic] relations with his [sic] kind [e.g. white supremacy, political divisiveness, hetero-hegemony, toxic masculinity].&rdquo;&nbsp;

If we&rsquo;re tired, angry, frustrated, dizzy, it&rsquo;s no surprise. But liminality needn&rsquo;t always be a negative state. The anthropological definition of liminality (from the Latin meaning &ldquo;threshold&rdquo;) includes existing in a nebulous middle stage during a rite of passage or a change to something else. It&rsquo;s a period of transition. We&rsquo;re between, in-between, the past or previous ways of structuring our identity and/or sense of community or what we hope to create for our future. As individuals and as communities.

As if that weren&rsquo;t enough, consider adding hyper to that liminal state. Panic-inducing, yes. But, also, the point at which, if we haven&rsquo;t already, we turn to art. For solace, for direction, for inspiration, for reflection, for meaning. All of which was present in the recent exhibition at Form+Content Gallery, HyperLiminal: Exploring In-Betweenness, An Inter-media Collaboration by Kathryn Nobbe and Philip Blackburn.

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<img alt="" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/file_container/RmlsZUNvbnRhaW5lch4fMjU4ODkwMDAz/full.jpg" />Installation view of Blackburn&#39;s Breath+Skin&nbsp;sound installation&nbsp;(at right: birchbark, metallic ink, light, sound transducers, and 29 minute&nbsp;audio) and Nobbe&#39;s&nbsp;mixed media works.

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Let&rsquo;s start with Blackburn&rsquo;s atmospheric, ethereal sound score, which surges and recedes from speakers housed in his hand-crafted birch-bark cylinders, the &ldquo;skin&rdquo; of which has been inscribed inside with mysterious symbols, and which are strung through with thick electrical cables along a tree limb. Just as the score melds the electronic with the acoustic (string instruments?) and natural (insect sounds?), so does the work reflect an intersection of technology and nature that&rsquo;s all too familiar.

Below this hanging piece? Crystalline &ldquo;rocks&rdquo; in blue and green, gathered into curves, appearing like a flowing stream. Where does one artwork end and another begin? What is representative and what&rsquo;s abstraction? Here&rsquo;s where Nobbe&rsquo;s work comes in.

 
Large long wall-hangings depict&nbsp;richly painted shapes that release their energy in long lines&nbsp;of color; in one work, into a deep blue pool, in another into two streams that flow right off the paper and down onto the floor and across the gallery. Beneath these two works are also piles of white debris, a granular substance resembling blown-in insulation or crumbled chalk, into which are embedded black stones and glittering rock not unlike yellow quartzite.

&nbsp;

<img alt="" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/file_container/RmlsZUNvbnRhaW5lch4fMjY2OTIwMDAz/full.jpg" /><img alt="" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/file_container/RmlsZUNvbnRhaW5lch4fMjkwODYwMDAz/full.jpg" />Top: Installation view of&nbsp;Kathryn Nobbe, HyperLiminal VII (reecho XIV, 2021), mixed media (Ink, watercolor, Golden acrylic media and paint, chalk, pencil ) on Hahnem&uuml;hle German Etching Paper, 44&nbsp;x100.&quot; Bottom: Installation views of&nbsp;HyperLIminal I (blu- cataract) + 3D details;&nbsp;ink, watercolor, pencil on watercolor paper, 118 x 44&quot;; charcoal, perlite, and tomatillo and ground cherry husks on floor;&nbsp;2021. Charcoal lines extend the length of the gallery floor.

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The work, it seems, can&rsquo;t be contained within the traditions of the frame, or the wall. Wall, floor, and space itself combine in surprising ways, breaking through their own boundaries, erasing the notion of where one work ends and another begins. Similarly, in Nobbe&rsquo;s other pieces, imagery springs from its two-dimensionality on paper to the wall where it becomes sculptural. Intricate drawings appear, at first glance, like a wire mesh bent or contorted or folded into itself to create organic, albeit alien, shapes.

In their press material, the artists said they &ldquo;encourage visitors to investigate the entire space, finding the in-between places and making their own interpretations from the multi-sensory elements that go beyond visual to include sound, spatial relationships, touch, and smell.&rdquo; What if, however, the work is viewed and reviewed, fittingly, from a place of liminality? In a geographic locale far from the gallery in which the exhibition occurred? Not in the urban North, but a small desert town in the Southwest? And moreover, from a computer?

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[youtube:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mIgWKMycjgc] &nbsp;

Video documentation by Philip Blackburn.

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&ldquo;Conceptually, the work explores metaphorical relationships of the human body as mother earth in transition, simultaneously vulnerable and resilient,&rdquo; the artists wrote. That may be so. Perhaps more&nbsp;so if viewed in person.

And yet, as a pandemic continues and we struggle to adapt to all of the political and cultural liminality in which we currently exist, an exhibition like this one serves to, most of all, remind us of how boundary-less creativity can be, how nature and culture &mdash; when reflected as inextricable &mdash; can confirm the potency inherent to liminality, and how art viewed on a screen can be as evocative and inspiring as that seen live. Liminal is where we all live right now.&nbsp;<span style="-webkit-text-stroke-color:rgb(237, 22, 144); background-color:rgb(250, 250, 250); caret-color:rgb(237, 22, 144); color:rgb(237, 22, 144); font-family:roboto,helvetica,arial,sans-serif; font-size:15.75px; letter-spacing:0.1686825007200241px">◼︎

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<img alt="" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/file_container/RmlsZUNvbnRhaW5lch4fMjY2OTAwMDAz/full.jpg" />

Kathryn Nobbe, HyperLIminal IV (Autopsia XIV),&nbsp;mixed media (Ink, watercolor, pastel chalk, pencil ) on Arches watercolor paper, 30&rdquo;&nbsp;x&nbsp;22,&rdquo; 2021.

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<a href="http://www.mplsart.com/events/hyperliminal-exploring-in-betweenness">HyperLiminal: Exploring In-Betweenness</a>&nbsp;was on view at <a href="http://www.formandcontent.org" target="_blank">Form + Content Gallery </a>from October 28 - December 4, 2021. On Instagram, you can follow the gallery <a href="https://www.instagram.com/formcontentgallery/" target="_blank">@formcontentgallery</a>&nbsp;and&nbsp;Kathryn Nobbe <a href="https://www.instagram.com/k.nobbe.art/" target="_blank">@k.nobbe.art</a>. For more info on&nbsp;Philip Blackburn, visit&nbsp;<a href="http://www.philipblackburn.com" target="_blank">philipblackburn.com</a>.

Banner image: Kathryn Nobbe, HyperLIminal VII (thresholds III) (detail),&nbsp;Ink, watercolor, pencil on Arches watercolor paper, 30&rdquo;&nbsp;x&nbsp;22,&quot; 2019.&nbsp;All images courtesy of the artists.

In a recent show at Form + Content, Kathryn Nobbe and Philip Blackburn ruminated on being in-between through 2D works, sculpture and sound

Hyperliminal: Where We All Live Now

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I have to begin with a confession: I&rsquo;ve long been skeptical of representational landscape painting. Like any other bias, there&rsquo;s no particularly good reason for this one. Maybe it&rsquo;s because I grew up in Maine, along the rocky coastline of Winslow Homer and Andrew Wyeth, where every field trip to the local museum felt like a rerun of the same breaking wave. Or maybe it&rsquo;s that the view of the ocean &mdash; that enormous, always-entrancing mass &mdash; from my family&rsquo;s favorite picnic spot was often blocked by a man in a fiddler cap and pleated trousers, his makeshift booth full of paintings reprinted for unwitting tourists. &nbsp;

When I was assigned to review Joshua Cunningham&rsquo;s exhibition of new paintings at Groveland Gallery, my bias resurfaced &mdash; this again? But, upon entering the exhibition I was greeted warmly by Sally Johnson, the gallery&rsquo;s director since 1983, and Joshua. We stood together in the foyer, making conversation about the previous night&rsquo;s snowfall &mdash; how difficult it was to dig ourselves out that morning, how bright it made the city seem. Then we visited the paintings, which lovingly evoke every Minnesota season. &nbsp;

Joshua grew up in Isanti, a rural community an hour north of the Twin Cities, where he now lives. He works in the plein air tradition, setting up his easel and palette in nature &mdash; or sometimes, when exposed to winter winds, in the cargo space of his Toyota Highlander. Though each painting represents a different physical landscape in one pocket or another of the Upper Midwest, he speaks of his process philosophically, emphasizing the importance of attentiveness and repetition when scouting for a site. &ldquo;The world&rsquo;s so much bigger than us, and it&rsquo;s always offering something unexpected,&rdquo; he tells me. &ldquo;It&rsquo;s just about staying open to it.&rdquo;&nbsp;

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<img alt="" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/file_container/RmlsZUNvbnRhaW5lch4fMjgwODgwMDAz/full.jpg" />Joshua Cunningham,&nbsp;Mississippi Moonrise, oil on mounted linen, 28 x 22&quot;, 2021

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This approach is most evident in his story behind Mississippi Moonrise, which presents a moonlit hill spilling into a larger valley. &ldquo;I was driving around looking for where the moon was going to come up,&rdquo; he remembers. &ldquo;I wasn&rsquo;t finding anything and, as I&rsquo;m going down into this valley, I&rsquo;m thinking, &lsquo;This is the wrong direction to find that moonrise.&rsquo;&rdquo; Just then, he came across a horse in the middle of the road, and a group of farmers hustling to corral it. While this scene unfolded, he looked up. &ldquo;And that,&rdquo; he says, gesturing to the painting, &ldquo;was the scene out the window.&rdquo; &nbsp;

My trepidation around landscape painting boils down to the field&rsquo;s historical attempts at representing an idealized, capital-w Wilderness, which brush aside the messiness of living ecosystems. However, the opposite is true in Joshua&rsquo;s compositions, which are the by-products of sustained engagement in singular locations. As he writes in his artist statement, many of the works featured in Further In were &ldquo;created over half a dozen visits to the same place at the same time of day.&rdquo; Each of these visits could stretch from three to six hours &mdash; enough time for Joshua to integrate into the local environment.&nbsp;

&nbsp;

<img alt="" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/file_container/RmlsZUNvbnRhaW5lch4fMjcwODUwMDAz/full.jpg" />Joshua Cunningham,&nbsp;Fog and the Fall, oil on mounted linen, 30 x 40&quot;, 2021

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This commitment also provides enough time for the local environment to accommodate him. When he shows me Upper Mississippi Twilight, he recounts the families of river otters and beavers that encircled him while painting; with Fog and the Fall, which depicts a decaying barn alongside a dirt road, he acknowledges the farmers who slowed down when passing his station to avoid kicking up dust clouds. For each painting, there&rsquo;s a rich periphery just outside the frame. These peripheries sometimes leak into the compositions, as is the case during summer evenings when his oils catch passing gnats. &nbsp;

Further In demonstrates that, at their best, landscape paintings are not simply representations of environments, but records of reciprocal relationships. In this sense, Joshua&rsquo;s paintings seem like tender portraits of subjects enduring life cycles and transitions &mdash; between planetary rotations, seasons, and droughts. &ldquo;Each painting felt like an invitation, and you want to show up in the best way to do right by it,&rdquo; he says. &ldquo;You don&rsquo;t want to be a bad guest.&rdquo;

&nbsp;

<img alt="" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/file_container/RmlsZUNvbnRhaW5lch4fMjkyODIwMDAz/full.jpg" />Joshua Cunningham,&nbsp;Crimson Crown, oil on mounted linen, 30 x 40&quot;, 2021

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The exhibition&rsquo;s title, Further In, refers to each landscape&rsquo;s invitation to Joshua to notice more, to dig in deeper. But it should also serve as a suggestion to visitors of Groveland Gallery whose close examination will be rewarded. One of the largest paintings in the show, Crimson Crown, draws attention to the carved, tree-topped ridges of the Driftless region. From across the room, the painting holds the final hour of light on an early winter day. But closer in &mdash; an arm&rsquo;s length, a breath away &mdash; the image transforms, as the whole forest recedes to individual trees. The effect is the result of Joshua applying an initial layer of paint on his linen canvas, and returning the next day to add another.

&ldquo;As I was painting over that first layer, the ridges of the textures below caught the paint in different ways than would have been possible had I been doing it all on a clean canvas,&rdquo; he notes. &ldquo;Those recessed areas end up holding what feels like shadow.&rdquo; While ecosystems are the outgrowth of increasingly complex interactions, Joshua&rsquo;s landscapes are another form of accumulation &mdash; of oil layers, of hours, of moisture from the morning dew, of whatever invisible things the wind happens to blow onto the canvas. &nbsp;

Back at Groveland Gallery, it&rsquo;s no wonder we began our conversation by chatting about the weather. In her acclaimed book How to Do Nothing,&nbsp;the artist Jenny Odell writes, &ldquo;The fact that commenting on the weather is a clich&eacute; of small talk is actually a profound reminder that the weather is one of the only things we each know any other person must pay attention to.&rdquo;1&nbsp;In the discussion that followed, Joshua brought up the farmers and hunters he grew up with in Isanti as much as he did any other artistic influence. After all, he pointed out, a hunter and a plein air painter share the same fundamental practice: waiting quietly at an easel or camouflaged in a blind, staying open to whatever might come their way. &nbsp;

As I walked back to my car, I suddenly became aware of the sun and the almost overwhelming brightness it emitted when reflected by the snow. Distracted, I nearly slipped on a patch of exposed ice, but managed to recover and murmur a thank you before unlocking my door &mdash; a thank you to Joshua, an acknowledgment of our common ground.&nbsp;<span style="-webkit-text-stroke-color:rgb(237, 22, 144); background-color:rgb(250, 250, 250); caret-color:rgb(237, 22, 144); color:rgb(237, 22, 144); font-family:roboto,helvetica,arial,sans-serif; font-size:15.75px; letter-spacing:0.1686825007200241px">◼︎

&nbsp;

<img alt="" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/file_container/RmlsZUNvbnRhaW5lch4fMjYyODQwMDAz/full.jpg" />Joshua Cunningham, Upper Mississippi Twilight, oil on mounted linen, 9 x 12&quot;, 2021

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Further In is on view at Groveland Gallery through January 8, 2022. Gallery hours: Tuesday - Saturday, 12 - 5pm. For more info, visit&nbsp;<a href="https://grovelandgallery.com" target="_blank">grovelandgallery.com</a> or follow the gallery on Instagram <a href="https://www.instagram.com/grovelandgallery/" target="_blank">@grovelandgallery</a>&nbsp;and the artist <a href="https://www.instagram.com/joshua.l.cunningham/" target="_blank">@joshua.l.cunningham</a>

Banner image: Joshua Cunningham, Evening Between the Lakes&nbsp;(detail), oil on mounted linen, 30&nbsp;x 40&quot;, 2021.&nbsp;All images courtesy of Groveland Gallery. &nbsp;

1Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing (Brooklyn: Melville House Publishing, 2019), 148.

The plein air painter’s new series of landscapes offers lessons in attention and embraces the unexpected in familiar terrain

Seeking Common Ground: Joshua Cunningham at Groveland Gallery

The Scene

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All good things take time. &nbsp;

It&rsquo;s a saying that designer Kelsi Sharp repeats often. Over the past year, it&rsquo;s been a helpful reminder&nbsp;&mdash;&nbsp;not only to Sharp, but to her collaborators and fellow artists Chelsea Brink and Lauren Callis. Together, they&rsquo;re opening a shared space at the intersection of Lake Street and 36th Avenue in the Longfellow neighborhood of Minneapolis. &nbsp;

The new space will house Brink&rsquo;s <a href="https://www.instagram.com/chelseabrink/?hl=en" target="_blank">graphic design consulting business</a>, <a href="https://sharpsignco.com/" target="_blank">Sharp Sign Co.</a>, and <a href="https://curiositystudioclass.com" target="_blank">Curiosity Studio</a> &mdash; a creative learning studio with classes designed to encourage creativity and teach about art and process. They will also share the building with <a href="https://launebread.com/" target="_blank">Laune Bread</a>. &nbsp;

After a year of brainstorming, planning, and renovating, Brink, Callis and Sharp reflect on a winding road to a near-future opening. &nbsp;

Bridget Kranz: When did you first get the idea for a shared space? &nbsp;

Sharp: Lauren and I started the conversation about getting a space together about a year ago. For all three of us, there&rsquo;s a lot of overlap between clients, the amount of space we need, and the values we have about the type of space we want to be in. &nbsp;

A big motivation for me was to have a space that&rsquo;s not my apartment. For example, I&rsquo;m building several signs for Seward Coop. I&rsquo;m exploding out of my current situation. I&rsquo;ve always felt like a bull in a china shop in the office and workspaces I&rsquo;ve inhabited. &nbsp;

Callis: Curiosity Studio first opened in the Northrup King Building, which was a great option for getting people familiar with our work. When we started talking about a shared space, it became harder to envision that in Northrup King &mdash; how would we have three separate rooms, within the one existing studio that we had? As we started searching for another space, an opportunity came up to collaborate with Laune Bread. They were moving into a new storefront on Lake Street, and we were able to be a part of the build-out. &nbsp;

&nbsp;

<img alt="" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/file_container/RmlsZUNvbnRhaW5lch4fMjc0OTIwMDAz/full.jpg" />Participants engaging in a workshop at Curiosity Studio. Image courtesy of Curiosity Studio.

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BK: How is this new space different than where you&rsquo;ve worked previously? &nbsp;

Brink: We&rsquo;re on a corner of Lake Street with several other storefronts, and I think we&rsquo;ll have more accessibility to the neighborhood. In studio buildings like Northrup King, you rely more on social media to get the word out. I&rsquo;m also eager to be back in a collaborative workspace. During the pandemic, I&rsquo;ve been working from home. I find a lot of joy and inspiration in being around other people. &nbsp;

Sharp: I&rsquo;ve been making my mark on the Minneapolis landscape in a certain way, and this is a whole different level. The moment when we put up our first temporary sign in the storefront, it felt like we were on display in a way we haven&rsquo;t been before. &nbsp;

A year ago, when we looked at the space, Lake Street looked totally different. We started by thinking critically about how we would rebuild. I&rsquo;ve already been doing a lot of signs in the neighborhood and have gotten plugged in with neighborhood associations. It&rsquo;s a more honest and direct way of meeting and interacting with potential clients. &nbsp;

&nbsp;

<img alt="" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/file_container/RmlsZUNvbnRhaW5lch4fMjU0ODQwMDAz/full.jpg" />&nbsp;Kelsi Sharp putting in the work on a recent commission. Photo by Graham Tolbert; image courtesy of <a href="https://www.instagram.com/sharpsignco/" target="_blank">Sharp Sign Co&#39;s Instagram</a>.&nbsp;

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BK: What has the planning and renovation process been like? &nbsp;

Callis: One of the first things we did after we put up our &ldquo;coming soon&rdquo; sign was to encourage people to come by and say hello. Immediately, we wanted to offer a space for people to introduce themselves. Curiosity Studio is informed by art therapy. We want our participants to be able to open up and incorporate the benefits of creativity into their everyday lives. To that end, we want to respond to community needs before we respond to our own wants. &nbsp;

We&rsquo;ve been having a lot of conversations and consultation with the community. We have a handful of open studio events planned for the new year, and we&rsquo;re currently offering take-home kits, but we want to wait to figure out the bulk of programming until we&rsquo;re in the new space and can highlight community concerns or areas of interest. It almost feels irresponsible to think that we&rsquo;d immediately hit the ground running. How can we train our staff and help get everyone settled in the new space? &nbsp;

Sharp: The pace and structure of how you open a business is defined by capitalism. As a group of creatives, it&rsquo;s our responsibility to control that. We want to show that that&rsquo;s the pace that capitalism dictates, but this is the pace that&rsquo;s sustainable for us. &nbsp;

Callis: From Curiosity Studio&rsquo;s perspective, we also want to keep our programming accessible. There&rsquo;s a different amount of capital that you&#39;re working with when you have a space to run. We want to be a sustainable business in the neighborhood. We want to expand when there&rsquo;s room to expand, but still be able to shrink if we need to. &nbsp;

&nbsp;

<img alt="" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/file_container/RmlsZUNvbnRhaW5lch4fMjU4ODgwMDAz/full.jpg" />Curiosity Studio will be offering a range of youth and adult classes focused on experimentations&nbsp;with creative playfulness, as in this collection of potato people. Image courtesy of Curiosity Studio.

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BK: Is there a set opening date? &nbsp;

Brink: We&rsquo;re close to the finish line of moving in. Once we physically get into the space, that&rsquo;ll help us answer those key questions. We&rsquo;re hoping to be open early next year, after another month or two of settling in and slowly building up to become more public facing. We want to see what it&rsquo;s like physically being in the space. As community needs come up, we&rsquo;re curious to collaborate around those. &nbsp;

Sharp: When I think about the space, how I want to feel in it, and how I want it to be perceived, a grand opening date has never been a part of that. When the sign goes on, it&rsquo;s typically the last step. It&rsquo;s like a wedding celebration, something intimate. &nbsp;

Callis: We can say, &quot;Here&rsquo;s a space that&rsquo;s coming soon. They don&#39;t really know what they are yet.&quot;&nbsp;We&rsquo;ll find out our narrative as we go.&nbsp;<span style="-webkit-text-stroke-color:rgb(237, 22, 144); background-color:rgb(250, 250, 250); caret-color:rgb(237, 22, 144); color:rgb(237, 22, 144); font-family:roboto,helvetica,arial,sans-serif; font-size:15.75px; letter-spacing:0.1686825007200241px">◼︎

&nbsp;

<img alt="" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/file_container/RmlsZUNvbnRhaW5lch4fMjkyODEwMDAz/full.jpg" />From left:&nbsp;Chelsea Brink, Kelsi Sharp, and Lauren Callis. Image courtesy of <a href="https://www.instagram.com/sharpsignco/" target="_blank">Sharp Sign Co&#39;s Instagram</a>.

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To stay up to date on upcoming classes and events, sign up to <a href="https://curiositystudioclass.com/newsletter" target="_blank">Curiosity Studio&#39;s newsletter here</a>.

The future home of Curiosity Studio, Sharp Sign Co., and Laune Bread is at 3605 E. Lake St in Minneapolis. Follow along on Instagram <a href="https://www.instagram.com/curiositystudio_/" target="_blank">@curiositystudio_</a>, <a href="https://www.instagram.com/sharpsignco/" target="_blank">@sharpsignco</a>, <a href="https://www.instagram.com/chelseabrink/" target="_blank">@chelseabrink</a>, and <a href="https://www.instagram.com/launebread/" target="_blank">@launebread</a>.

Also check out our earlier profile about&nbsp;the origins of&nbsp;Curiosity Studio <a href="https://www.mplsart.com/written/2020/03/cultivating-curiosity" target="_blank">here</a>.

Banner image courtesy of Curiosity Studio.

The artist-run creative learning studio and local sign-painter, along with Laune Bread, are set to open their collaborative space early next year

COMING SOON: Curiosity Studio & Sharp Sign Co. move to Lake Street

&nbsp;

I&rsquo;ll start with a caveat: I&rsquo;ve never seen a Yayoi Kusama infinity room in person. So I can&rsquo;t really compare that experience to <a href="https://www.mplsart.com/events/quantum-mirror" target="_blank">Quantum Mirror</a>, a new art installation at REM5, although I&rsquo;m sure there would be some interesting parallels to draw. &nbsp;

I have, however, played a lot of video games, so when I found the original patent diagram for the Nintendo Gameboy framed in the bathroom at REM5, I knew it was a decent bet that I would like this place. Billed as a &ldquo;Virtual Reality Laboratory,&rdquo; REM5 has the feel of a swanky arcade. Tucked away in a squat building off a side road in a little industrial strip mall in St. Louis Park, it&rsquo;s&nbsp;a fun spot&nbsp;where you and your friends can book a spacious, lounge-like&nbsp;stall;&nbsp;experience different games, places, and programs through a VR headset;&nbsp;and munch on a menu of pubfare and local craft beer befitting a night at the bowling alley. &nbsp;

But we were here for something else: a proper Art experience &mdash; a mixture of virtual reality, digital projection, and mirror-room immersion by Chicago-based artist Adrian Stein, in collaboration with Zac Hall. And I have to say&hellip; it was pretty cool. &nbsp;

One piece of advice I got from my mentor back in college was to watch out for that word. &ldquo;If someone tells you your work is &lsquo;cool,&rsquo;&rdquo; I remember him telling me, &ldquo;it probably means it&rsquo;s not challenging them enough.&rdquo; New media artworks perhaps require a caveat to that statement;&nbsp;the newness (and coolness) of the tech itself can be&nbsp;enough to steal your attention entirely. Quantum Mirror is certainly cool, and I imagine for a lot of viewers their take-away may well begin and end there. But the experience of this installation is also visually strange, thoughtfully dark, and a lot more sensorially engaging than I had expected. &nbsp;

The immersive experience begins just past the front lobby, where you are asked to take off your shoes (pro tip: remember to wear decent socks). You enter a futuristic waiting room and sit in chairs in front of two tall, closed mirrored barn doors on the far wall. You are handed a VR headset, and your trip into Stein&rsquo;s world begins. &nbsp;

The experience of a headset is still quite novel&nbsp;for some of us &mdash; late-comers as it were to the metaverse. Your eyes and ears are cut off from the natural world, occupied suddenly by a fully digital environment. Disembodied silver hands pop into view, following the movements of your own hands exactly in a bit of motion-capture wizardry created and added to the headsets by the REM5 team themselves. You tilt your neck left and right to take in the scene, you move your hands and point your fingers as directed by the soothing voice in your head. To anyone standing in the corner, you may well look a fool, and there&#39;s a vulnerability you experience knowing the real world is still there, just out of view. It&rsquo;s an out-of-body experience that makes you aware of your own body. Fitting, as that&rsquo;s basically what this piece is all about. &nbsp;

&nbsp;

<img alt="" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/file_container/RmlsZUNvbnRhaW5lch4fMjgwODUwMDAz/full.jpg" />Adrian Stein, Andro Genie #5802, rendered image on a lit&nbsp;LED frame, 2020. Available to purchase&nbsp;at REM5, this image and character also show up in the larger installation.

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Kusama first developed her mirrored installations in 1965 as a way to exponentially expand the impact of her polka-dotted sculptures. Over the past five decades, her walk-in rooms &mdash; covered floor to ceiling in mirrors &mdash; have evolved into ambient, atmospheric meditations on mortality, the cosmos, and, of course, pumpkins. They were also designed to engage the viewer as part of the artwork itself, to turn the audience into its own subject. &nbsp;

Quantum Mirror&nbsp;does the same but&nbsp;takes as its subject not just its audience,&nbsp;our bodies,&nbsp;and our endless vanity&nbsp;but also what effect our digital lives are having on us. &ldquo;My work is always centered with the body as the subject,&rdquo; says Stein, explaining that this installation is about &ldquo;thinking of the digital body as a metaphor for prosthetic consciousness.&rdquo; &nbsp;

Inside the headset &mdash; filled with rows of simplified human bodies hunched forward seemingly in rote discouragement &mdash; the virtual scene provides you with an intellectual framework for thinking about digital identity. It also puts you in an interactive mindset. As you remove your headset and reenter physical reality, the mirrored doors have opened, revealing some kind of bizarre, sci-fi glass chamber, throbbing with video visuals. You enter, hyperaware now of the weight and angle of your footing on the mirrored floor as you move slowly inside, trying to use your senses to make sense of this place. &nbsp;

At the core of this fractallized gemstone, a central pillar of screens plays a longer video of these despairing silver bodies&nbsp;set to a melancholic drone of human voices, a score created largely out of Gregorian and Victorian chants (directed by Stein and produced by sound artist and musician&nbsp;Necatuss).&nbsp;I will spare you a detailed description of the experience, since it is best done cold. Feel free, once you&#39;re in there,&nbsp;to indulge your immediate impulse to whip our your phone and take photos &mdash; I did just that. But after you get a few good shots, remember to put it down and be present with the piece. &nbsp;

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<img alt="" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/file_container/RmlsZUNvbnRhaW5lch4fMjYwODgwMDAz/full.jpg" />Installation view and still&nbsp;from the video playing inside Quantum Mirror.

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Only six people are allowed inside at a time &mdash; each $25 ticket buys you a thirty minute experience &mdash; and it is a far more intimate affair than other notable immersion experiences currently in town. Unlike the wallpapered warehouse effect of the Immersive Van Gogh Exhibit (which I wrote about <a href="https://www.mplsart.com/written/2021/08/immersing-vincent" target="_blank">here</a>), Quantum Mirror is scaled quite nicely to its subject: the human body. &nbsp;

&ldquo;Architecturally I designed the room after a toroid, which is the geometric shape of a donut,&rdquo; Stein tells us. &ldquo;That shape is used to express almost every energetic field in both physics and esoterics.&rdquo; The room&rsquo;s looping shape also connects to the looping (and inescapable) video narrative, to the circular rhythm of the droning soundtrack, and to the seemingly endless depth and distance you perceive in the infinitely reflected mirrored surfaces. Brian Skalak, the Director of REM5, tells us that claustrophobia has not been much of an issue so far for visitors; those with a fear of heights, however,&nbsp;have had a harder time. Look down at your feet, and you&rsquo;ll understand why (also, to my friends out there in skirts and kilts, consider yourselves warned). &nbsp;

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<img alt="" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/file_container/RmlsZUNvbnRhaW5lch4fMjcwODQwMDAz/full.jpg" />One vertiginous view inside Quantum Mirror, and a reminder to wear clean&nbsp;socks.

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The mirrored chamber creates a&nbsp;visual experience that&nbsp;runs full-bleed across your line of sight, and really the only boring part of the entire installation is when you catch your own reflection, normal and unrefracted, in the flat facing walls. I suppose those make for good selfies, though. Quantum Mirror sets its sights almost pretentiously high, billing itself as a meditation on the impact that technology is having on our animal consciousness. The deep thoughts are there, if you want to think them, though cleverly clouded by the marvel of visual wonder and fancy tech. It is an exercise in using technology to criticize our obsession with technology, housed inside a business built entirely around&nbsp;technology. The experience is engaging and unsettling, like a half-hour inside a funhouse Fortress of Solitude. You are born alone, you die alone, and here you are asked to reckon with the fact that you also post on Instagram alone. Our data, however&hellip; that&rsquo;s another story. They live on in perpetuity, forming an incomplete and exploitable identity all their own&nbsp;&mdash; an avatar, you might say, or a digital shadow. Where this parallel multiverse of ones and zeroes will lead us here in the real world is anybody&#39;s guess.

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<img alt="" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/file_container/RmlsZUNvbnRhaW5lch4fMjYyODMwMDAz/full.jpg" />The Quantum Mirror vestibule at REM5, with the portal into the mirrored chamber at center.

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Speaking of bodies, there are questions of accessibility that remain unanswered at the moment, primarily around whether the installation can accommodate wheelchairs &mdash; not due to spatial limitations but to avoid the mirrored floor from being scratched by anything harder than socks.&nbsp;Skalak&nbsp;encourages visitors to reach out, saying &ldquo;We will happily field any questions about accessibility.&rdquo; &nbsp;

To their credit, this isn&rsquo;t a one-off foray into the arts for REM5. This installation will stay up at least into Spring of 2022, and meanwhile the company has other plans in the works, including an augmented reality collaboration with Northern Spark, an art gallery for community projects to live inside a WebXR space for the Great Northern Festival, and Tilt Brush VR painting sessions with local artists like <a href="https://www.instagram.com/insidetherobot/" target="_blank">Linnea Maas</a>. &nbsp;

Back in the front lobby, on the way out, you might notice an old Nintendo Gamecube hooked up in the corner, a now vintage relic from the turn of the century. It&rsquo;s a funny reminder, like the patent posters in the bathroom, of the obsolescence hot on the heels of any new tech. As with the crude graphics of N64&rsquo;s &ldquo;Goldeneye&rdquo; or the clunky flying triangles of Super Nintendo&rsquo;s &ldquo;Starfox&rdquo; before it, some day we will look back on these early experiments in virtual immersion and marvel at how relatively little it took to make us marvel. Quantum Mirror stands on its own merits, but it&rsquo;s also worth a visit if only to prepare yourself for what comes next.&nbsp;<span style="-webkit-text-stroke-color:rgb(237, 22, 144); background-color:rgb(250, 250, 250); caret-color:rgb(237, 22, 144); color:rgb(237, 22, 144); font-family:roboto,helvetica,arial,sans-serif; font-size:15.75px; letter-spacing:0.1686825007200241px">◼︎

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<img alt="" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/file_container/RmlsZUNvbnRhaW5lch4fMjcwODQwMDA0/full.jpg" />A detail of the framed patent document for the Gamebody, on view in REM5&#39;s restroom.

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<a href="https://www.mplsart.com/events/quantum-mirror" target="_blank">Quantum Mirror</a> is on currently on view at REM5 VR Lab in St. Louis Park. Tickets and more info are available at&nbsp;<a href="https://www.quantummirrormn.com" target="_blank">quantummirrormn.com</a>. For more info on&nbsp;events and attractions at REM5, visit&nbsp;<a href="https://www.rem5vr.com" target="_blank">rem5vr.com</a>&nbsp;or follow along on Instagram <a href="https://www.instagram.com/rem5vr/" target="_blank">@rem5vr</a> and <a href="https://www.instagram.com/quantummirrormn/" target="_blank">@quantummirrormn</a>. To see more of Adrian Stein&#39;s work, check out <a href="https://www.looneystein.com" target="_blank">his website</a> or follow him <a href="https://www.instagram.com/looneystein/" target="_blank">@looneystein</a>.

Use code <a href="https://www.eventbrite.com/e/quantum-mirror-tickets-170187763181?discount=MPLSART" target="_blank">MPLSART at checkout</a> for $5 off your ticket. MPLSART does not receive any profit from this partnership; it&#39;s just a treat for our readers that REM5 has offered.

REM5 is located at&nbsp;4950 W 35TH St in St. Louis Park, MN. Open to the public Thursday 3 - 9pm, Friday 3 - 10pm, Saturday 11am - 9pm, and Sunday 12 - 7pm.

All photos are by the author.

Now on view at REM5 VR Lab in St. Louis Park, the art installation combines VR, video, and a hall of mirrors to reflect on our bodies and souls in the digital age

Reflecting Realities: Quantum Mirror's Suburban Immersion 

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Minneapolis&rsquo;s new Public Service Building, which centralizes office space for 1,300 city employees formerly spread out across half a dozen different locations, is an art-filled dazzler. The&nbsp;care taken towards utilizing the natural light coming from the windows (by lighting designer Buro Happold)&nbsp;gives the building an open feeling, while the&nbsp;lighting design by Michael Cohen&nbsp;on some of the artworks inside&nbsp;adds&nbsp;a dash of whimsy. On each of the building&rsquo;s ten floors&nbsp;there are murals, such as Kao Lee Thao&rsquo;s Threads of Life honoring Hmong traditions, and ceiling-mounted sculptural installations, like Alexander Tylevich&rsquo;s Impressions, made to look like fingerprints. In all, the work transforms the city building into a gallery of contemporary art.

Located at 505 Fourth Ave. S and designed by Minnesota-based architecture firm Meyer, Scherer, &amp; Rockcastle, Ltd. (MSR Design) in collaboration with the Danish design firm Henning Larsen, the building features a glass exterior that acts as a mirror to the buildings that surround it, including&nbsp;City Hall, which&nbsp;sits kitty corner from it. &nbsp;

According to the City&#39;s website, the&nbsp;investment in public art, in total, cost $2 million. Working with the City&rsquo;s Public Arts Administrator&nbsp;Mary Altman, the Community Planning &amp; Economic Development (CPED) department, and Project Manager Kirstin Wiegmann&nbsp;was artist&nbsp;Tristan Al-Haddad, of&nbsp;Formations Studio. &nbsp;

It wasn&rsquo;t Formations&rsquo; first collaboration with the City. Back in 2018, Al-Haddad&rsquo;s orbital sculpture, Nimbus, was installed outside of the Central Library, creating a gathering space and also an outdoor theater on Nicollet Mall. Al-Haddad&#39;s new&nbsp;sculpture, Current Conditions,&nbsp;lofts above the main staircase located near the front entrance. It&rsquo;s made up of luminous squiggles that drip like rain&nbsp;droplets from the ceiling. They change color as the light shifts from day to night.

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<img alt="" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/file_container/RmlsZUNvbnRhaW5lch4fMjg0ODIwMDAz/full.jpg" />Tristan Al-Haddad,&nbsp;Current Conditions, acrylic &amp; lights, 2020.&nbsp;Image by Corey Gaffer, courtesy of the City. From the City&#39;s website: &quot;Current Conditions reflects the changing climate of the City and planet. The shape evolves daily and over time. The 98 chains represent the City&rsquo;s weather conditions. Together they shift across the ceiling from the west side towards the east.&quot;

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In an artists&#39; dialogue this past&nbsp;Thursday, Al-Haddad said&nbsp;that after applying through the City&rsquo;s RFQ process in 2016, he was commissioned in 2017 and&nbsp;then joined by the other 13 artists and artist&nbsp;groups in 2019.&nbsp;According to Al-Haddad, the first phase of the project included developing a conceptual master plan about filling the building with works that were curated, architecturally integrated into the space, and also had as much diversity as possible. &ldquo;What we came up with was works that would be part of an art core,&rdquo; he said, using a&nbsp;phrase borrowed from the notion of a building core (i.e. what allows for flow between floors, containing staircases, elevators, electric cables, water pipes, etc.). &nbsp;

The foil to many of the works in the building is the Great Seal of the City of Minneapolis,&nbsp;made in 1967 by Rich McFarland Cut Stone Company, based on a design approved by the City Council in 1878. Originally installed in the Minneapolis Auditorium in 1968, the 33,000 pound stone behemoth depicts a Minneapolis scene by Saint&nbsp;Anthony Falls, with images of wheat and industry. Several of the commissioned&nbsp;artists worked in direct response to the erasure of Dakota and Native American presence in Minnesota reflected in the seal. &nbsp;

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<img alt="" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/file_container/RmlsZUNvbnRhaW5lch4fMjg0ODMwMDAz/full.jpg" />Marlena Myles,&nbsp;Indigenous Wealth, ink on vinyl, 2020. Image courtesy of the City. From the City&#39;s website: &quot;Minneapolis&rsquo; early economic wealth developed around Saint Anthony Falls, featured in the City Seal. To Dakota people, upon whose homelands Minneapolis resides, these sacred falls are known as Ow&aacute;mniyomni (&#39;three whirlpools&#39;) and represent a different economic meaning. In one oral tradition, the Horse Nation met the Dakota/Lakota at &#39;great whirlpools&#39;&nbsp;and those horses would bring great economic benefits to the people.

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For example, Marlena Myles has created two works that speak to the Dakota&rsquo;s relationship with this place. Her mural Indigenous Wealth shows a scene, like the Great Seal, by Saint&nbsp;Anthony Falls. Rather than industry and activities that take from the land and water, her work reflects Dakota traditions of being a good relative to the natural world. &nbsp;

&ldquo;As Native people we have philosophies that are opposite of the ways that Minneapolis grew from that site,&rdquo; Myles said at the artist talk. &ldquo;Native people have a very complex and important story, and all of that is stored right here in this land that we walk on each day.&rdquo; &nbsp; &nbsp;

Myles also created a series of window glass works, which allow light into city office spaces while shielding them from view, using Dakota words that reflect notions of caring toward life, people, and harmony. &nbsp;

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<img alt="" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/file_container/RmlsZUNvbnRhaW5lch4fMjkwODUwMDAz/full.jpg" />Witt Siasoco, Power and Play, ink on vinyl, 2020. Image courtesy of the City. From the City&#39;s website: &quot;Drawing inspiration from the Mississippi River, this mural illustrates how water is the source of our power and play - metaphorically and literally.&quot;

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Witt Siasoco also points to Saint Anthony Falls for his mural, Power and Play, as he layers historic images of vibrant scenes from Minneapolis life. After touring the City&#39;s&nbsp;Public Works facilities, Siasoco&nbsp;reflected,&nbsp;&quot;It was beautiful to see the real structure of the City and the people that make that happen, and they go without applause. In general, this piece is really about individuals&rsquo; relationship to the gigantic system that is the City, and a love letter to the people that work for them.&rdquo;

Other artists participated in engagement processes with the City workers on whose floors their artwork would end up as well. Rory Erler Wakemup&nbsp;met with City employees who formerly worked at a building near the Mississippi River. &ldquo;Folks said they would miss the interaction with the river,&rdquo; Wakemup&nbsp;said.&nbsp;His work, Anangokaa (There are Many Stars), is made up of mirrors and starry night lights. It has a watery effect and also dreams of distant futures. &nbsp;

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<img alt="" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/file_container/RmlsZUNvbnRhaW5lch4fMjc4ODYwMDA0/full.jpg" />

Rory Erler Wakemup,&nbsp;Anangokaa&nbsp;(There are Many Stars), mirrored polycarbonate and lighting, 2020. Image courtesy of the City. From the City&#39;s website: &quot;In many cultures, the Milky Way is compared to water and a pathway in the sky. People are a product of the lifecycle of the stars. The relaxing environments of flowing water and the night sky most connect us to the ethereal world and our understanding of the multiverse. This artwork seeks to create a similar tranquil experience for the people in this building.&quot;

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Another artist, James Brenner, worked with the City&rsquo;s Investigations Bureau to create Balance, 340 glass columns made up of moving lights. Brenner said it became apparent that working with the police department carried with it a lot of&nbsp;anxiety. &ldquo;Nobody likes to see them when they show up,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;They have to stick together when they show up&mdash; they have a difficult job.&rdquo; His work uses the scales of justice as a way to tease out the idea that there are many sides to one story. He also&nbsp;wanted to create a sense of calm for the officers passing through the installation each day.&nbsp;Angela Two Stars similarly offers a sympathetic viewpoint bolstering the work of police officers with The Number One Goal.&nbsp; &nbsp;

Futures North (Adam Marcus, Molly Reichert, Daniel Dean, &amp;&nbsp;John Kim) created three noteworthy pieces on the building&rsquo;s windows as well as the skyway. Their designs are bird-safe, in contrast to the debut of Viking Stadium visible to the west, which faced criticism for attracting birds to their death when that building first opened. Lines of Flight, Avian&nbsp;is inspired by migratory bird flight patterns, while Lines of Flight, Human&nbsp;draws on human migration patterns. Finally, Lines of Acknowledgment&nbsp;uses white dashed lines to illustrate Indigenous place names. &nbsp;

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<img alt="" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/file_container/RmlsZUNvbnRhaW5lch4fMjg4ODQwMDAz/full.jpg" />Aaron Marx, Genesis, wood &amp; lighting, 2020. Image courtesy of the City. From the City&#39;s website: &quot;Inspired by images of the falls, reflections off the river, and dappled light through trees, the thousands of lights change seasonally and in response to hourly changes of the river volume based on live data.&quot;

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Many of the projects draw on research about the city&rsquo;s history, transformed into art-making. Aaron Marx&rsquo;s Genesis&nbsp;uses LIDAR data to illuminate Minneapolis&rsquo;s topography, using locally-sourced wood cut from dead trees killed by emerald ash borer.&nbsp;Christopher E. Harrison&rsquo;s Elements, meanwhile, is a colorful&nbsp;abstraction that draws on city planning maps. The artist CRICE&nbsp;researched racist housing policy while also imagining a better and more equitable future for the city. &ldquo;I felt comfortable making the work for Brown and Black employees,&rdquo; CRICE says. &ldquo;I wanted them to have something they could relate their stories to &mdash; that they were seen in a public space.&rdquo; &nbsp;

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<img alt="" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/file_container/RmlsZUNvbnRhaW5lch4fMjc4ODYwMDAz/full.jpg" />LUCITO (Andrew Lucia and Iroha Ito),&nbsp;Likeness of an Alegory&nbsp;(view from directly below), plastic and fabric, 2020. Image courtesy of the City. From the City&#39;s website: &quot;It is composed of over 40 anamorphic silhouettes. Between light and dark areas, profiles are revealed only at specific moments and never in total, rendering the overall composition illegible from any single vantage.&quot; Photo Credit: Peter J. Sieger

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Other notable works are Constellation by Laurie Borggreve, a hand-made resin, metal, and glass sculpture glowing on the ceiling, and Likeness of an Allegory&nbsp;by LUCITO (Andrew Lucia and Iroha Ito), a black and white installation&nbsp;that contains 40 hidden silhouettes of iconic Minneapolis images. &ldquo;It is a bit of a Rorschach,&rdquo; Lucia said. &ldquo;People see things in there that we didn&rsquo;t intend there at all.&rdquo; &nbsp;

In all, the work, even&nbsp;when it leans toward being overly positive about city government, is a noteworthy investment in artists and the importance of art in our daily lives. You can see all of the work <a href="https://www.mplsart.com/events/celebrate-the-new-public-artworks" target="_blank">this Friday, from 4-7pm, during a public reception</a>.&nbsp;<span style="-webkit-text-stroke-color:rgb(237, 22, 144); background-color:rgb(250, 250, 250); caret-color:rgb(237, 22, 144); color:rgb(237, 22, 144); font-family:roboto,helvetica,arial,sans-serif; font-size:15.75px; letter-spacing:0.1686825007200241px">◼︎&nbsp; &nbsp;&nbsp;

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<img alt="" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/file_container/RmlsZUNvbnRhaW5lch4fMjg4ODQwMDA0/full.jpg" />

The Public Service Building is located at 505 Fourth Ave S in downtown Minneapolis. The public reception for the artwork takes place Friday, December 10th, from 4-7pm, with remarks at 4:30.&nbsp;

<a href="https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/b5137fe509354f6c80ae49ac487ad09f" target="_blank">You can view a virtual tour of the works online here</a>.&nbsp;During normal business hours, three of the artworks will be available by appointment only due to their location&nbsp;in the building. The City will be offering other&nbsp;public&nbsp;tours of the art in the future, and you can contact Mary Altman for more information at&nbsp;Mary.Altman@minneapolismn.gov.

Banner image: Futures North&nbsp;(Adam Marcus, Molly&nbsp;Reichert, Daniel Dean, &amp;&nbsp;John Kim),&nbsp;Lines of Flight, Human&nbsp;(detail on exterior windows), 2020. Image courtesy of the City.

Throughout ten floors, inside and out, commissioned works from sixteen artists illuminate Minnesota's cultural history (and light up the hallways, as well)

Public Art Unveiled at City's New Public Service Building

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In the dining room hallway of my grandmother&#39;s house there hang two prints of her making, products of a series of printmaking classes led by art educator Bill Slack at Highpoint in the early 2000&rsquo;s. The large, mask-like monoprints are Speak No Evil and Through/Within/Beyond, created using the same template then altered individually. &ldquo;It was a very interesting process because I had never done anything like that before,&rdquo; she says. It was there, in my grandmother&rsquo;s house, that I was first exposed to printmaking. &nbsp;

As a teen, her love of the arts and culture led me to the Loft Literary Center for poetry workshops and bookmaking classes, the Minnesota Historical Society for exhibits, and eventually, back to Highpoint for their Free Ink Days. Marked by the crude block prints created by me and my younger brother, the walls of our family home are now evidence of a Black matriarchal lineage, and a continuing artistic exploration. &nbsp;

Cornrows, combs, cotton and quilt, braids and barrettes; Objects once relegated solely to Black familiarity become cultural motifs, coalescing with narrative themes of hypervisibility and obscurity. <a href="https://www.mplsart.com/events/a-contemporary-black-matriarchal-lineage-in-printmaking">A Contemporary Black Matriarchal Lineage in Printmaking</a> is the first of its kind; an exhibition dedicated to Black women printmakers, curated by Black women printmakers, Tanekeya Word and Delita Martin. &ldquo;Like our foremothers,&rdquo; Word writes, &ldquo;Black women printmakers have used the tools in our hands to create visual languages that tell the stories of our past, future, and the in-between spaces within fractal time.&rdquo; Featuring twelve Black women printmakers, the exhibition is on view at the Highpoint Center for Printmaking, a Twin Cities&rsquo; staple for printmaking and education. &nbsp; &nbsp;

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<img alt="" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/file_container/RmlsZUNvbnRhaW5lch4fMjkwODMwMDAz/full.jpg" />

<img alt="" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/file_container/RmlsZUNvbnRhaW5lch4fMjcyODYwMDAz/full.jpg" />Top: Through/Within/Beyond and Speak No Evil, prints made by the author&#39;s grandmother at Highpoint&nbsp;in the early 2000s.&nbsp;Bottom: Delita Martin, &quot;Keepsakes&quot; series, mixed media&nbsp;collograph &amp; lithographs, 2020. Photos by the author.

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In the niche between the main gallery and printmaking studios exists &ldquo;Keepsakes,&rdquo;&nbsp;a collection of prints produced at Highpoint&nbsp;by Delita Martin in collaboration with Highpoint&#39;s Master Printer Cole Rogers and other print staff. Christening dresses provide the backdrop for six pencil-like portraits of Black girls, adorned by stitched outlines that mimic naturally occurring geometrics, like flowers and leaves. The christening dresses are on view atop the flat file drawers &mdash; their three-dimensionality pressed paper-thin and starched stiff &mdash; as artifacts that elucidate Martin&rsquo;s layering of technique, material, and pattern. &ldquo;I create work that is a reflection of the social and spiritual spaces Black women inhabit,&rdquo; says Martin, citing inspiration&nbsp;from&nbsp;oral traditions as well as vintage and family photos. Though not technically part of the larger exhibition,&nbsp;&ldquo;Keepsakes&rdquo; serves almost as prerequisite viewing for the full gallery as it provides perspective on Black interiority and gives context to ideas of contemporary Black matriarchal lineage. &nbsp; &nbsp;

The twinkling, candy-colored barrettes of Althea Murphy-Price&rsquo;s Crowns is an intimate evocation of childhood identity exploration, conjuring the sounds of Black girls running, playing, and moving adorned in clittering and clacking plastic accessories. Sharpe Things depicts tools of personal care that hold, affix, and organize; needles, picks and pins, a rattail comb. Murphy-Price describes a freedom of experimentation with these ornaments, how the sovereignty of determining her own appearance as a child created a realm for her to envision a multitude of possible identities, blending fantasy and reality. Each image was printed by building layers of ink, one on top of the other, creating a glittering texture and playfully suggesting their compositions. &ldquo;These objects were tethered to my understanding of race, culture, and femininity and they remain bound to an inner impulse and interest in appearance,&rdquo; says Murphy-Price. &nbsp; &nbsp;

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<img alt="" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/file_container/RmlsZUNvbnRhaW5lch4fMjU4ODYwMDAz/full.jpg" />Installation view. At left: Latoya M. Hobbs,&nbsp;The Studio, Carving Out Time: Scene 5, woodcut, 2021. At right: Karen J. Revis,&nbsp;I AM SOMEBODY: Black Man&nbsp;and&nbsp;2020, both linocuts on handmade paper, 2021. Photo by Russ White.

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By Latoya M. Hobbs, Carving Out Time is a 96&rdquo; x 114&rdquo; woodcut, composed of five scenes that bestow an explicit interpretation of Black motherhood. Hobbs, a mother and working artist herself, is center, encircled by her own works in various stages of completion, each work a depiction of relationship: a child embraced by a mother, a woman resting her head on another&rsquo;s shoulder, a cross-legged woman cradling her pregnant belly. Subtly imbued in the piece are Adinkra symbols, Ghanaian cultural markings that signify different values and spiritual concepts. Among those etched, duafe, a wooden comb signifying beauty, cleanliness and feminine qualities, and sankofa, taking the form of a heart, symbolizing to &ldquo;go back and get it,&rdquo; or learning from the past. Hobbs&rsquo; piece is magnificently intricate, lending itself to the physicality of tree rings, with each line distinctly visible and possessing both a literal and emotive weight from its engraving. &nbsp;

In other traditions, printmakers Stephanie Santana and Ann Johnson employ the use of fabric and alternative materials. &ldquo;I break all of the traditional &lsquo;printmaking rules,&rsquo;&rdquo; says Johnson. &ldquo;I do not print on paper. I take pride in pushing the boundaries of my medium.&rdquo; Her &quot;Auction Block Series,&quot; made up of the pieces Octoroon and Chattel examine the narrative of enslavement, moveable property, powerlessness, abuse, and trauma. Both pieces are images of Black women printed onto raw cotton, their gaze shrouded by the wispy white tufts of the plant. Santana&rsquo;s Reclamation is a quilted textile that features an image of the artist&rsquo;s grandmother, repeated six times in a visual incantation. &ldquo;Photographic images are set against a backdrop of haint blue, known for its use in homes through the American south as a way to ward off unwanted spirits,&rdquo; says Santana. &ldquo;Making the work is a process of healing and discovery: it allows me to reflect upon my own lived experiences and those of my ancestors, and connect them by creating a visual record.&rdquo; &nbsp;

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<img alt="" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/file_container/RmlsZUNvbnRhaW5lch4fMjc4ODUwMDAz/full.jpg" />

<img alt="" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/file_container/RmlsZUNvbnRhaW5lch4fMjc4ODUwMDA0/full.jpg" />Top: Ann Johnson, Chattel&nbsp;&amp;&nbsp;Octoroon,&nbsp;from the Auction Block Series, intaglio on raw cotton, 2021. Installation photo by Seth Dahlseid.&nbsp;Bottom: Stephanie Santana;&nbsp;Reclamation;&nbsp;screenprint, monotype, cotton textile and batting, machine quilting; 2021. Images courtesy of Highpoint Center for Printmaking.&nbsp;

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The works of these twelve artists are connected not only by shared identity, but by the ways in which their printmaking techniques conceptualize, evolve, explore, and preserve the art form. &ldquo;My lived experience as a Black woman printmaker in the 21st century is reflected in the process of printmaking itself,&rdquo; says Paula Wilson. &ldquo;I am dyslexic, and printmaking&rsquo;s inverted process was a natural fit for me.&rdquo; Her print, Mooning, is a reverent yet cheekily playful repeating pattern of butts. Or, as described, &ldquo;two heavenly bodies, the crescent moon and the human ass, exist[ing] as one&hellip; a testament to our crude divinity.&rdquo; &nbsp; &nbsp;

I left Highpoint feeling partially like I wasted the experience of the Free Ink workshop being a sulky teenager. But more so, I left feeling affirmed. Intrigued. Inspired. I left marveling at the abundance of our (Black women&rsquo;s) creativity and expression. I was left emotional, struck by the familiarity of the combs, the fractal-esque cornrows, the sight of cotton plants, wood-grain flesh, braids and barrettes, and the Blackness of it all. As Tanekeya Word says, &ldquo;Stories are being told; are you listening to what Black women are saying, are you seeing what Black women are creating? If you see us, if you hear us, &lsquo;you would understand form and line and discipline and order and America*.&rsquo;&rdquo; <span style="-webkit-text-stroke-color:rgb(237, 22, 144); background-color:rgb(250, 250, 250); caret-color:rgb(237, 22, 144); color:rgb(237, 22, 144); font-family:roboto,helvetica,arial,sans-serif; font-size:15.75px; letter-spacing:0.1686825007200241px">◼︎

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<img alt="" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/file_container/RmlsZUNvbnRhaW5lch4fMjgyODMwMDAz/full.jpg" />&nbsp;Tanekeya Word;&nbsp;tender: a sisterhood anthem, (B-side) fig. 006;&nbsp;linocut, relief ink, watercolor, ink, gouache, &amp;&nbsp;hand quilting; 2021. Image courtesy of Highpoint Center for Printmaking.

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<a href="https://www.highpointprintmaking.org/calendar/2021/9/24/cbmlip">A Contemporary Black Matriarchal Lineage in Printmaking</a> is on view at Highpoint Center for Printmaking until Dec 4th. Gallery hours are&nbsp;Monday&nbsp;-&nbsp;Friday 10am - 4pm and Saturday 12&nbsp;- 4pm. A 55-page limited edition exhibition catalogue is also available.

*Excerpt from Lucille Clifton, &ldquo;study the masters,&rdquo; Blessing the Boats: New and Selected Poems 1988-2000,&nbsp;(Rochester, NY: BOA Editions, 2000), 25.&nbsp;

Banner image: Paula Wilson,&nbsp;Locks&nbsp;(detail), relief print.

On view through December 4th at Highpoint Center for Printmaking, this group exhibition pulls from the past, looks to the future, and shows us the present

Study the Black Matriarchs: A Contemporary Black Matriarchal Lineage in Printmaking

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The two gallery rooms that make up <a href="https://www.mplsart.com/events/what-opens-like-a-blaze-of-fire">what opens&mdash;like a blaze of fire</a>, now on view at The Catherine G. Murphy Gallery at St. Catherine University, envelop visitors in mysterious plays of light and shadow. Presented in conjunction with an artist book, the project &mdash; created by visual artist Charles Matson Lume with poets Joyce Sutphen and Galilee Peaches &mdash; offers a sensorial experience of literature and art. &nbsp;

In one room, ripe oranges are set amidst patterns of electric night lights and extension cords, atop a metallic sheet, with additional reflective rectangles adhered to the wall. The effect is ghostly, almost post-apocalyptic. The oranges glow in the lights, almost too perfect to eat, their vibrant color reflected on the foil below them. The installation looks a bit like a science experiment, one that is pristine and also somewhat foreboding. &nbsp;

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<img alt="" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/file_container/RmlsZUNvbnRhaW5lch4fMjY2ODMwMDAz/full.jpg" />Charles&nbsp;Matson Lume&#39;s&nbsp;east gallery installation. Photo by the author.

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In the other room, the more vibrant of the two, film sheets are layered on top of each other, propped up with a pattern of rocks that make them bulge and ripple. Lights from above reflect on the film paper and shine up at the ceiling and wall, creating a transfixing texture of light that harnesses different colors of the rainbow spectrum: yellows, blues, and oranges all created through the bending light. &nbsp;

You can get lost in the sinews of light. Some of them look like elements of the body&mdash; is that muscle tissue? Is that a nipple there? Perhaps it&rsquo;s blood flowing through the capillaries. The colors dance, creating a sense of movement that flickers ever so slightly. &nbsp;

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<img alt="" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/file_container/RmlsZUNvbnRhaW5lch4fMjc2ODMwMDAz/full.jpg" />Detail view of Charles&nbsp;Matson Lume&#39;s&nbsp;west gallery installation. Photo courtesy of The Catherine G. Murphy Gallery.

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The artist book provides, if not context for the installations, perhaps content adjacent to them. It&rsquo;s made of less than a dozen poems that slip in between photographs and designs that recall elements of the installation. The colorful rectangles on paper remind the viewer of the silvery rectangles on the wall in the gallery. There&rsquo;s also a luminescence in a number of the photographs, as well as a sense of beauty mixed with desolation. The images and poems are couched in between blank pages that make up more than two thirds of the book. They seem to invite the reader to add their own thoughts and poems to its blank pages. Or, possibly, the blank pages are simply that: a silence that we wade in to allow the art to sift through eventually. &nbsp;

The Former Poet Laureate of Minnesota, Joyce Sutphen, writes the first section of short poems. The poems hold their breath. They wait, bored and uneasy. &nbsp;

&ldquo;It didn&rsquo;t last&mdash; that moment I wished for,&rdquo; she writes in &ldquo;That Moment.&rdquo; &nbsp;

&nbsp;

I was always making the same mistake, 

&nbsp; 

thinking I could slow down time or erase &nbsp;

the changes it made in everything. &nbsp;

&nbsp;

An agitation, escalated by the isolation of the pandemic, reveals itself in her poems. In &ldquo;Summer Days,&rdquo; she writes: &ldquo;Shall I compare them? To what?&rdquo; The voice is exasperated, while at the same time open to observation and reflection. &nbsp;

Light figures into poems by both Sutphen and Peaches. &ldquo;&hellip;Notice how/ the light is never lost, how it lingers/in the darkest hour, how it changes and/ reflects and makes of time a little stay,&rdquo; writes Sutphen. &nbsp;

Meanwhile, Peaches also references the light in her description of a starling flock, in the poem &ldquo;a cloud dreams like a mountain is radicalized in the light&rdquo;: &nbsp;

&nbsp;

the murmuration throws itself against the screened sky &nbsp;

sun-damaged, with browned edges 

moving into a ground ultramarine &nbsp;

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The colors she references &mdash; later she writes of &ldquo;violet streaks at the bottom of the bowl&rdquo;&mdash; are echoed in the dancing colors of light in&nbsp;Lume&rsquo;s installation. &nbsp;

The books&mdash; while they last&mdash; are available for free. The best way to experience the poems is in the gallery, allowing the colors and the light and the hodgepodge of found objects to dance along with you in waiting. Waiting for the pandemic to end, maybe. Waiting for the spring to come. Waiting for something better, or simply waiting for the sake of waiting, as memories and emotions swirl and ebb and pass through you in the silent dark. <span style="-webkit-text-stroke-color:rgb(237, 22, 144); background-color:rgb(250, 250, 250); caret-color:rgb(237, 22, 144); color:rgb(237, 22, 144); font-family:roboto,helvetica,arial,sans-serif; font-size:15.75px; letter-spacing:0.1686825007200241px">◼︎&nbsp;&nbsp;

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<img alt="" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/file_container/RmlsZUNvbnRhaW5lch4fMjc2ODIwMDAz/full.jpg" />Detail view of Charles&nbsp;Matson Lume&#39;s&nbsp;east gallery installation. Photo by the author.

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<a href="https://www.mplsart.com/events/what-opens-like-a-blaze-of-fire">what opens&mdash; like a blaze of fire</a>, is on view through December 12th&nbsp;at The Catherine G. Murphy Gallery at St. Catherine University, 2004 Randolph Ave, St. Paul. Gallery&nbsp;hours are&nbsp;Mon&nbsp;&ndash; Thurs 8am &ndash; 8pm,&nbsp;Fri&nbsp;8am &ndash; 6pm, and Sat &ndash; Sun&nbsp;12&nbsp;&ndash;&nbsp;6 pm.

There will be an artist talk Dec 2nd at 6:30 pm. Visit&nbsp;<a href="http://gallery.stkate.edu" target="_blank">gallery.stkate.edu</a> for more info, and please review their <a href="https://www.stkate.edu/coronavirus-info/health-safety" target="_blank">campus COVID policies</a> before visiting. Visitors are required to wear a mask and observe posted capacity limits in the gallery.&nbsp;&nbsp;

Banner image photo courtesy of The Catherine G. Murphy Gallery.

Spanning two galleries at The Catherine G. Murphy Gallery, Charles Matson Lume's mixed media installations pair with a book of poems by Joyce Sutphen & Galilee Peaches

Dancing With What's Absent: 'what opens — like a blaze of fire' at St. Kate's

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Flags are&nbsp;everywhere, when you start to notice them. Flags for countries, states, colleges, candidates, beliefs,&nbsp;and businesses.&nbsp;Flying from poles atop public buildings, hanging&nbsp;limp at 45&deg; angles next to&nbsp;your neighbor&#39;s&nbsp;front door, flapping in multitudes above car dealerships. That&#39;s not counting the ones printed on shirts and flyers and decals&nbsp;and underwear. There are even flags on the Moon&nbsp;&mdash;&nbsp;no fewer than seven, in fact&nbsp;(six planted by&nbsp;America from 1969-72&nbsp;and the seventh by China just last year).

They&#39;ve been part of our visual culture for centuries, originating as signals of military allegiance, political fealty, and colonial conquest. Now&nbsp;they&nbsp;have filtered down to the rest of us peasants as individualistic identifiers, symbols of our own&nbsp;personal&nbsp;allegiances.&nbsp;There is a proud defiance built into these pieces of cloth, a certain backbone as strong and straight as the flagpoles themselves, whether they&nbsp;celebrate&nbsp;LGBTQ+ pride, for instance, or a particular&nbsp;NFL team, or, in the case of the increasingly popular Punisher skulls, a white supremacist police state. &nbsp;

That signification has recently worked its way back up the ladder of power, reverse-engineered by&nbsp;demagogues like Donald Trump who realize the potential in crowd-sourcing symbology from the serfs they seek to control. Look no further than the spectacle of an American President standing at a podium <a href="https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-factcheck-blue-flag-trump/fact-check-u-s-and-thin-blue-line-flags-were-displayed-at-trump-wisconsin-rally-idUSKBN27C23W" target="_blank">backed&nbsp;not by the American flag</a> but by a massive&nbsp;Thin Blue Line banner. At the same time, I can&#39;t help but also think of the Black Lives Matter flag I pass by every day, flying&nbsp;high&nbsp;above Holy Trinity Lutheran Church&nbsp;just down the street from our bombed-out&nbsp;Third Precinct.

Waving in the wind, flags&nbsp;conjure drama and stir&nbsp;emotion. Hanging in the still air of&nbsp;an art gallery, they strike a different tone altogether&nbsp;&mdash;&nbsp;presented as objects for our consideration. And Alexa Horochowski&nbsp;gives us a lot to consider.

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<img alt="" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/file_container/RmlsZUNvbnRhaW5lch4fMjY0ODIwMDAz/full.jpg" />A collection of recent hand-sewn flags hand-sewn. Image courtesy of the artist.

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The Minneapolis-based artist, who holds dual citizenship in Argentina and who earned a BA in Journalism prior to her MFA, currently has several hand-sewn flags on view as part of <a href="https://www.mplsart.com/events/in-search-of-lost-time" target="_blank">In Search of Lost Time</a> at Dreamsong.&nbsp;Known for her large scale&nbsp;installations,&nbsp;prints, and videos reflecting on climate crisis, Horochowski&nbsp;consistently asks us to widen our lens beyond our own species, to see the truth of how our actions (and inaction) are impacting not just each other but the world in which we live. Speaking of her work as a whole, Horochowski references political theorist Jane Bennett, who &quot;argues that political theory needs to better recognize the active participation of nonhuman forces in events... [Bennett]&nbsp;asks us to consider a &rsquo;parliament of things&rsquo; in ways that provoke our democratic imaginations and interrupt our anthropocentric hubris.&quot;

Given that&nbsp;Horochowski&#39;s work&nbsp;spans so many&nbsp;topics, crises, and continents, our conversation could have reached just as far. Instead,&nbsp;I decided to anchor my questions&nbsp;to just&nbsp;one flag in particular&nbsp;&mdash; her commemoration of the attempted coup on January 6, 2021&nbsp;&mdash; and delve into its implications on political satire, artistic ownership, and how she thinks about her audience.

To dig into the many other questions with which the flags&nbsp;grapple, I recommend visiting them in person, on view at Dreamsong through December 4th.

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Russ White:&nbsp;Your work, to me, is that of a distiller &mdash; you boil large, difficult social truths down to succinct visual statements. Pitchforks rendered almost like stick figures; giant messy vortices made by simple styrofoam cups; a grocery cart camouflaged into an idyllic lake-side park. &nbsp;You&rsquo;ve also been working on a series of hand-sewn flags, dating back to at least 2017 when you co-curated <a href="https://hyperallergic.com/352519/13-artists-design-flags-for-the-age-of-trump-with-plans-to-burn-them-later/" target="_blank">a show of artist-designed flags at the Soap Factory</a>, and currently you have several on view at Dreamsong. 

Given that flags have a long history in terms of warfare, conquest, and oppression as well as in protest against those forces, I&rsquo;m curious what your relationship with flags is. What is it that you are trying to distill with them? &nbsp;

Alexa Horochowski: The flags I have been producing came about after the killing of George Floyd in my South Minneapolis neighborhood. He was killed on my father&#39;s 85th birthday, during a pandemic, where I couldn&rsquo;t travel to Argentina to be with him. I channeled the weight of these synchronous events by making a memorial flag for George Floyd with the date of his death. The act of stitching it and being home-bound during the pandemic prompted me to sew over twenty linen flags representing events between 2019-2021. I am recording and synthesizing issues that came to the fore during the pandemic &mdash; an event caused by a novel coronavirus, born of habitat loss and interspecies entanglement &mdash; where non-human allyship, systemic racism, climate change, and autocratic politics have become the norm. &nbsp;

Because they are stitched, they take time to produce, so they don&#39;t have the immediacy of the news or infotainment media. I am interested in handmade flags that are used by small entities such as union groups and social clubs. They exist somewhere between a banner and a flag. Though I use symbols that are meaningful, the flags aren&#39;t tied to ritual in the way real flags are. I don&#39;t consider the George Floyd&nbsp;memorial flag as part of this body of work, because it does have a clear function as memorial. There is a contradiction in calling these objects flags because they are not meant to be unfurled outside the gallery. I think of them as marking time and serving as artifacts that remember what is so quickly consumed and forgotten in the news feed. &nbsp;

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<img alt="" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/file_container/RmlsZUNvbnRhaW5lch4fMjkwODEwMDAz/full.jpg" />

<img alt="" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/file_container/RmlsZUNvbnRhaW5lch4fMjcyODMwMDA0/full.jpg" />Top: Flag made to memorialize George Floyd&#39;s murder.&nbsp;Bottom: A few of the patches made for Horochowski&#39;s Jan. 6 Co-Conspirators flag, some of which are available to buy in <a href="https://shop.dreamsong.art" target="_blank">Dreamsong&#39;s&nbsp;online shop</a>. Images courtesy of the artist.

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RW: One of the most recent flags is a dark commemoration of the attempted coup on January 6th, 2021. For that flag, you created a series of faux far-right patches &mdash; not dissimilar from ones you might see sewn on a Proud Boy&rsquo;s sleeve, but pushing those ideologies to their ridiculous, illogical conclusions. &nbsp;When you <a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/CU510vUlo6Q/" target="_blank">teased the series on Instagram</a>, you said &ldquo;Because imagery can be readily co-opted, and the meaning distorted, I won&rsquo;t share all the patches outside of their context as a group.&rdquo; 

When working against such extreme political ideologies &mdash; beliefs so wild that they already seem self-satirizing &mdash; do you see any limitations or shortcomings to satire? Is irony losing its power? &nbsp;

AH: Yes, I do believe irony is losing power, but I&#39;m attempting something which I think is a bit more complex, not a one-off joke such as we hear on late-night comedy shows. The flags are tangible objects that get presented and displayed in a particular context. Instagram is not their ultimate platform. I was recently at MOMA and saw a film/performance by &Ouml;yvind Falhstr&ouml;m, Mao-Hope March, 1966, where he had seven people march down New York&#39;s Fifth Avenue carrying placards with photos of Mao Tse Tung and Bob Hope (America&#39;s foremost comedian at the time). In the audio, we hear a recording of viewer&#39;s comments and the answers to the question &quot;Are you happy?&quot; One can interpret this piece as being completely irreverent, a joke, and it was likely infuriating to some when he made it. But it can also be seen as an allusion to the U.S. Declaration of Independence, and a critique of how the political is mixing with entertainment, a sentiment that continues to be relevant today. I was surprised by how much it resonated in 2021. Like many artworks, it likely had some notoriety in its time, then faded, and now the content is once again activated by current events. An astute curator noticed this aspect of the artwork and has once again deployed it for consumption. &nbsp;

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<img alt="" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/file_container/RmlsZUNvbnRhaW5lch4fMjgyODEwMDAz/full.jpg" />&Ouml;yvind Falhstr&ouml;m,&nbsp;Mao-Hope March, still from film of performance, 0:04:30, 1966.&nbsp;

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My stance with the flags is critical of a range of political events that have taken place during the era of climate change known as the Anthropocene, and Late Capitalism. For example, one of the earlier flags I made in 2019 deployed the German word &quot;Schadenfreude,&quot; which means taking pleasure in the misfortune of others. I made this flag when Trump announced he was positive for Covid-19. Trump&#39;s illness materialized on the heels of a concerted campaign by the president and his White House to downplay the Covid-19 pandemic, potentially resulting in the death of thousands of people. Just because we can&#39;t quantify the number of people who died because of Trump&#39;s negligence, nor punish him for his actions, it doesn&#39;t mean it didn&#39;t happen. &quot;Schadenfreude&quot; is a word that is poignant to many people around the world but wasn&#39;t completely understood in the United States until the election of Donald Trump. This is a word that requires the experience of collective pain, and the crumbling of ideology such as manifest destiny, to be fully understood. &nbsp;

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RW: As you mention in the Instagram post I referenced, those patches could easily be recontextualized and co-opted, similar to what happened with Pepe the frog or the phrases &ldquo;Fake news&rdquo; and &quot;deplorables,&quot; for instance. A disturbing number of people are proud of what happened on January 6th, and I could see some of them even flying this flag proudly (or the Stop the Steal or Hoax flags, for that matter). Does an artist maintain ownership of their intent once a work enters the world? &nbsp;

AH: I may have overstated my point, in that the Jan. 6 flag is not vague about its politics and the group of 6 patches include opposing viewpoints between various right-wing groups, including the GOP. I don&#39;t think a Q-Anon believer, 3 Percenter, Anti-vaxxer, or GOP congressperson would dare fly this flag without altering it by removing or covering some aspects of it. If someone steals from my studio the &quot;Stop the Steal&quot; flag &mdash; a hand-sewn copy of an amateur sign done in felt pen that was at the Jan. 6 insurrection &mdash; they very well could take it home and feel they scored a wonderful reusable flag...or because it looks amateurish, they may prefer to print one that looks professional at the local Kinko&#39;s. &nbsp;

It is true that in the era of fake news, memes, and so many far-fetched conspiracy theories irony has lost a lot of its bite. However, I am arguing that what I am doing with the patches and the flags goes beyond meme-able propaganda. The risks I (and you) pointed out have to do with the problem of the internet and platforms such as IG and Facebook. The flags exist as handmade, material objects, stitched of linen and felt. They are unlikely to get co-opted unless I make a concerted effort to make them go viral. My concern was that if I posted a detail shot that isolated one patch from the others, it could be misused, because it is easy to copy and paste things on the internet. The object itself is harder to manipulate.

I don&#39;t have ownership over the flags once they are out in the world. So far, only two groups of three have been shown. In my studio, one of the flags I made includes platform icons for Whatsapp, YouTube, and Twitter, combined with the phrase &quot;pan y circo&quot;, a term that is casually used in South America to refer to situations where politicians give away palliative perks to generate public approval. In ancient Rome, the poet Juvenal coined this term to critique the politicians who gave away bread and circus games to the poor, a practice that guaranteed a quick rise to power and was an early version of voter suppression. In 2020, Facebook has promoted the dissemination of a range of fake news and conspiracy theories that threaten Democratic transfer of power. Aside from making flags that comment on the pitfalls of the internet, writing is another way that I can attempt to make the ideas in my work resonate beyond my lifetime and Instagram. &nbsp;

&nbsp;

<img alt="" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/file_container/RmlsZUNvbnRhaW5lch4fMjgwODIwMDA0/full.jpg" />Schadenfreude flag, 2019. Image courtesy of the artist.

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RW: You also write, &ldquo;I made this flag as a record of these events because there is a concerted effort to rewrite history and downplay the harm done by this coup attempt.&rdquo; It&rsquo;s tempting to think of explicitly political art as preaching to the choir, throwing bombs safely from inside friendly territory, but it is important to remember, as viewers, both that we also need reminding of the dangers we face and that we are complicit as well &mdash; art spaces are anything but neutral. &nbsp;

First, I&rsquo;m curious, did you consider making a patch for the centrists and moderate left as enablers/co-conspirators, and more generally, how do you think about audience when making your work? &nbsp;

AH:&nbsp;I love the idea of a flag/patch that implicates the centrists and moderate left as co-conspirators. Everything you say, I agree with. I am essentially preaching to the choir, especially on IG, and I often question whether I should even be using the app. However, it is a simple way to communicate with artists who are far away or I may not see regularly. Artist Leslie Fernandez recently posted an image of graffiti on the walls of Concepci&oacute;n, Chile. It is a drawing of an alien head (as in an extraterrestrial being) with the word &quot;Dignidad&quot; (Dignity) below it. She cleverly invented the term &quot;Dignidad Alien&iacute;gena&quot; or Aliendigenous Dignity, a play on words commingling indigenous with alien. Her invention takes on more complexity as we consider the status of the illegal alien in North America. &nbsp;

I have found that when making these flags I was thinking of both a South American audience and an American audience, translating back and forth from Spanish to English, trying to reconcile language and words and how meaning is formed. An early flag I embroidered in black, spells out, &quot;Negro Matapacos,&quot; the name of the riot dog that allied himself with humans during uprisings in Chile and became the mascot of recent protests in 2019-2020. I have returned regularly to Concepci&oacute;n, Chile, since directing a study abroad program in 2005. I think of Concepci&oacute;n and Minneapolis as sister cities within my intimate world view. By some fated, cosmic simultaneity, I landed first in Chile videotaping stray dogs during the &quot;Estallido Social&quot; of 2020 and two months later in Minneapolis protesting on the streets of South Minneapolis. &nbsp;

I have spent most of my career as an artist working with not-for-profit art centers creating ambitious installations that have a one- to three-month lifespan. When the exhibition comes down, most of the work goes into storage or gets disassembled if it&#39;s temporary. I have had the honor of having a few works collected by museums who are able to protect the work and even display it occasionally. I can sustain my practice by teaching at a university. As new commercial galleries open, I am having to re-evaluate my relationship with the exhibition space. &nbsp;<span style="-webkit-text-stroke-color:rgb(237, 22, 144); background-color:rgb(250, 250, 250); caret-color:rgb(237, 22, 144); color:rgb(237, 22, 144); font-family:roboto,helvetica,arial,sans-serif; font-size:15.75px; letter-spacing:0.1686825007200241px">◼︎

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<img alt="" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/file_container/RmlsZUNvbnRhaW5lch4fMjY2ODQwMDA0/full.jpg" />Bananacene patch, 2021.Image courtesy of the artist.

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For more information on Alexa Horochowski and her work, visit <a href="http://www.alexahorochowski.com" target="_blank">the artist&#39;s website</a> or follow her on Instagram <a href="https://www.instagram.com/alexahorochowski/" target="_blank">@alexahorochowski</a>. Her patches are available for purchase in <a href="https://shop.dreamsong.art" target="_blank">Dreamsong&#39;s online shop</a>.

Horochowski&#39;s flags are currently on display as part of the group exhibition <a href="https://www.mplsart.com/events/in-search-of-lost-time" target="_blank">In Search of Lost Time</a> at <a href="https://dreamsong.art" target="_blank">DREAMSONG</a> gallery in Northeast Minneapolis, through December 4th. Open&nbsp;Wed - Thurs 11am&nbsp;-&nbsp;5pm&nbsp;, Fri&nbsp;-&nbsp;Sat 12 - 6pm, and by appointment.

Banner image:&nbsp;Negro Matapacos&nbsp;flag. Image courtesy of the artist.

Currently on view in a group show at Dreamsong, the artist's hand-sewn banners tackle big, interwoven issues, from George Floyd's murder to the insurrection attempt to climate collapse

Democracy Flagging: On art, protest, and satire with Alexa Horochowski

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Light Grey Art Lab, which has held a gallery space in the Whittier neighborhood since 2012, is saying goodbye to its physical space with an exhibition called <a href="https://www.mplsart.com/events/the-end-is-nigh">The End is Nigh</a>.&nbsp;The 100th show of the arts group marks a shift in its direction, as it continues to offer educational programming, creative travel&nbsp;opportunities for artists, art books and other physical projects, and new gallery shows in the future not tied to a single physical space. &nbsp;

Starting in 2015, LGAL has been hosting arts programs in other countries, including residency programs in Iceland and Norway. They also have an art camp program, where artists have an opportunity to experience hiking and local crafts of a particular place. LGAL has brought artists to all corners of the world, including Japan, Greece, the UK, and Costa Rica, as well as national parks in the U.S. &ldquo;The whole point is to kind of bring artists together and have really good conversations about what it means to be a maker and where we&rsquo;re at creatively, and to get inspiration from the places we are traveling,&rdquo; says gallery manager Jenny Wells. &nbsp;

Usually, artists in the residency programs will be featured in an exhibition the following year. &ldquo;We don&#39;t expect anyone to walk away with a lot of finished pieces,&rdquo; Wells says. Instead, during their time away, artists are gaining inspiration, taking photos, perhaps doing some plein air painting, and learning. &ldquo;It&rsquo;s a little bit fast and furious,&rdquo; she explains. &ldquo;And then a year later, we usually do the exhibition where they&#39;ve had time to process and can make any sort of project like a book, or a series of photographs, or something kind of inspired by it, but it&#39;s not necessarily made on the program.&rdquo; &nbsp;

&nbsp;

<img alt="" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/file_container/RmlsZUNvbnRhaW5lch4fMjQzOTkwMDAx/full.jpg" />One of LGAL&#39;s&nbsp;residency&nbsp;cohorts in Iceland. Photo courtesy of the gallery.

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The gallery shows hosted by LGAL have also featured artists from all over. &ldquo;I would say at least 60 percent of the people come from other places&mdash; so both the United States, Canada and then beyond,&rdquo; says LGAL founder Lindsay Nohl. &nbsp;

Besides the travel and gallery shows, LGAL has also hosted a number of collaborative projects, like video games, tarot decks, and art books. &ldquo;It&rsquo;s kind of a weird amoeba,&rdquo; says Nohl. &nbsp;

They also host classes and workshops, which went &ldquo;virtual&rdquo; during the pandemic. The virtual classes opened up new possibilities. &ldquo;It&rsquo;s actually been great because so many more people who are interested in those topics can show up online versus when we were hosting it in a space,&rdquo; Wells says. &nbsp;

Deciding to end the lease for the gallery was hard, but timely. &ldquo;We are closing up on a 10 year lease,&rdquo; Nohl says. &ldquo;We thought long and hard about whether or not to renew in that space.&rdquo; Like many other small businesses, LGAL struggled greatly during the pandemic, especially as a venue that normally offered public events. The pandemic led LGAL to think about opportunities that didn&rsquo;t center around a physical space.

&nbsp;

<img alt="" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/file_container/RmlsZUNvbnRhaW5lch4fMjUxNzgwMDAx/full.jpg" />

<img alt="" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/file_container/RmlsZUNvbnRhaW5lch4fMjQ1OTUwMDAx/full.jpg" />Top: Lindsay Nohl enjoying Dream Arcade, a previous&nbsp;exhibition.&nbsp;Bottom:&nbsp;Light Grey Art Lab&#39;s current gallery space. Photos courtesy of the gallery.

&nbsp;

&ldquo;To be honest, we have so many people that we have done positive things with that can never even visit the space,&rdquo; Nohl says. &ldquo;So when we took a long, hard look about whether or not it was a good idea to continue to rent that space, we were like, &lsquo;this is much more about getting people together across different kinds of platforms.&rsquo;&rdquo; Even though the physical space had been a place for gathering, it seemed time to let it go. &nbsp;

Luckily, both Nohl and Wells have a host of experiences that make LGAL&rsquo;s next life outside of a permanent space feasible. Nohl, a faculty member at MCAD, has a host of experiences as an artist, designer, and creator putting together different kinds of projects, and Wells previously was involved with putting together pop up shows through Art of This Gallery. &nbsp;

&ldquo;It is totally possible to continue to do things in the Cities for this kind of experience,&rdquo; Nohl says. &ldquo;We don&#39;t have to be stuck to a schedule at this point, where at times, we were trying to put 10 shows on a year out.&rdquo; &nbsp;

&nbsp;

<img alt="" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/file_container/RmlsZUNvbnRhaW5lch4fMjIwMzUwMDAx/full.jpg" />Coral Moore, It&#39;s Time, part of the exhibition&nbsp;The End Is Nigh. Image courtesy of the gallery.

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You can say goodbye to Light Grey Art Lab&rsquo;s current home this week for the exhibition of The End is Nigh,&nbsp;featuring 200 artists. Divided into categories of allegory, characters in death, tombstones, scientific tools and objects, and wearables or clothing, the show seeks inspiration around death or the processes around it. &nbsp;

&ldquo;We have The End is Nigh&nbsp;being significant for the end of our time in that space,&rdquo; Nohl says. &ldquo;But also because we&#39;re kind of coming up here on Halloween, and we have things in the spooky realm. It&rsquo;s a show about celebrating and memorializing the different ways that we see death.&rdquo; &nbsp;

Through symbolism, allegory, and the lens of different cultures, the five part exhibition allows the artists to explore death in a non-gory fashion. According to Nohl, &ldquo;It&#39;s about the understanding of how people perceive death.&rdquo; And perhaps, what comes after.&nbsp;<span style="-webkit-text-stroke-color:rgb(237, 22, 144); background-color:rgb(250, 250, 250); caret-color:rgb(237, 22, 144); color:rgb(237, 22, 144); font-family:roboto,helvetica,arial,sans-serif; font-size:15.75px; letter-spacing:0.1686825007200241px">◼︎

&nbsp;

<img alt="" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/file_container/RmlsZUNvbnRhaW5lch4fMjUwMTgwMDAx/full.jpg" />Fran Matsumoto, Anhanga, part of the exhibition The End Is Nigh. Image courtesy of the gallery.

<a href="https://www.mplsart.com/events/the-end-is-nigh">The End Is Nigh</a> opens Friday, October 29th, from 7-10pm at Light Grey Art Lab, 118 East 26th St, #101, in Minneapolis. For more info, visit&nbsp;<a href="http://lightgreyartlab.com" target="_blank">lightgreyartlab.com</a> or follow them on Instagram <a href="https://www.instagram.com/lightgreyartlab/" target="_blank">@lightgreyartlab</a>.

Previously featured on MPLSART: <a href="https://www.mplsart.com/written/2016/11/interview-lindsay-nohl-of-light-grey-art-lab" target="_blank">an interview with Lindsay Nohl</a> from 2016.

With its final, 200-artist group show opening this weekend, Light Grey Art Lab ends ten years in Whittier, with an eye towards evolution and reincarnation

The End Is Nigh: Light Grey Art Lab Closes Its Doors

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My conversation with DJ and curator Yasmeenah Sideak-Jama takes place over Zoom on an early Fall evening, when she is visiting&nbsp;the home of a friend,&nbsp;meeting&nbsp;her friend&#39;s&nbsp;baby for the first time since its birth. She takes time from&nbsp;her jubilation to talk with me about her work, describing her adoration for music and community&nbsp;as though it&rsquo;s been preordained.

She grew up the middle sibling of two brothers, in upstate New York, Ohio, and intermittently Minnesota. Yasmeenah recalls through and across all these places the ever-present sounds and visuals of music programming. MTV, VH1, and BET are remembered as less of a pastime and more of a curriculum. She describes her adolescent self as animated, exuberant, often the &ldquo;weird kid.&rdquo; &ldquo;I spent a lot of time alone,&rdquo; she says. &ldquo;If it wasn&rsquo;t watching, it was acting, singing, writing.&rdquo; &nbsp;

The same holds true today, though Yasmeenah​&#39;s categories of work are far from solitary in nature. It&rsquo;s become more or less apparent that Yasmeenah&rsquo;s multidisciplinary passions align with the most virtuous aims of the popular culture that once engrossed her: to fill a space, adorn it, and make those in it &mdash; as many as possible &mdash; feel held and seen. As a DJ, Yasmeenah&#39;s&nbsp;more audible works traffic the airways of the likes of KFAI and KRSM and have charged the rooms of any number of functions across the Twin Cities. &nbsp;

Yasmeenah goes on to share her proposal for a world, more specifically a community, in which Black Minnesotans can sense and grasp freedom wherever it lay. It&rsquo;s through a myriad of stories told through and about her work that Yasmeenah makes clear at the end of the day, these liberatory strivings are the goal. And while DJing has long been her praxis of choice, Yasmeenah&rsquo;s means to the ends of freedom have expanded in recent years to include photography, organizing, and curating. &nbsp;

Of course, song&rsquo;s place in Yasmeenah&nbsp;vision of the future is never far off. If anything, communicating through selected sounds has more than prepared Yasmeenah for the pensive onlookers and careful readers of the zines and billboards she&rsquo;s created. In either sphere, communication is king &mdash; &nbsp;to connect an audience with ideas both ephemeral and concrete. &nbsp;

&ldquo;Throwing a party is curation to me,&rdquo; Yasmeenah says. &ldquo;I don&rsquo;t think it&#39;s always recognized as such&hellip; Dealing with the curation of parties you&rsquo;re also dealing with the social hierarchies that exist. The duty of the DJ is to do that research. I have to agitate and push and challenge people out of that comfort zone&hellip; With an exhibit, intellect is usually placed at the forefront. At a party, every energy is welcomed. The lovers, the awkward person standing in the corner, the friends ki-ki-ing. You have to meet [everyone] where they&rsquo;re at.&rdquo; &nbsp;

Even still, Yasmeenah notes, &ldquo;DJing could only cover so much of what I wanted to convey. [Visual] art gives me that room to be more clear about how I want people to feel. Because what&#39;s in front of you is what&#39;s in front.&rdquo; &nbsp;

&nbsp;

<img alt="" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/file_container/RmlsZUNvbnRhaW5lch4fMjQyMTUwMDAx/full.jpg" />Time:Capsule, a collaborative zine edited by Yasmeenah&nbsp;and Maryama Dahir&nbsp;and featuring 20 Minnesota-based artists. <a href="https://wfpc.myshopify.com/collections/frontpage/products/time-capsule-zine" target="_blank">Available for purchase here</a>. Photo courtesy of the artist.

&nbsp;

In the summer of 2020, she expanded her practice with the creation of Time:Capsule. Though dubbed a zine, the collaborative project between Yasmeenah and Maryama Dahir fashions itself as more of an anthology &mdash; a living expression of Black voice and thought in a climate laden with anti-Black violence. Yasmeenah recalls the undertaking of Time:Capsule in terms that honor the process&#39;s tediousness as much as they do its pleasure. One of these pleasures, for Yasmeenah, was paying every artist for their contribution in a season that was full of financial strife for creatives, especially Black ones. In addition, proceeds from the sale of Time:Capsule go directly to supporting Black trans and nonbinary youth in Minnesota through a mutual aid fund created in partnership with the organization&nbsp;Women for Political Change.&nbsp;The raison d&rsquo;etre of Time:Capsule is summed up by Yasmeenah in the words of Nina Simone, from 1987: &ldquo;An artist&rsquo;s duty is to reflect the times.&rdquo; &nbsp;

Yasmeenah&rsquo;s most recent project shares many of the ambitions of Time Capsule, but on a different scale of magnitude. The newly unveiled billboard, aptly titled Authority and Visibility, sits at the entrance of the Franconia Sculpture Park in Shafer, Minnesota. The semi-truck-sized board features the monochromatic portraits of 20 Black Minnesotans and stands at the crossroads of Highways 8 and 95, both of which run through the state. Atop the photographs is a message layered in translucent yellows, greens, and reds. It reads, Here we are for now. How well prepared are you / To meet the changes necessary / To make the world a more human dwelling place? &nbsp;

&nbsp;

<img alt="" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/file_container/RmlsZUNvbnRhaW5lch4fMjQyMTYwMDAx/full.jpg" />Authority and Visibility. Photo courtesy of Franconia Sculpture Park.

<img alt="" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/file_container/RmlsZUNvbnRhaW5lch4fMjIwMzEwMDAx/full.jpg" />The crowd at the unveiling celebration for Authority and Visibility. Photo courtesy of the artist.

&nbsp;

Yasmeenah describes the process of creating&nbsp;Authority and Visibility&nbsp;in conceptual and logistical terms: &ldquo;At first, I really thought about the terrible, oppressive forces on Black folks in the Twin Cities. But I also thought about the same powerful young folks who make things happen everyday. I wanted people to see these Black faces in rural Minnesota. I knew I wanted a yearbook aesthetic, so I picked people with an impact in their communities in unique ways.&rdquo; &nbsp;

The portraits that fill Yasmeenah&rsquo;s billboard are of local young authors, neighborhood caretakers, queer tech music trailblazers and organizers, documentarians, and more. At its core, the piece is radiant, bustling, and made for all&nbsp;&mdash;something like the morning music video countdowns of VH1. Though&nbsp;unlike most billboards, Authority and Visibility sits on the ground. It faces outward, towards traffic, as cars decide whether or not to keep straight or change their destinations entirely. And without a need to tower over drivers or land, Authority and Visibility is grand in its demands and dreams to anyone in passing.&nbsp;<span style="-webkit-text-stroke-color:rgb(237, 22, 144); background-color:rgb(250, 250, 250); caret-color:rgb(237, 22, 144); color:rgb(237, 22, 144); font-family:roboto,helvetica,arial,sans-serif; font-size:15.75px; letter-spacing:0.1686825007200241px">◼︎

&nbsp;

<img alt="" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/file_container/RmlsZUNvbnRhaW5lch4fMjI1NjEwMDAx/full.jpg" />Yasmeenah Sideak-Jama&nbsp;&nbsp;at the unveiling celebration for Authority and Visibility. Photo by <a href="https://www.instagram.com/bearboiphoto/" target="_blank">@bearboiphoto</a>,&nbsp;courtesy of the artist.

To see more of the artist&#39;s work, follow them on Instagram <a href="https://www.instagram.com/yasmeenahxo/" target="_blank">@yasmeenahxo</a>. To purchase a copy of Time:Capsule, <a href="https://wfpc.myshopify.com/collections/frontpage/products/time-capsule-zine" target="_blank">click here</a>.

Authority and Visibility is on view now at <a href="https://www.franconia.org" target="_blank">Franconia Sculpture Park</a> in Shafer, MN. It&#39;s always well worth a visit.

The DJ, curator, zine-maker, and public artist casts her eyes - and pushes her audience - towards a future for the people

Move the Crowd: a profile of Yasmeenah Sideak-Jama 

&nbsp;

Have you ever wanted to read the Bible, or maybe just felt like you&nbsp;should? No wonder why so many of us haven&#39;t: it&#39;s long, it&#39;s old, it&#39;s difficult to follow (depending on the translation you pick), and good God in Heaven, it can be boring.&nbsp;

Well, artist Sam Robertson is here to help with that last part. Next year he will be releasing a new illustrated version of the Old Testament, available for <a href="https://1111press.com/oldtestament" target="_blank">pre-order through Minneapolis&#39;s own 11:11 Press</a>, and the 257 paintings he created to accompany the text are absolutely bonkers. Forget Charlton Heston and Yul Brynner; Robertson has painted us a horse of a very different color. His is a cast made up mostly of&nbsp;ruddy, modern-day white folks&nbsp;trapped in outlandish, kaleidoscopic landscapes&nbsp;&mdash;&nbsp;wearing safety vests, dust-busting eggs off the kitchen counter, and hoisting fishing trophies into the sky.&nbsp;Each illustration was&nbsp;inspired by a specific passage highlighted on the adjoining page. Sometimes the connection is clear;&nbsp;other times, not in the least. All of them, however, are delightfully strange, irreverent, and oddly enough, make you want to engage with the text, if only to understand what you&#39;re looking at. (I think dolphins may have something to do&nbsp;with circumcision, for instance, but I really can&#39;t be sure.)

We connected with Sam to get to the bottom of this weird, seven-year saga he has just completed, and to get the deets on some big plans he has to get the book out into the world. If anybody knows&nbsp;the Pope, it might be best to warn him now.

&nbsp;

<img alt="" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/file_container/RmlsZUNvbnRhaW5lch4fMjIwMjcwMDAx/full.jpg" />The death of Moses, Deuteronomy 34: 5-6.&nbsp;

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Russ White: As texts go, you can&rsquo;t get much older, bigger, or more impactful on Western culture than the Old Testament. It&rsquo;s been translated, interpreted, and illustrated countless times over the past three thousand years. What drew you to this project in the first place? What has your relationship with religion and with that book in particular been throughout your life? 

Sam Robertson: I was drawn to the project in a roundabout way. I wanted to undertake a large, flexible illustration project that I could evolve with and learn a lot from. I had heard of some other people who set out to illustrate existing books with existing fan bases who then found that that audience helped to create momentum for their illustration endeavor. I thought I could maybe find a publisher that way, by illustrating a popular book, and hoping it might open the doors to further opportunities down the line. I ran through potential books in my head. None of my favorite books seemed like the right choice, but when I thought of the Old Testament, I knew that was the one. It was an epiphany. &nbsp;

I had never read the book, but I went to a Roman Catholic grade school up through 6th grade. I remember that experience being very tedious. I don&rsquo;t think I took away anything positive or memorable about the Bible from how it was presented to me as a kid. Most of what I remember is being kicked out into the hallway during classes a bunch and never understanding why. Like when I said &ldquo;puke-arist&rdquo; instead of &ldquo;eucharist.&rdquo; The teacher screamed, &ldquo;Stop saying that you say that ALL THE TIME&rdquo; when it was for sure the first time I had ever said it. Then I remember feeling all sad and lonely out in the hallway.

The Bible wasn&rsquo;t made digestible for young minds at the school I went to. I remember being in church trying to make the flame of the candle by the altar four pews away wiggle from blowing at it as hard as I could without being noticed and therefore reprimanded, for the better part of many 45 minute masses, never hearing a word of what was spoken by the priest, because I was 10 years old&nbsp;and super hyper. And I remember having to sit boy girl boy girl in church so we would be less likely to have fun, make jokes, or be any sort of distraction. That&rsquo;s my whole religious takeaway from those early 7 years of Catholic school. Then I got confirmed in high school, and that felt transactional, like something I was supposed to do but didn&rsquo;t care about. I felt guilty about getting confirmed under those circumstances, not being into the Bible. And then I remained agnostic up until the start of the project&nbsp;and to the present day. I&rsquo;d consider myself to be sort of spiritual, but I haven&rsquo;t been drawn to any one religion. &nbsp;

Going into illustrating this, I had a sense of the Old Testament being the book that has probably most shaped humanity. So I wanted to take that energy and bring myself into the conversation, reflecting on the influence it&rsquo;s had, and on our Western consumerist culture I was born into. A culture somehow descendant from&nbsp;that text. And I wanted to approach it sort of like a lost, ageless, estranged child, who didn&rsquo;t know of this formative book for 3000+ years and is just meeting it now, trying to explain or piece together in some way the long journey its words have sent me on, both historically and culturally. But I needed to do it without actually researching the history and the culture. Like if I found it in a time capsule in my yard and never heard tell of the old days or something. I just wanted to stay in my role as the millennial I am, uninfluenced by this book in any real direct ways, and try to make sense out of it symbolically. Then when I started to illustrate it, it felt like it was meant to be. Its words (The King James&nbsp;Version&nbsp;in particular) had tons of rich imagery and archaic phrasings to work with. Often all I had to do was to show up for the paintings, to put the time in, and they made themselves. &nbsp;

&nbsp;

<img alt="" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/file_container/RmlsZUNvbnRhaW5lch4fMjIzNzkwMDAx/full.jpg" />

<img alt="" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/file_container/RmlsZUNvbnRhaW5lch4fMjM2MTEwMDAx/full.jpg" />Top:&nbsp;Purified maidens on their way to see King Ahasuerus, as one does. Esther 2: 12-13. Bottom: Jeremiah 6: 19-20, in which our burnt offerings displease the Lord.

&nbsp;

RW: Your illustrations offer a really surreal, cartoonish take on specific passages from each page. I&rsquo;m assuming you read the entire thing, which can be very dense and very dry at times. How did you land on which passages to illustrate? 

SR: Yes, I read the entire thing, but it was an admittedly superficial reading. Humor has often been at the core of my paintings, even before this project, so I tried to select passages I thought I might be able to do something funny with. That&rsquo;s not to say I was out to lambaste or make fun of the book - humor is in part the language I use to explore deeper themes and things that interest me. I feel like humor has the power to really cut through the weeds and into the depths of human struggle, which the Old Testament seems to be about. I think a little crust of humor makes the paintings more accessible for many people, so they can kind of let their guards down, and then I can really explore what humans are doing with their time! Then I can really start to dig into the jarring contrasts between the beauty and brutality of the human impact on each other and the planet. The Old Testament already seems to be all about those themes, so I discovered it fit snugly with my style, in a way no other book could. &nbsp;

&nbsp;

RW: Your work in here is really hilarious and engaging and delightfully strange. It&rsquo;s not the first time the Bible has been illustrated by contemporary artists (I&rsquo;m thinking of R. Crumb and Basil Wolverton specifically, and there are surely many others), but I don&rsquo;t think I&rsquo;ve ever seen a version with so many cowboys and rodeo clowns and construction workers and games of beach volleyball. Can you explain how you landed on this particular style and set of characters? 

SR: Looking back on the work, I&rsquo;m not exactly sure how I landed on the individual characters or the style to be honest. I approached each painting with the goal of making it its own thing that could stand alone, and did whatever inspired me in the moment to avoid getting bogged down by the vastness of the endeavor. I tried to make whatever connections I could within each passage, sometimes drawing inspiration from a literal interpretation, sometimes just a subconscious feeling about what might best illustrate it. My intention was always to make a series of paintings where each could stand alone without the words that inspired it, but then when each was paired with the Bible verse, it would make even more sense and become more profound, and when all got bound together in their final form with the entire text of the Old Testament in a big book, they would take on a meaning of their own I couldn&rsquo;t have imagined, that they&rsquo;d be larger than the sum of their parts. &nbsp;

&nbsp;

<img alt="" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/file_container/RmlsZUNvbnRhaW5lch4fMjUxNzUwMDAx/full.jpg" />The first spread of Robertson&#39;s book.

&nbsp;

RW: It&rsquo;s a funny juxtaposition, pairing these seemingly irreverent illustrations with the King James translation itself, reverently reprinted in full. Most artists would have started Genesis, for instance, with God conjuring light out of the darkness or creating Adam and Eve in the Garden; the very first image in your version is a cattleman awkwardly trying to hog-tie a calf in distress. It kind of sets the mood for an unconventional, critical reading of the text. What do you hope readers will get out of viewing the Old Testament through your lens? What did you get out of it? 

SR: That first painting I made a couple weeks before I even thought of illustrating the Old Testament, and it became what steered the whole project, being a reflection on God&rsquo;s order to dominate the world and all the other plant and animal creations. From there it was like, &quot;Well, let&rsquo;s explore what happened later on, over three millennia later, after we were told to dominate all the plants and animals.&quot;&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;&nbsp;

I don&rsquo;t hope for readers to get anything specific out of it;&nbsp;each can bring their own experiences to my illustrated version of this book and take away their own thing. What I got out of it personally was the experience of having a very defined purpose for seven years and what that does to a person. (It was supposed to take only one year but that&rsquo;s not what happened.) It was a serious and seriously long journey. There&rsquo;s been nothing else like it in my life, it was transformative. I was so much younger when I started it, irresponsible and aimless perhaps, and in those past seven years while I painted, I also got married and had two kids and learned a trade (tiling). The early paintings are so different from the later ones and my thoughts on the world have changed a lot, too. I used to be pretty indifferent, and I&rsquo;m sure some of my worldview changed due to this project, but much has likely changed from having lived seven more years, from being with a partner who cares deeply about the world, and from having kids. &nbsp;

&nbsp;

<img alt="" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/file_container/RmlsZUNvbnRhaW5lch4fMjUxNzYwMDAx/full.jpg" />

<img alt="" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/file_container/RmlsZUNvbnRhaW5lch4fMjIzNzgwMDAx/full.jpg" />Top: Ezekiel 20: 15-26, in which the Lord expresses his disappointment in the people of Israel flaunting his statutes.&nbsp;Bottom: Dolphins are just one of many recurring, unexpected thematic elements throughout.&nbsp;Illustration for&nbsp;Joshua&nbsp;5: 2-3.

&nbsp;

RW: Did you come away with a favorite book or a favorite story from the Old Testament? 

SR: Since I read it over a four or five year period and was focused on finding inspiring passages more so than gleaning a storyline, I remember surprisingly little. I remember being disappointed with Psalms, hoping for poetic beauty but finding mostly what seemed to me like rambling prayers for self-enrichment and death to one&rsquo;s enemies. So I&rsquo;ll read it again when I get my hands on one of these copies at some point perhaps. &nbsp;

&nbsp;

RW: Right now the book is in production by 11:11 Press here in Minneapolis, with a scheduled release next summer. At that point, I hear, you have a performance piece planned?

SR: Yes, I&rsquo;m going to sell it door to door. Equipped with a briefcase, some 60&rsquo;s era salesman clothing, my own welcome mat (this isn&rsquo;t a very welcoming world anymore) and a hidden mic (it&rsquo;s legal, I researched it), I&rsquo;m going to see how the world receives this book if I just show up and try to get them to buy it. I hope to sell many books this way, thousands and thousands and thousands, but also I want to simply converse with people and record those conversations (keeping the people&rsquo;s anonymity of course) and see what they&rsquo;re thinking about the world in this era where most of us are all getting so cloistered, insular, and divided. I hope to make a podcast about it, part radio drama, part actual salesman conversations. I don&rsquo;t think most people want a Bible salesman at their door these days, but I hope to change that. I hope they want me at their door. I hope they want me there and they don&rsquo;t want to beat me up. &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;

Also I&rsquo;m trying to get an introduction by&nbsp;Pope Francis if anyone knows how I can get in touch with him, and I&rsquo;m trying to get hotels to stock this book. One hotel in Wisconsin called The Oxbow is looking to buy 33 copies which is super exciting. I want it to replace, or at least accompany, all the Gideon bibles that are a staple in American hotels and motels. I think that&rsquo;s a mainstay that&rsquo;s never really been played with, the fact that in almost any hotel room you visit, you can open a drawer and be sure to find the same exact bible with no flourishes. I want weary travelers to open their hotel room drawers all frantic and disheveled and find this book and find salvation. So if you&rsquo;re a hotel owner/manager/worker reading this, and you think you want to partake in this opportunity, let me know. Make no mistake, this is a beneficial opportunity for both parties, me and you. &nbsp;

&nbsp;

RW: How can folks preorder the book? And do you have any plans to show the original paintings as well?

SR: Preorders are at <a href="https://1111press.com/oldtestament" target="_blank">www.1111press.com/oldtestament</a> - The preorders are what will fund the printing of this book. We will print a few extra, but your only guarantee to acquire this book is to preorder it. There may be subsequent print runs in the coming years, but who knows? &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;

And as for showing the originals, I do want to show the paintings. I want to exhibit the whole series at the Vatican, mark my words. I&rsquo;ve shown sections of the paintings in four different exhibitions during the creation of this body of work, but there&rsquo;s probably 70 that the world has never seen in person. I&rsquo;m looking for opportunities to show all the originals in Minneapolis, and then on the road, hopefully to tons of cities, like you name it I want to go there. I want to bring these paintings on a crazy world tour. I want to go to LA, Chicago, NYC, then Rome, Berlin, other exotic European places, and Russia, Palestine, and Mexico as well. Then I want the Vatican to buy all the originals. They got tons of money and assets. They&rsquo;re the richest establishment ever, or at least they were. They can throw down for this, give me a break!&nbsp;<span style="-webkit-text-stroke-color:rgb(237, 22, 144); background-color:rgb(250, 250, 250); caret-color:rgb(237, 22, 144); color:rgb(237, 22, 144); font-family:roboto,helvetica,arial,sans-serif; font-size:15.75px; letter-spacing:0.1686825007200241px">◼︎

<img alt="" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/file_container/RmlsZUNvbnRhaW5lch4fMjI1NTgwMDAy/full.jpg" />Sam Robertson, amidst&nbsp;a non-burning bush. All images courtesy of the artist.

To learn more about and&nbsp;preorder Sam&nbsp;Robertson&#39;s Illustrated Old Testament, visit <a href="https://1111press.com/oldtestament" target="_blank">1111press.com</a>. Books are set to arrive in June of 2022.&nbsp;

For more on the artist, follow him on Instagram <a href="https://www.instagram.com/samrobertsonart/" target="_blank">@samrobertsonart</a>.

Banner image: the wizards being cast out, I Samuel 28: 3.

Artist Sam Robertson spent seven years illustrating the King James Version of the Old Testament, and someday soon he'll be bringing it to your doorstep

The New Old Testament: The Good Book gets weird

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Reggie LeFlore describes his ventures through visual art in mythic proportions. It&rsquo;s a tendency that makes a great deal of sense coming from an aerosol muralist who shares, with delight, that his best work is guided by storytelling. &nbsp;

You may not recognize his name, but if you spend any time in Minneapolis, you certainly recognize his murals. Bright, bold colors; lavish stenciled faces; raised fists and charming rattle cans &mdash; all signed with his tag (and IG handle) <a href="https://www.instagram.com/ral86/" target="_blank">RAL86</a>. LeFlore delineates his inclination for portraiture as ultimately an adoration and reverence for peoples&rsquo; stories. In the endeavor of painting his subjects, he takes on learning them first, creating alongside them. &ldquo;Really, collaboration did nothing but to amplify this love for portrait work,&rdquo; he explains. &ldquo;Because now I can tell you in as many details as you&#39;d like what you want to know about them. Where they came from, who they are now&hellip;&rdquo; &nbsp;

Born and raised in Omaha, Nebraska, LeFlore paints a picture of his childhood by way of the media he consumed. &ldquo;I was listening to rock, hip hop, trance, breakbeats, drum and bass, and I also read and watched a ton of comic books, cartoons, anime, and mangas,&rdquo; he says, sharing a laundry list of genres and outlets. But of all his influences, it was the public and visual expressions of art throughout hip-hop culture that stuck. &ldquo;Street art specifically. It wasn&#39;t present as much in Nebraska, but it was all over&nbsp;music videos on TV&rdquo;. &nbsp;

As the culture peaked, so too did LeFlore&rsquo;s interest. It was after he graduated from Benson High School in 2004 that he began pursuing a degree in Media Arts, writing his own stories and developing characters along the way. While his original intrigue in illustration and cartooning eventually waned, an illustrative technique and style still perseveres in his work. Explaining his approach, he says, &ldquo;I was carrying over vectors and vexel techniques from graphic design to be able to make tonal values for my stencils. Which helped me&nbsp;approach&nbsp;[spray painting] with a technical lens.&rdquo; &nbsp;

Of course, inundated in the history of hip-hop was the need to make one&rsquo;s self, one&rsquo;s story, and one&rsquo;s name known. Graffiti artists of the day did so on any surface necessary. LeFlore credits these visual pioneers for sparking his love for the art form and lauds them by name. &nbsp;

&ldquo;Cornbread, the dudes from Tats Cru, T-Kid&hellip; It was crazy. Seeing what these people were able to do with very limited resources. That&#39;s what got me into it&hellip; One of the most profound things I&#39;ve learned about public and street art is that it&rsquo;s a vessel to improve people&#39;s daily lives... Blank wall spaces, deteriorating buildings. Painting enters those public spaces.&rdquo; &nbsp;

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<img alt="" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/file_container/RmlsZUNvbnRhaW5lch4fMjIwMjMwMDAx/full.jpg" />The Afrocentric Spectrum, mural along University Avenue in Saint Paul. Photo courtesy of the artist&#39;s website.

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After making his way to Minneapolis in 2016, LeFlore recounts taking on the Made Here, a project&nbsp;by Hennepin Theatre Trust, in which artists filled up downtown storefront windows with their creations. Whether subconscious or intentional, Made Here was the perfect vehicle for LeFlore to put his influence from street art and graffiti&nbsp;into practice. &ldquo;Lots of buildings weren&rsquo;t at capacity, so our art was a way to activate that space.&rdquo; &nbsp;

Today, LeFlore&rsquo;s work takes on exponentially larger canvases. He goes into detail about having just completed a colossal multi-story public mural powered by Hennepin Theatre&nbsp;Trust and The X Games along First Avenue downtown. The work itself depicts the combined portraits of five young skaters. They gaze up in all directions, effervescent in their color&nbsp;scheme. The city&rsquo;s skyline traces behind them. &nbsp;

Though as with any project of this proportion, it wasn&rsquo;t without its tribulations. &ldquo;There were challenges in the beginning with the timeline and trying to take on an image of this magnitude in just a few months,&rdquo; he says. &ldquo;Your work can get lost if you don&#39;t have any special sense of direction. Storytelling gives it that direction, and people help with that story&hellip; There were connections we needed to make to be able to feel comfortable depicting kids in the Twin Cities.&rdquo; It wasn&rsquo;t until connecting with the local skate&nbsp;shop 3rd Lair and having a chance to sit down with owner Mark Rodriguez and&nbsp;some of their most dedicated skaters that the mural&rsquo;s imagery really came into focus. &nbsp;

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<img alt="" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/file_container/RmlsZUNvbnRhaW5lch4fMjMyMTMwMDAx/full.jpg" />Mengistu, one of LeFlore&#39;s collaborators from&nbsp;3rd Lair Skatepark &amp; Skateshop, celebrates the mural&#39;s completion at the X Games Mural Celebration this past August. Photo courtesy of Hennepin Theatre Trust.

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Dale Stark, Manager of Public Relations at Hennepin Theatre Trust echoes the necessity for and presence of utter intention behind LeFlore&rsquo;s multi-story work, comparing it to developing theater productions. &ldquo;Picking an artist, picking a theme, it all clicks when you start to see the likeness [murals] have to any show. It&rsquo;s always more than just color on a backdrop. That&rsquo;s what got me excited about it.&rdquo; &nbsp;

&ldquo;It was really about a way that we could show the positivity of young skaters of color,&rdquo; Stark continues. &ldquo;They&rsquo;re the future, the next generation of leaders, our future voices. We wanted to honor the impact that these youth have on downtown&hellip; With construction and the pandemic, the city&rsquo;s center was a ghost town. Now, with people returning, we hope that they return with a new perspective and realization that downtown&rdquo; &mdash; much like the city itself &mdash; &ldquo;is simply not what it used to be.&rdquo; &nbsp;

Even outside of the vastness of LeFlore&rsquo;s downtown skate mural, it&rsquo;s clear that the artist has a propensity for projects that span space and time. Just this past summer LeFlore was selected by the City of Bloomington and the Ua Si Creative to collaborate on the creation of one of Minnesota&rsquo;s longest murals. The 750-foot-long&nbsp;work envisions the South Loop of Bloomington&rsquo;s <a href="https://www.bloomingtonmn.gov/pl/news/one-longest-murals-minnesota-coming-south-loop-2021-07-06" target="_blank">&ldquo;past, present, and future,&rdquo;</a> featuring art by LeFlore, Marlena Myles, Martzia Thometz, Xee Reiter, Andr&eacute;s Guzm&aacute;n, and Tom Jay and Thomasina Topbear of&nbsp;the City Mischief Murals collective.

As he continues his practice, Reggie anticipates a hunkering down on public art informed by narrative. He speaks with a concentrated giddiness about a mural-based graphic novel that could one day sprawl across the city&rsquo;s public spaces. With characters in development and a storyline inspired by his long-standing love for comic books, it&rsquo;s an epic worth watching vacant walls for.&nbsp;<span style="-webkit-text-stroke-color:rgb(237, 22, 144); background-color:rgb(250, 250, 250); caret-color:rgb(237, 22, 144); color:rgb(237, 22, 144); font-family:roboto,helvetica,arial,sans-serif; font-size:15.75px; letter-spacing:0.1686825007200241px">◼︎

<img alt="" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/file_container/RmlsZUNvbnRhaW5lch4fMjM2MDgwMDAx/full.jpg" />Self-portrait from the artist&#39;s recent solo exhibition, Laying the Groundwork, at Gamut Gallery May-June 2021. Image courtesy of the artist&#39;s website.

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To see more of LeFlore&#39;s work, check out <a href="http://ral86.com" target="_blank">his website</a> or <a href="https://www.instagram.com/ral86/" target="_blank">follow him on Instagram</a>. His mural for Hennepin Theatre Trust is located at 714 1st Ave N, across from First Avenue. The Ua Si Creative mural is located on 30th Ave S between Lindau and American Blvd.&nbsp;in Bloomington.

For more on Hennepin Theatre Trust, visit <a href="https://hennepintheatretrust.org" target="_blank">their website</a> or follow them on <a href="https://www.instagram.com/hennepintheatretrust/" target="_blank">Instagram</a>.

Banner image: LeFlore&#39;s X Games mural on 1st Ave. Photo courtesy of Hennepin Theatre Trust.

Fresh off two gigantic murals in Minneapolis and Bloomington, the artist reflects on the power of people, color, and what a wall can mean to a city

Reggie LeFlore Never Paints Alone (Even When He Does)

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Juxtaposition Arts (JXTA), the North Minneapolis arts organization where young people are paid to be artists and designers, is ready to break ground on its new arts campus September 17, bringing to life a vision that goes back over a decade.

In the past three years, the project has been kicked into high gear, after structural issues on two of its buildings became severe enough that a demolition was in order. JXTA set up a skate park in the intervening time period, which will continue to act not only as a place to skate but as a forum for town halls, small groups, and community gatherings while the new building on Broadway Avenue is erected.

According to Gabrielle Grier, who became JXTA&rsquo;s Managing Director a year ago, JXTA&rsquo;s new transition follows the organization&rsquo;s status as the epicenter of art and design in the Twin Cities.

&ldquo;I think it is incredibly important that JXTA is the only Black-owned and -led&nbsp;art and design organization of our size in our region,&quot; says Grier.&nbsp;&quot;That is essential for the BIPOC community, and for everyone else as well.&rdquo;

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<img alt="" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/file_container/RmlsZUNvbnRhaW5lch4fMjI1NTUwMDAx/full.jpg" />JXTA Managing Director Gabrielle Grier. Photo by&nbsp;David Sherman - NBA Photographer.

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In the economy coming out of the pandemic, JXTA&rsquo;s focus on non-traditional forms of learning and incorporating different creative processes is needed more than ever, Grier says. &ldquo;COVID has informed us that we have to be creative beings. There&#39;s no other way that this works.&rdquo;

JXTA&rsquo;s new three-and-a-half story building will take up 17,000 square feet, with an additional terrace, and will feature LED lighting displays, Grier says. It will house space for each of JXTA&rsquo;s labs, where young people are paid a living wage to work creatively, and there will also be a wood shop and an outdoor classroom. &ldquo;It mimics the same appeal as a pavilion space where young people will be able to take their work outside,&rdquo; Grier says of the outdoor space. &ldquo;The same feel that you get on a college campus.&rdquo; &nbsp;

Grier is looking forward to how the new building will impact the sensory and physical infrastructure for people that interact with North Minneapolis. &ldquo;I am mostly excited for being able to extend and support the beautification of North Minneapolis,&rdquo; Grier says. &ldquo;I also think how incredibly important it&#39;s going to be for young people to walk by and know that this is an extension of a space that they live, and for JXTA to now be in one building and for people to know where to go.&rdquo; &nbsp;

Grier&rsquo;s relationship with JXTA began peripherally back when she was a teenager. Having grown up in Brooklyn Center and then Plymouth, she was involved in organizing while she was in high school doing block parties and talent shows, where she encountered the organization. Then, in her 20s, she became involved with the FLOW Northside Arts Crawl. After she finished her master&rsquo;s degree program at the University of Minnesota, she began teaching in JXTA&rsquo;s contemporary art lab, and she helped build&nbsp;the organization&rsquo;s ceramics program. &nbsp;

A potter by trade, these days Grier is more involved with running JXTA than working with clay. &ldquo;I would say I&rsquo;m an artist through and through,&rdquo; she says, &ldquo;even if that means everything from strategy to throwing pots.&rdquo; &nbsp;

Grier assumed her role as managing director in August of 2020, when North Minneapolis was still reeling from the unrest that erupted following the murder of George Floyd, on top of the havoc that Covid was bringing to the community. Being able to navigate all that was happening was all part of what JXTA is all about. &nbsp;

&ldquo;It is an exemplar of the work that JXTA does, in the essence that things are extremely nuanced,&rdquo; Grier says. &ldquo;The same way that JXTA bridges graphic design, environmental design, architecture, and contemporary art &mdash; like painting and drawing &mdash; and finds a way for them to speak together, I would say that was the same essence in which I showed up to this role.&rdquo; &nbsp;

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<img alt="" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/file_container/RmlsZUNvbnRhaW5lch4fMjI3NjMwMDAx/full.jpg" />

<img alt="" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/file_container/RmlsZUNvbnRhaW5lch4fMjMyMTIwMDAx/full.jpg" />

<img alt="" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/file_container/RmlsZUNvbnRhaW5lch4fMjIwMjIwMDAy/full.jpg" />Apprentices and teachers at work across JXTA&#39;s&nbsp;disciplinary spectrum. Photos courtesy of Juxtaposition Arts.

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The biggest challenge Grier has noticed in her tenure is knowing the worth and value of the organization, feeling the support from the community, and at the same time trying to move people about the importance of what JXTA is trying to do, Grier says. &nbsp;

&ldquo;There are ways that we have to talk about and express the need for the build, rather than it just being something that is rightfully so,&rdquo; she says. &ldquo;Having to be in a conversation with folks about the relevance of the work on one end, while also simultaneously being completely supported by community and by funders and by corporate folks about how important JXTA is, and sitting inside of that juxtaposition &mdash; no pun intended &mdash; I think is, is a part of the challenge.&rdquo; &nbsp;

The groundbreaking ceremony and thank you party takes place September 17, with the building demolition taking place the first week in October. JXTA plans to continue construction through the winter, spring, and early summer. &ldquo;We anticipate that we will be sitting inside our new building in August of 2022,&rdquo; Grier says. &nbsp;

In the meantime, JXTA still has about $400,000 to raise toward the project. The organization has also launched a $5 million legacy campaign that supports the first two years of program needs, as well as the needs of the inaugural year.&nbsp;<span style="-webkit-text-stroke-color:rgb(237, 22, 144); background-color:rgb(250, 250, 250); caret-color:rgb(237, 22, 144); color:rgb(237, 22, 144); font-family:roboto,helvetica,arial,sans-serif; font-size:15.75px; letter-spacing:0.1686825007200241px">◼︎

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The <a href="https://secure.givelively.org/event/juxtaposition-inc/capital-legacy-campaign/build-jxta-groundbreaking" target="_blank">groundbreaking ceremony</a> takes place Friday,&nbsp;September 17th, at 4pm at&nbsp;2007 Emerson Avenue North in Minneapolis. 

For more info, visit <a href="https://juxtapositionarts.org" target="_blank">juxtapositionarts.org</a> or follow them on Instagram <a href="https://www.instagram.com/jxta_arts/" target="_blank">@jxta_arts</a>.&nbsp;To donate to their capital campaign, <a href="https://juxtapositionarts.org/donate/capital-campaign/" target="_blank">click here</a>.

Banner image: rendering by&nbsp;4RM+ULA Architects​. All images courtesy of Juxtaposition Arts.

With a celebration planned for September 17th, the Northside art and design org is putting their capitol campaign funds to work for their community

Breaking Ground: Juxtaposition Arts begins their new build

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The year was 2019.&nbsp;The Before times. The State Fair was in full swing, signaling the end of summer with one last long bacchanal of deep fried, sunburnt delight. After a few years in a row of leaving grumpy&nbsp;&mdash;&nbsp;staying too long and paying too much&nbsp;&mdash;&nbsp;my wife and I had a strategy, and I share it with you now because it holds up in Plague times, too: Go early. If possible, go early on a weekday.&nbsp;

It&#39;s a contentious affair, since Fair organizers have thrown out all precautions short of a &quot;strong urging&quot; for masks. It&#39;s a reckless calculation on their part, as requiring proof of vaccination or a negative COVID test has kept recent festivals like Lollapalooza from being super-spreader events (<a href="https://www.nydailynews.com/coronavirus/ny-covid-cases-traces-lollapalooza-festival-chicago-20210818-i6lqnuxmpbht7ky6rkfwxqhwvu-story.html" target="_blank">although it was responsible for&nbsp;over 200 cases</a>). If you&#39;re thinking about going, you&#39;ve hopefully&nbsp;already performed your own personal calculus around the risks to you and those around you of wading into the sweaty throngs of your fellow mouthbreathing countrymen. It&#39;s a lot to consider, although the science behind vaccines, masks, social distancing, and outdoor activities are all in our favor. Whether you want to reward the Fair&#39;s lack of leadership with your dollars is another matter.

For those who choose to attend, perhaps our strategy from 2019 will help: we&nbsp;started at&nbsp;8:30am, with a corndog&nbsp;for breakfast and a&nbsp;beer flight as soon as they opened. 10/10 highly recommend, and no waiting in line! Next stop was the Fine Arts show, and we had the whole place practically to ourselves. After that we meandered&nbsp;across the entire&nbsp;fairgrounds, ate some bites and met some goats, and&nbsp;by noon&nbsp;&mdash;&nbsp;just as the streets were growing thick with humanity&nbsp;&mdash;&nbsp;we were on our way back to the car. Social distancing was key, even then.

Just like the vaccines, it&#39;s not foolproof.&nbsp;If you do go this year, dear traveler, I wish you godspeed and safe air, and I hope you&#39;ll make a point of seeking out some art. And, it shouldn&#39;t have to be said (for multiple reasons), but&nbsp;wear your&nbsp;dang mask! Certainly&nbsp;when you&#39;re indoors! And if you haven&#39;t gotten vaccinated, hit up the North End Event Center first and get it for freeeeeeeee. Please. Seriously, Jesus Christ. They&#39;ll give you $100.

Okay, everybody grab yourself a whole-ass&nbsp;bucket of cookies and let&#39;s either do this thing or at least see what we&#39;re missing:

<img alt="" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/file_container/RmlsZUNvbnRhaW5lch4fMjQyMDUwMDAx/full.jpg" />

<h2>1. The Fine Arts Building</h2>

Way up on the East end, at Cosgrove and Randall, is the crown jewel of the State Fair art experience: the Fine Arts Building, with its annual state-wide Fine Arts Competition. It&nbsp;can feel like a proper cattle call in there when it&#39;s busy, caught in a current of people shuffling steadily past&nbsp;all 321 works of art. Going early will give you some space to really take it in.&nbsp;

As always, the show this year is like speed-dating the entire state, exhausting and exhilarating. It&#39;s a wild mix of media and content, spanning everything from recent political histories to deep cultural traditions. The sheer breadth and&nbsp;volume of image-makers in this state is staggering,&nbsp;even with just a fraction of them all in the same room.&nbsp;It&#39;s a microcosm of the Fair itself: bringing people from all different backgrounds together to peek into each other&#39;s lives. Rural folks get to see some weirdo art; city slickers get to walk through the barns.

&quot;We hope to curate an experience that nurtures a desire to seek out other arts experiences throughout the year, that this show is a gateway,&quot; says Jim Clark, the Fine Arts Building&#39;s&nbsp;superintendent.

Both photography and figurative painting loom&nbsp;large in this exhibition,&nbsp;which makes the deviations from that norm all the more memorable. It&#39;s always interesting to see which pieces stick in your mind once you exit the building. For those staying home, <a href="https://issuu.com/mnfinearts1/docs/21-msf-fine-arts-catalog_final" target="_blank">the full show is online here</a>.

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<img alt="" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/file_container/RmlsZUNvbnRhaW5lch4fMjUwMDMwMDAx/full.jpg" />Areca Roe (Mankato),&nbsp;Self Care, archival pigment print. Image courtesy of the artist&#39;s website.

<img alt="" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/file_container/RmlsZUNvbnRhaW5lch4fMjE2MDUwMDAx/full.jpg" />Darius O Holmes (Eden Prairie),&nbsp;Freedom Is A Mindset, July 4th 2021, digital print.&nbsp;

<img alt="" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/file_container/RmlsZUNvbnRhaW5lch4fMjIzNzEwMDAx/full.jpg" />Lexi B Ames (Saint Paul),&nbsp;Huskers, ballpoint pen.

<img alt="" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/file_container/RmlsZUNvbnRhaW5lch4fMjE2MDUwMDAy/full.jpg" />Liliana Lennox (Robbinsdale),&nbsp;Study of Norma Bassett Hall, in Magenta, acrylic on muslin.

<img alt="" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/file_container/RmlsZUNvbnRhaW5lch4fMjUwMDMwMDAy/full.jpg" />Patty A Voje (Saint Paul),&nbsp;Dairy Queen, oil on board.

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<h2>Studio:HERE</h2>

Also in the Fine Arts Building is the Studio:HERE residency program, featuring&nbsp;a different artist every day turning a corner of the exhibition space into their own personal art studio. Expect painting, ceramics, fiber art, printmaking, and more.&nbsp;Alyssa Baguss&nbsp;has set up a Minnesota Artists Penny Press, with which you can hand-crank a design from one of four local artists into crushed coins, and Andy Sturdevant&nbsp;will turn the studio into his office, so you can watch him lay out books for his publishing imprint and even go on a Zoom call with a collaborator. See, artists aren&#39;t so different from the rest of us. Full schedule of artists is:

8/26:&nbsp;Arden Harrison-Bushnell, fiber/embroidery/bead artist &bull; 8/27:&nbsp;Mike Smieja, potter &bull; 8/28:&nbsp;Joshua Bindewald, printmaker &bull;&nbsp;8/29:&nbsp;April Malphurs, sculptor/glass artist &bull;&nbsp;8/30:&nbsp;Blair Treuer, fiber artist &bull;&nbsp;8/31:&nbsp;Niccu Tafarrodi, diorama artist &bull;&nbsp;9/1:&nbsp;Kristine Heykants, photographer &bull;&nbsp;9/2:&nbsp;Andy Sturdevant, artist book publisher/writer &bull;&nbsp;9/3:&nbsp;Scott Krohn, scratchboard/colored pencil artist &bull;&nbsp;9/4:&nbsp;Christopher Harrison, painting/drawing/sculpture artist &bull;&nbsp;9/5:&nbsp;Alyssa Baguss, though her Penny Press is active every day &bull;&nbsp;9/6:&nbsp;Kordula Coleman, ceramicist

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<h2>&nbsp;</h2>

<h2>2. Crop Art</h2>

A quintessential&nbsp;State Fair&nbsp;tradition, the crop art is always a blast. Expect a big wall of mostly small works, painstakingly assembled using a variety of seeds and glue, often taking the form of hilarious political commentary or equally hilarious celebrity portraiture. It&#39;s inside, and there&#39;s often a line, so it&#39;s your call whether it&#39;s worth the risk to see if the seed is mightier than the sword.&nbsp;

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<h2><img alt="" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/file_container/RmlsZUNvbnRhaW5lch4fMjI5OTkwMDAx/full.jpg" /></h2>

<h2>3. Joyful World Mural Park</h2>

A new attraction this year, the Joyful World Mural Park is further west, just past the Grandstand. Produced by the State Fair&nbsp;in partnership with&nbsp;Forecast Public Art, the project will feature twelve&nbsp;of the best muralists working in the Twin Cities today&nbsp;&mdash;&nbsp;Leslie Barlow, Jennifer Davis, Jose Dominguez, Hibaaq Ibrahim, Tom Jay, Maiya Lea, Geno Okok, Shade Pratt, Xee Reiter, Joy Spika, Kao Lee Thao, and Thomasina Topbear&nbsp;&mdash;&nbsp;creating work envisioning a better world. Artists will be on site from 11am to 3pm each day, weather permitting, though not all at one time.

Tricia Heuring, who consulted for Forecast to help curate the event, explains:&nbsp;&quot;These are intended to be mini-murals, for State Fair audiences to see up close the process of painting a large-scale artwork. Across the 12 days of the Fair the murals will all be in different stages of the process, some finishing earlier and others starting later. I think that will be an interesting evolution for the audiences. Just because you are there earlier in the Fair doesn&#39;t mean you&#39;ll only see in-progress murals...&nbsp;It&#39;s been a rough year and a half, so the theme of the mural park is Joyful World,&nbsp;giving the artists an opportunity to design something that makes us all feel like better days are ahead.&quot;

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<img alt="" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/file_container/RmlsZUNvbnRhaW5lch4fMjUxNjgwMDAx/full.jpg" />Mural by Shade Pratt (Fola). Photo by Tricia Heuring.

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<img alt="" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/file_container/RmlsZUNvbnRhaW5lch4fMjI1NTMwMDAx/full.jpg" />Image courtesy of mnstatefair.org.

<h2>4. Cream of the Crop Artists</h2>

Just a few steps away, in the West End (open air) Market, stop in at the Cream of the Crop Artists Gallery to do some shopping. Expect a little bit of everything: fine art paintings, sculptures, abstract and pop art, and archival and silkscreened prints,&nbsp;as well as t-shirts, gifts, magnets, stickers, art ties, buttons, caps, you name it. Organized and staffed entirely by artists, it&#39;s a fun, safe spot to go digging for your new favorite treasure. Organizer and artist Genie Castro says, &quot;We are open 9-9 daily in the open air of the West End Market. Our amazing booth is fun with artists working throughout the day.&quot; Plus, she adds,&nbsp;&quot;We are right by the <a href="https://www.mnstatefair.org/location/schells-stage-at-schilling-amphitheater/" target="_blank">Schell&rsquo;s stage</a>!&quot;

For those who can&#39;t make it, their shop is also&nbsp;fully online&nbsp;at&nbsp;<a href="https://creamofthecropartists.com" target="_blank">creamofthecropartists.com</a>. With all the money you saved on tickets, parking, and&nbsp;sticked&nbsp;foods, you should buy yourself some art!

<img alt="" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/file_container/RmlsZUNvbnRhaW5lch4fMjQzOTMwMDAx/full.jpg" />

<img alt="" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/file_container/RmlsZUNvbnRhaW5lch4fMjQ1ODEwMDAx/full.jpg" />

<img alt="" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/file_container/RmlsZUNvbnRhaW5lch4fMjQ3OTQwMDAx/full.jpg" />

<img alt="" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/file_container/RmlsZUNvbnRhaW5lch4fMjIzNzIwMDAx/full.jpg" />Some booth shots showing the wide variety of&nbsp;treasures&nbsp;available&nbsp;at Cream of the Crop Artists Gallery. Bottom:&nbsp;Genie Castro (second from left) with fellow artists and art-lovers in their booth at the West End Market. All photos courtesy of Genie Castro.

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There&#39;s more art to be had&nbsp;&mdash; if you still have the stomach for it after all those cookies&nbsp;&mdash;&nbsp;from a variety of vendors at&nbsp;The Grandstand (5), the Merchandise Mart (6), and the International Bazaar (7)&nbsp;(which is also outside). I will leave that up to you, my friends. The sun is getting high in the sky, though, so I vote we bounce.&nbsp;

Be safe out there!&nbsp;<span style="-webkit-text-stroke-color:rgb(237, 22, 144); background-color:rgb(250, 250, 250); caret-color:rgb(237, 22, 144); color:rgb(237, 22, 144); font-family:roboto,helvetica,arial,sans-serif; font-size:15.75px; letter-spacing:0.1686825007200241px">◼︎

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<img alt="" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/file_container/RmlsZUNvbnRhaW5lch4fMjM2MDIwMDAx/full.jpg" />​Greta J Sandquist&nbsp;(Saint Paul),&nbsp;Becoming Something More, oil on panel

The Fair runs from August 26th - September 6th, from 6am to midnight everyday except Labor Day, when they close at 9pm.&nbsp;For more info, visit&nbsp;<a href="https://www.mnstatefair.org" target="_blank">mnstatefair.org</a>.

All images are photos taken by the author unless otherwise noted. Article has been updated to include a photo of a Joyful World mural.

A quick and cautious guide to finding art at the Minnesota State Fair, August 26 - September 6

Art at the Fair: What to see at the Great Minnesota I Don't Know If It's A Good Idea To Get Together

On paintings, projections, and our endless fascination with Vincent van Gogh 

Immersing Vincent

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Entering into the new site-specific installation created by&nbsp;Rosy Simas at All My Relations Gallery&nbsp;&mdash;<a href="https://www.mplsart.com/events/yodoishendahgwageh-a-place-for-rest-rosy-simas">y&ouml;doish&euml;ndahgwa&rsquo;geh (a place for rest)</a> &mdash;&nbsp;is a bit like stepping into a different dimension.

As you walk in, you are surrounded by an immersive sound score by French composer Fran&ccedil;ois Richomme. There are nature sounds like crickets, but also deeper tones that make you think of entering some deep cavernous space, or perhaps stepping inside the human body.

Meanwhile, Simas has a layered visual design mapping the space, including multiple projection screens. In some cases the screens pop out from the wall, catching the light differently than the screen behind it. It creates a rich texture, as the video &mdash; filtered with differently hued colors at different points in the gallery &mdash; displays footage of natural landscapes and warping angled lines. &nbsp;

Finally, there are sculptural elements as well, including larvae-like pods that hang down from the ceiling, which Simas created with Jeffrey Wells back in 2019 for a residency at the Weisman Museum, and a loom structure. There are also anti-gravity chairs where visitors can sit and perhaps take a nap. &nbsp;

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<img alt="" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/file_container/RmlsZUNvbnRhaW5lch4fMjIwMTQwMDAx/full.jpg" />

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A member of the Seneca Nation, Heron Clan, Simas often makes interdisciplinary performance works that incorporate dance, sound, video, lighting, and other visual elements that are intimately a part of the art form. She also has veered more into the visual arts world side of things, presenting her work within the context of a gallery, like when she had her work on view at Soo Visual Art Center two years ago along with poet and artist Heid Erdrich. &nbsp;

With y&ouml;doish&euml;ndahgwa&rsquo;geh, Simas deliberately moves away from elements that make up the experience of seeing performance. &nbsp;

&ldquo;It&rsquo;s different than a performance work in the sense that [this installation] is&nbsp;not intended to create a lot of stimulation of the nervous system,&rdquo; Simas says. &nbsp;

The work engages the nervous system through the senses &mdash; especially aurally and visually&nbsp;&mdash;&nbsp;as a way to occupy it enough for the mind to get quiet, Simas says. The idea is to take away any sense of fight or flight mechanism, or even the experience of pleasure. Rather than stirring you up, the work is meant to slow you down. &nbsp;

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<img alt="" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/file_container/RmlsZUNvbnRhaW5lch4fMjQyMDIwMDAx/full.jpg" />

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In some ways, the piece operates like a sensory deprivation tank. In that case, the participant gets immersed in water without any sound or light as a way to relax. In y&ouml;doish&euml;ndahgwa&rsquo;geh, there isn&rsquo;t an utter lack of stimulation, but the music and visual elements have a way of enveloping you into a dream-like experience. &nbsp;

It&rsquo;s the opposite of how Simas normally creates work with her collaborator, Richomme. &ldquo;Sometimes we&rsquo;re working with sound crescendo in a way that is supposed to create heightened alertness to what is happening on stage,&rdquo; Simas says. &ldquo;This is taking all of that away.&rdquo; &nbsp;

The piece is part of a three-year project by Simas called she who lives on the road to war. It&rsquo;s a response to global loss and the need to grieve. With her work, she&rsquo;s creating a place to take refuge and console for all that has happened in the last couple of years, especially for Black, Indigenous, and bodies of color.

&ldquo;It&rsquo;s a place for resting,&rdquo;&nbsp;Simas&nbsp;says about the work. &ldquo;It&rsquo;s really needed in the Native community.&rdquo; &nbsp;

Originally, y&ouml;doish&euml;ndahgwa&rsquo;geh was slated to take place at Hair &amp; Nails Gallery, but the show was cancelled.&nbsp;In a public statement, Hair &amp; Nails wrote that it failed to provide a supportive environment for Simas to work. &nbsp;

&ldquo;As individuals and as a small arts entity, we have been made uncomfortably aware of the extent and scale of our impact in the perpetuation of systemic oppressions, particularly, white body supremacy,&rdquo; they write in their public statement. &ldquo;Our experience this week has helped us see that we have much more work to do as individuals and as a gallery to undo racism and oppressive cycles in our hearts, actions, and in our community.&rdquo; &nbsp;

It&rsquo;s unfortunate the original venue failed in supporting Simas in creating this powerful show. While All My Relations is a wonderful setting for it, the controversy shows how far white-led institutions have to go to undo systems of oppression in the community. Simas&rsquo;s a place for rest offers a place of refuge for those on the front lines of this work.&nbsp;<span style="-webkit-text-stroke-color:rgb(237, 22, 144); background-color:rgb(250, 250, 250); caret-color:rgb(237, 22, 144); color:rgb(237, 22, 144); font-family:roboto,helvetica,arial,sans-serif; font-size:15.75px; letter-spacing:0.1686825007200241px">◼︎

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<a href="https://www.mplsart.com/events/yodoishendahgwageh-a-place-for-rest-rosy-simas" target="_blank">y&ouml;doish&euml;ndahgwa&rsquo;geh&nbsp;(a place for rest)</a> is on view at All My Relations through September 21st. Open hours: Mondy - Friday, 10am - 5pm, and Saturdays 10am - 3pm, at 1414 E Franklin Ave in Minneapolis. For more info, visit <a href="http://www.allmyrelationsarts.com/yodoishendahgwageh/">allmyrelations.com</a>, <a href="https://www.rosysimas.com" target="_blank">rosysimas.com</a>, and follow <a href="https://www.instagram.com/allmyrelationsarts/" target="_blank">the gallery</a> and <a href="https://www.instagram.com/rosysimasrosysimas/" target="_blank">the artist </a>on Instagram.

All photos by Russ White for MPLSART.COM.

In a new multimedia installation, artist and performer Rosy Simas and collaborator François Richomme create 'a place for rest'

Gallery As Refuge: 'yödoishëndahgwa’geh' at All My Relations

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It&rsquo;s not often that tears are&nbsp;shed during a press preview for an art exhibit, but that&rsquo;s exactly what happened at&nbsp;the American Swedish Institute prior to the opening of Kindertransport&nbsp;&ndash;&nbsp;Rescuing Children on the Brink of War.&nbsp; &nbsp;

It would be hard not to get emotional experiencing this exhibition, which tells the stories of families who had to make the heart-wrenching decision to separate after Germany&rsquo;s &quot;Kristallnacht,&quot; November 9th into the 10th, 1938. &nbsp;

Over the course of that night&nbsp;&mdash; &quot;The Night of Broken Glass&quot;&nbsp;&mdash;&nbsp;hundreds of Jewish homes,&nbsp;businesses, and synagogues were destroyed by rioters from the Nazi party, and 30,000 Jewish men were arrested and put into concentration camps. The Kindertransport (German for children&rsquo;s transport) was a coordinated effort to provide safe haven for Jewish children, housing them in Great Britain as well as France, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Sweden. Staying in foster homes as well as hostels, schools, and farms, more than 10,000 children escaped the concentration camps, even as many of their families waited for the worst to come.

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<img alt="" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/file_container/RmlsZUNvbnRhaW5lch4fMjE1OTgwMDAy/full.jpg" />Installation view of the exhibit at&nbsp;the Center for Jewish History in New York. Photo by C&amp;G Partners, courtesy of ASI.

The exhibition, <a href="https://www.mplsart.com/events/kindertransport-rescuing-children-on-the-brink-of-war" target="_blank">on view at the Osher Gallery at ASI</a>, was created and organized by Yeshiva University Museum and the Leo Baeck Institute- New York/Berlin, and was previously exhibited at the Center for Jewish History in New York and the Holocaust Memorial Center in Michigan. &nbsp;

According to Michael Simonson, archivist and director of public outreach at the&nbsp;Baeck Institute, the Kindertransport came to be when organizations around both Germany and Austria, as well as other countries, began to work together. In England, one organization called the Movement for the Care of Children from Germany and Austria, took about 10,000 children, waiving the normal visa requirements&nbsp;and immigration limits. Other countries took fewer, and Sweden took about 500. &nbsp;

But they didn&rsquo;t take adults. &ldquo;The world for the most part was very anti-immigrant,&rdquo; Simonson says. &ldquo;And it was anti-semitic, and no one wanted the Jewish refugees in their countries.&rdquo; The United States, for instance, did not participate in the effort. A<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wagner–Rogers_Bill" target="_blank">&nbsp;Congressional bill</a>&nbsp;was introduced in early 1939&nbsp;to bring 20,000 children, but it was never brought to a vote.

The exhibition is made up of historical objects, photographs, letters, diary entries, and other ephemera that illuminate the excruciating experience the families went through. You read letters from anxious parents inquiring about how their children are faring in school, even as they manage to suppress their fears about their own safety. &nbsp;

&ldquo;When you come to good people, who will raise you on our behalf and look after&nbsp;you, try to give your best,&rdquo; one letter states. &ldquo;Always take care of your little sister Linda and stick together wherever you&nbsp;may be. Do not forget your Jewish roots.&rdquo; &nbsp;

On one wall of the Osher are hundreds of identification tag replicas, representing the thousands of children that made it out of Germany. Thinking about all those children &mdash; many who never saw their parents again, is a painful illustration, beautifully executed. &nbsp;

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<img alt="" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/file_container/RmlsZUNvbnRhaW5lch4fMjIzNjgwMDAx/full.jpg" />

<img alt="" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/file_container/RmlsZUNvbnRhaW5lch4fMjM1OTYwMDAx/full.jpg" />Top:&nbsp;Installation view of ID tag replicas.&nbsp;Photo by C&amp;G Partners, courtesy of ASI. Bottom: Pressed flowers among&nbsp;Benno Black&#39;s childhood belongings. Photo by Sheila Regan.

Erin Stromgren, the exhibitions manager at ASI, got tearful as she described opening a suitcase full of memories and keepsakes owned by Benno Black, who left on the Kindertransport away from Germany to the safety of the United Kingdom in 1939. Inside the suitcase was a book of pressed flowers Black had collected with his mother. Next to each pressed flower, you can see her gentle handwriting describing the plant. &nbsp;

Black settled in Minnesota, where he and his family live to this day.&nbsp;Also highlighted in the&nbsp;Turnblad Mansion are the stories of Kurt Moses, who was 11 when he and his younger brother left their small farm in T&uuml;tz, Germany to find shelter in La Guette, France, as well as Siegfried Lindenbaum, who was only&nbsp;9 when he and his brother escaped the small town of Unna, Germany. &nbsp;

Beth Gendler, Lindenbaum&rsquo;s daughter, says for much of her life, her father never talked about what had happened to him. Lindenbaum died in 1993, before the rise of social media and other tools he might have used to share his story with the world, Gendler says. &ldquo;In fact he never spoke about it at all. We sort of had an inkling of what had happened growing up.&nbsp;He never spoke publicly until he attended a reunion of survivors 50 years later, which is about two years before he died .&rdquo;&nbsp;After her father attended the reunion, he did a lot of writing and processing, she says. &ldquo;It&#39;s such an honor to be able to share the story.&rdquo; &nbsp;

Besides the stories of the three Minnesotans who left on the Kindertransport, the exhibition in the Turnblad also includes illustrations by Swedish illustrator Stina Wirs&eacute;n, of a book called The Story of Bodri&nbsp;about the Holocaust, by H&eacute;di Fried.&nbsp;<span style="-webkit-text-stroke-color:rgb(237, 22, 144); background-color:rgb(250, 250, 250); caret-color:rgb(237, 22, 144); color:rgb(237, 22, 144); font-family:roboto,helvetica,arial,sans-serif; font-size:15.75px; letter-spacing:0.1686825007200241px">◼︎

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<img alt="" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/file_container/RmlsZUNvbnRhaW5lch4fMjUzOTIwMDAx/full.jpg" />A reminder that this wasn&#39;t so very long ago. Benno Black at the exhibition with his family, which now calls Minnesota home. Photo by Jon Dahlin, courtesy of ASI.

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<a href="http://www.mplsart.com/events/kindertransport-rescuing-children-on-the-brink-of-war" target="_blank">Kindertransport&nbsp;&ndash;&nbsp;Rescuing Children on the Brink of War</a>&nbsp;runs through October 31 at the American Swedish Institute. There will be several exhibition tours and talks, some given by descendants of the children who escaped. Check <a href="https://asimn.org/exhibition/kindertransport/" target="_blank">ASImn.org</a> for details.

ASI is located at 2600 Park Avenue, Minneapolis.&nbsp;Museum Admission: $12 adults, $8 seniors ages 62 +, $6 ages 6&ndash;18 and full-time students with ID. &nbsp;Free for ASI members and children ages 5 and under.

The ASI Museum, Museum Store, and FIKA Caf&eacute;&nbsp;hours are Thursday 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. and Friday through Sunday, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. For more information and to purchase tickets, visit <a href="http://www.ASImn.org" target="_blank">www.ASImn.org</a> or call 612-871-4907.

Banner image: a map of kindertransport routes across Europe to Great Britain. Photo by C&amp;G Partners, courtesy of ASI.

A powerful new exhibition tells the story of Jewish children fleeing Nazi Germany before the outbreak of World War II

Lest We Forget: 'Kindertransport' at The American Swedish Institute

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When I want to feel close to my grandma, I put on a silver ring striped with three bands of opal. It reminds me of the countless times I saw her wearing it, where we were when she bought it, even the couple who sold it to her. &nbsp;

I&rsquo;ve always been something of a hoarder, and I&rsquo;ve never been able to shake the idea that objects are conduits &mdash; to our own memories, but also to other people through time. &nbsp;

At Revere Auctions in St. Paul, there is a glass case filled with such objects, and among them&nbsp;an ancient Greek glass amphoriskos &mdash; a small, slim-necked jar, only six inches tall, that looks like it could hold perfume. It&rsquo;s positioned on a brightly lit shelf, next to a group of Egyptian alabaster pottery, a few steps away from two first-edition books by Huey P. Newton. &nbsp;

These objects have been brought together through time for an <a href="https://live.revereauctions.com/auctions/revere-auctions/day-1-decorative-arts-of-the-world-6514/catalog" target="_blank">upcoming two-day auction</a> (starting Tuesday, July 27th at 11am EDT) and are currently being displayed at Revere as a preview for the sale. They&rsquo;re surrounded by decorative arts, paintings, prints. An entire living room is set up in the middle of the space with furniture that will be for sale. Co-owner Sean Blanchet pulls up a seat, choosing from a group of eight mid-century modern dining chairs, and talks about the pieces he&rsquo;s most drawn to &mdash; including a mysterious wooden figurine being sold as part of a small lot. It looks like a depiction of a person in prayer. &nbsp;

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<img alt="" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/file_container/RmlsZUNvbnRhaW5lch4fMjI1NDkwMDAx/full.jpg" />Revere Auctions is located in St.&nbsp;Paul&rsquo;s Priorworks building, located in the Creative Enterprise Zone north of University Avenue. Pictured here, furniture is displayed as part of the preview for an upcoming auction.

Sean explains that he creates lots when pieces are interesting but wouldn&rsquo;t sell for much by themselves. These items are grouped together and go up for bid as a bundle. Not much is known about the wooden figure, except that it was likely carved in Europe around the turn of the 18th century. Somehow, it&rsquo;s made its way to Revere&rsquo;s space in a former industrial building in St. Paul and has found a new home among three jade dishes and a sculpture of Buddha, laughing, surrounded by monkeys. &nbsp;

There&rsquo;s a magic to coming in and viewing centuries-old items up close, holding the kneeling figurine, seeing it juxtaposed with the amphoriskos, or&nbsp;a 1930s wooden cow carved by a prisoner in Maine. On the base of the cow, there&rsquo;s a small piece of paper that says, &ldquo;And you think you have problems?&rdquo; Apparently there is a market and collectors for prison folk art, made throughout history. Bidding for this sculpture starts at $100. Bidding for the cryptic figurine and its newfound group starts at $20, and the auction house estimates that the nine-item lot might sell for a couple hundred. &nbsp;

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<img alt="" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/file_container/RmlsZUNvbnRhaW5lch4fMjQzODcwMDAx/full.jpg" />The kneeling wooden figurine, at right, paired in a lot with a laughing Buddha statue, a wooden carving, three jade dishes, lacquered chess pieces, and a Japanese&nbsp;tsuba, or sword&nbsp;hilt. Image courtesy of Revere Auctions.

Sean also singled out a silver bangle from Ancient Rome, two snake heads almost meeting. Putting on the bangle, there was a strong sense of connection &mdash; neutral and anonymous, but undeniable. An awe at the ongoing afterlives of objects and a desire to be a part of that history. There&rsquo;s also a disbelief at being able to touch something that would usually be seen from a distance. &nbsp; &nbsp;

Next to the bangle was an almost solid gold 50-peso coin. Someone had turned it into a pendant and placed a ring of diamonds around the metal. They had taken two incredibly valuable things and customized them, in a way I would never have imagined doing, but which also reminded me distinctly of my grandmother &mdash; always putting slightly mismatched things together, like sewing yellow curtain fringe along the hem of a dress. It made me curious about the person who had altered the coin in this way, and the person who would purchase it at the auction. Would they keep it as is, or would they take it apart and reset the diamonds? Where had that dress my grandma put together gone after she moved out of her home? &nbsp;

There were paintings, as well &mdash; framed, with gallery stickers accumulated on the back. These are likely as the original artists made them, although Sean points out that buyers can sometimes find old paintings underneath newer layers. A William Wegman photo hung in one corner, alert-looking Weimaraners standing cleanly against a pink backdrop. But the most surreal and interesting things to me were the ones that held a little more age, a little more mystery. &nbsp;

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<img alt="" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/file_container/RmlsZUNvbnRhaW5lch4fMjQ1NzQwMDAx/full.jpg" />The items in a preview and auction are determined by what the auction house receives from clients, most often individual collectors and estates. Contemporary art trays from Mexican artists Miguel Pineda and Pedro Cervantes are among the items up for bid.

It was impossible not to feel the weight of all the people who had held these objects previously, and the knowledge that many had come from the estates or collections of the recently deceased. These strangers were brought together in one space, awaiting new owners and rubbing elbows in the process to create juxtapositions you wouldn&rsquo;t normally get to see. &nbsp;

Revere has shelves of reference books, and Sean was able to share information as well. While there was mystery, there was also an act of discovery and the feeling of peeling back layers &mdash; getting drawn in by something&rsquo;s form, then finding out more about its history. Looking at the amphoriskos, Sean discussed the strong tradition of intricate glass work in Ancient Greece, how artisans made patterns by twisting different colors of glass together, how these pieces were valued as trade items. It was easy to wonder: where had this vase been since it was made? It was easy to wonder about all the lives it had been a part of. &nbsp;

When I hold my grandma&rsquo;s ring, I also think about the parts of her life I never knew. I wear it back to the places we used to go together to bring her there with me, and I take it to new places to show her for the first time. &nbsp;

Holding objects at Revere, being surrounded with history &mdash; ancient to contemporary, still living as these items move through the world &mdash; I felt a similar sense of connection. Here I was, holding a wooden figurine that a stranger who lived 200 years before me put their time and energy into creating. Here I was, able to bid on and possibly own a piece of Ancient Greece. It is so out-of-the-ordinary, so magical, and yet so suddenly possible.&nbsp;<span style="-webkit-text-stroke-color:rgb(237, 22, 144); background-color:rgb(250, 250, 250); box-sizing:inherit; caret-color:rgb(237, 22, 144); color:rgb(237, 22, 144); font-family:roboto,helvetica,arial,sans-serif; font-size:15.75px">◼︎

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The upcoming auction is divided into two parts: <a href="https://live.revereauctions.com/auctions/revere-auctions/day-1-decorative-arts-of-the-world-6514/catalog" target="_blank">Day 1: Decorative Arts of the World on July 27</a>, and <a href="https://live.revereauctions.com/auctions/revere-auctions/day-2-fine-jewelry-with-a-collection-of-fine-modern-contemporary-art-7177" target="_blank">Day 2: Fine Jewelry with a Collection of Fine Modern &amp; Contemporary Art on July 28</a>. The auction will take place virtually, but the items are displayed for viewing at Revere Auctions, 755 Prior Ave. N., Unit 235 C, St. Paul, MN 55104. 

The auction house is open Monday through Friday, 10 a.m. to 3 p.m., or by appointment. For more information, or to view a complete gallery of upcoming auction items and starting bids, visit <a href="http://www.revereauctions.com" target="_blank">www.revereauctions.com</a>.&nbsp;

Banner image: A lot of seven Modern African, Asian, and Native American sculptures and vessels.&nbsp;All photos taken by the author unless otherwise noted.

In a preview of items going to auction July 27th and 28th, decorative arts, jewelry, and contemporary art share space and swap stories

Written