Profiles of McKnight Fellows

This is the fifth&nbsp;<a href="https://www.mplsart.com/written/mcknight-profiles">in a series of articles</a>&nbsp;profiling the six distinguished artists chosen as 2019&nbsp;McKnight&nbsp;Fellows in Visual Arts, a grant&nbsp;program for&nbsp;mid-career artists in Minnesota&nbsp;that&nbsp;is&nbsp;administered by the Minneapolis College of Art and Design.&nbsp;Culminating the two-year fellowship (delayed last year&nbsp;by the pandemic), there will be two McKnight Discussions, each&nbsp;held in person:

<a href="http://www.facebook.com/events/400213234812760/" target="_blank">The first</a>&nbsp;is on&nbsp;May 24th at 6:30pm&nbsp;at&nbsp;MCAD, featuring Janet&nbsp;Dees,&nbsp;Steven and Lisa Munster&nbsp;Tananbaum&nbsp;Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at The Block Museum of Art, Northwestern University,&nbsp;in conversation with&nbsp;Leslie Barlow,&nbsp;Mary&nbsp;Griep, and&nbsp;Melvin R. Smith.&nbsp;

<a href="http://www.facebook.com/events/927464617889113">The second</a>, featuring&nbsp;Henriette&nbsp;Huldisch,&nbsp;Chief Curator and Director of Curatorial Affairs at the Walker Art Center,&nbsp;in conversation with&nbsp;Joe&nbsp;Sinness,&nbsp;Alexa&nbsp;Horochowski, and&nbsp;Tetsuya&nbsp;Yamada&nbsp;has unfortunately been postponed until the fall, due to&nbsp;Covid-related&nbsp;scheduling issues.

<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; letter-spacing:0.1686830073595047px">◼︎◼︎◼︎◼︎◼︎◼︎

<img alt="" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/file_container/RmlsZUNvbnRhaW5lch4fMjYxMjYwMDAz/full.jpg" />Photo by Rik Sferra

&nbsp;

There&rsquo;s not a lot of smiling in art museums. Take a stroll through the Minneapolis Institute of Art, for instance, and you will find happy faces in very short supply. Sure, you can almost always find people at the caf&eacute; laughing and talking, or&nbsp;gaggles of schoolkids running gleefully from room to room on field trips. It&rsquo;s not at all an unhappy place; I love that museum.&nbsp;

But the people on the walls &ndash; in the paintings, drawings, prints, and sculptures? On the whole, not a chipper bunch. On a recent visit I found only a handful of exceptions: a couple of smiling buddhas, one placidly cordial baby Jesus, and a few quizzical smirks in the Modern &amp; Contemporary galleries. Aside from that, this massive collection of some of the world&rsquo;s best art has very little to say &ndash; at least representationally &ndash; about joy.

The first full-fledged, teeth-flashing smiles I found were well into my visit, up on the third floor, in a beautifully stylized painting of a Black mother proudly posing with her young sons, by the artist Joy&nbsp;Labinjo. The source image looks like a candid family snapshot, the three boys up front cheesin&rsquo; for the camera &ndash; an utterly normal moment of fun. But in the context of the exhibition it&#39;s in, Rituals of Resilience, the painting &ndash; and these sudden smiles inside the gallery &ndash; take on the weight of something larger and more powerful. You get the sense that, as the poet Toi Derricotte put it in the title to one of her poems, &ldquo;Joy is an act of resistance.&rdquo;

Around the corner from Labinjo&rsquo;s piece is another domestic scene, a mixed media portrait by Leslie Barlow of her grandmother, Ellen Barlow, sitting at home on the couch. There is not quite a smile on her grandmother&rsquo;s face, but it&rsquo;s close. She wears a loving, knowing, contented look, not so much gazing out at the viewer as studying the artist &ndash; her granddaughter &ndash; with patience and pride. Behind her on the wall, a flash of yellow brushstrokes haloes her head. At her slippered feet the canvas becomes a quilted carpet of fabric blocks and old family photos &ndash; a scrapbook of domestic life as faded as the box of tissues on the side table, which Barlow has left barely there in the breezy pink strokes of her underpainting. It reminds me of visiting my own grandmothers at their homes: the years of accumulated family history&nbsp;in the furniture and the photos and the familiarity &ndash; in the stuff and the smells of the place.

&nbsp;

<img alt="" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/file_container/RmlsZUNvbnRhaW5lch4fMjg5MTAwMDAz/full.jpg" /> 
<img alt="" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/file_container/RmlsZUNvbnRhaW5lch4fMjgxMjEwMDAz/full.jpg" />Top: Ellen Barlow,&nbsp;Oil, pastel, acrylic, photo transfer, and fabric on canvas,&nbsp;66&rdquo; x 48&rdquo;,&nbsp;2019. Bottom:&nbsp;When I was your age, we&hellip;,&nbsp;Acrylic and quilted fabric on canvas,&nbsp;72&rdquo; x 76&rdquo;, 2019.

&nbsp;

The story of a family is the story of time passing. Barlow&rsquo;s portraits often&nbsp;contain pieces of what has passed, some of it ugly and some of it sweet, much of it written on the faces of her subjects. But the way she paints grabs ahold of the present moment, teasing out deep rivers of feeling from something as simple as a woman relaxing on her sofa at home.

&ldquo;My paintings aren&rsquo;t about just capturing a likeness,&rdquo; Barlow explains, &ldquo;although that&rsquo;s important to me. They&rsquo;re also about sharing something about that person&#39;s&nbsp;energy or personal story.&rdquo;

Flashes of orange, teal, and magenta form the folds in Ellen&rsquo;s sweatshirt; her hands fade in and out of focus like memories. Some subtle drips run through her figure and onto the floor below, but her face is fully realized in wonderfully observed sections of color. She glows with light purples, blues, golden pale yellows, rich red browns, and carefully placed black shadows. A painting like this makes you realize just how many colors you can find in a face. In a way, that is what Barlow&rsquo;s work is all about: exploring life between colors and cultures as part of a multi-racial family in a society still structured around white supremacy.

&ldquo;My work talks about those issues on an intimate level,&rdquo; she says. &ldquo;Instead of talking about racism with a capital R, I&rsquo;m talking about intergenerational trauma&nbsp;&ndash;&nbsp;the subtle ways these systems and constructs affect us in our families, in our friendships, in our romantic relationships, and how these things perpetuate over time.&rdquo;

Her paintings are typically one step removed from autobiographical &ndash; you won&rsquo;t find many self-portraits in her recent catalog, but you will find her grandmothers, her parents, her siblings, her colleagues, and her friends. &ldquo;I&rsquo;ve always felt weird about self-portraits, to be honest,&rdquo; she explains. &ldquo;I feel like I&rsquo;m already really present in the work. I paint a lot of family members, so it&rsquo;s very much my story.&rdquo; Indeed, you can see the artist quite plainly reflected in her subjects&rsquo; eyes, in the confidence and comfort with which they pose, knowing they are not just being studied but being seen.&nbsp;What you&rsquo;re seeing on their faces, more than anything, is trust.

&nbsp;

<img alt="" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/file_container/RmlsZUNvbnRhaW5lch4fMjczMjcwMDAz/full.jpg" />

<img alt="" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/file_container/RmlsZUNvbnRhaW5lch4fMjY3MzEwMDAz/full.jpg" />Top: Nicole and Seth and their daughter (and daughter to be), in the kitchen,&nbsp;Oil and acrylic on panel,&nbsp;60&rdquo;&nbsp;x 48&rdquo;,&nbsp;2020. Bottom:&nbsp;Lacey and their poodle, in the backyard,&nbsp;Oil, acrylic, yarn, and canvas on panel,&nbsp;60&rdquo; x 48&rdquo;,&nbsp;2020.

&nbsp;

That trust was on prominent display in Barlow&rsquo;s MAEP exhibition last year, Within, Between, and Beyond, filling up Mia with a lot more smiles than normal. The show featured 16 large-scale portraits of individuals and families from different ethnic backgrounds, with different lived experiences, accompanied by <a href="https://new.artsmia.org/exhibition/leslie-barlow-within-between-and-beyond/" target="_blank">video interviews</a> with the subjects telling their own stories. The paintings themselves are large and luscious &ndash; all painted on four by five foot wooden panels &ndash; each one caught in the balance between finished portrait and sketchy underpainting. Barlow&rsquo;s colors are&nbsp;almost radioactively vibrant in some spots: a hand glowing bright red, a brick wall turned neon orange,&nbsp;a landscape rendered in&nbsp;swirling magentas.&nbsp;As with Ellen, here her subjects&rsquo; faces ground the works, even as arms, legs, and whole rooms fade into atmosphere. You can tell she&rsquo;s having fun making these.

&ldquo;For me, when I&rsquo;m pushing around that goo &mdash; the pigment and the dirt, there&rsquo;s something very sensual about it,&rdquo; she says. &ldquo;It&rsquo;s a very embodied experience. I don&rsquo;t feel separate from the paint, I kind of get lost in it.&rdquo; If you follow her on Instagram, you&rsquo;ve likely seen <a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/CF8FGZJHL1O/" target="_blank">pictures of her painting palette</a>, expertly dappled&nbsp;with dozens of daubs of oil paint in every shade imaginable. That process alone can take up to two hours, mixing and preparing her materials at the start of a painting session. &ldquo;It&rsquo;s like when people pour their coffee in the morning to get ready for their day. It&rsquo;s how I get in the mindspace to paint.&rdquo;

Textile elements pop up on some of these paintings, as well: red scraps quilted into the background of one; embroidered sunflowers&nbsp;in the foreground of another. It&rsquo;s a&nbsp;material nod to the history of American craft and art, calling to mind the quilts of Gee&rsquo;s Bend and the collages of Romare Bearden, while also connecting Barlow to contemporary artists working in fiber-based media, such as Bisa Butler, whose work hangs nearby in Rituals of Resilience.&nbsp;

In one of the MAEP pieces,&nbsp;about two dozen different fabric patterns form an undulating line encircling a woman dancing. The quilt has become a sort of aura around her, feeding right into her yellow floral dress. The trees in the background are nothing more than purple line drawings dripping down the golden woodgrain. The woman, however, is fully rendered, her face highlighted ever so slightly by hints of luminescent green. She, too, is smiling out at us.

&ldquo;We&rsquo;re so complicated and layered,&rdquo; Barlow says with a small laugh. &ldquo;But I&rsquo;m really fascinated by how we navigate the world, especially now, how we find joy amongst all the pain, and how we lean on each other to make it through.&rdquo;

&nbsp;

<img alt="" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/file_container/RmlsZUNvbnRhaW5lch4fMjg5MDkwMDAz/full.jpg" />

Murals created in 2020 by Creatives After Curfew, honoring Tony McDade, George Floyd, and Breonna Taylor.

&nbsp;

Fostering community around art is central to more than just her painting practice. It informs&nbsp;everything that she does professionally, and she does a lot. In addition to her studio practice, Barlow has been volunteering with&nbsp;<a href="https://www.midwestmixed.com" target="_blank">MidWest Mixed</a> for the past seven years, facilitating connections between people of mixed race and multiracial backgrounds. She is also a core member of <a href="https://creativesaftercurfew.com" target="_blank">Creatives After Curfew</a>, a large crew of muralists in Minneapolis who&rsquo;ve been making murals together since the city was covered in plywood after the murder of George Floyd. And now she works as Director of <a href="https://publicfunctionary.org/studios" target="_blank">PF Studios</a>, the art studio program Public Functionary runs out of the Northrup King Building in Northeast, providing subsidized space and professional development to over 20 young BIPOC artists.

I ask her, with everything she&rsquo;s got going on, what is it that keeps her from burning out?

&ldquo;What keeps me going is the work feeds itself. Now, even though I&rsquo;m doing several things, they&rsquo;re all very interrelated. There&rsquo;s a conversation I can have at Creatives After Curfew that feels very connected to a conversation in the studio program, which then impacts how I&rsquo;m thinking about my own work, which then makes me want to bring up something at Midwest Mixed. It doesn&rsquo;t feel like I have to separate parts of myself to do the work.

&ldquo;We create these super weird and wonderful lives as artists,&rdquo; she continues. &ldquo;There&rsquo;s no roadmap, but when you pause and take a step back to look at what you&#39;ve been doing, you&rsquo;re like &lsquo;Oh, I&rsquo;m here. This is what I dreamed of.&rsquo;&rdquo;

Right now, Barlow has just finished up a commission for the Minnesota State Fair &ndash; the Official 2022 Commemorative Art, no less &ndash; and she is now gearing up for a solo show at Bockley Gallery in the fall. &ldquo;The joy was always there,&rdquo; she&nbsp;says, speaking about her work up to this point. But this show, she tells me, &ldquo;will have very intentionally joyful images.&rdquo; She is still in the early phases of seeing what will work in the studio, let alone in the gallery, but she gives me a hint: there will probably be some cosplay. Barlow has always worn her sci-fi love on her sleeve, dressing up in elaborate costumes as Star Wars, Star Trek, or MCU characters, and a few years back some of her own cosplay even made it all the way onto some&nbsp;of her canvases. Now she&rsquo;s revisiting the idea with a renewed focus on community.

&ldquo;There is something really interesting about cosplay, especially for people of color, especially for Black cosplayers,&rdquo; she explains. &ldquo;You can kind of live outside of your prescribed identity and be a different person. The mask that you put on or the role that you play in cosplay sometimes can feel more true to you than the experiences you have outside of cosplay. Because you get to be anything, in a way, and it&rsquo;s really expansive.&rdquo;

It makes sense, for work so rooted in the past and so viscerally connected to&nbsp;the present, to start thinking about the future. And to think about future audiences at the same time.&nbsp;&ldquo;I see myself almost as archiving stories,&rdquo; she says. &ldquo;Trying to create space for images and stories that I would have loved to have seen as a kid, particularly when I felt lost and alone and like nobody knew or cared about my lived experience. I didn&rsquo;t really see that in museums or elevated in that kind of way.&rdquo;&nbsp;

&nbsp;

<img alt="" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/file_container/RmlsZUNvbnRhaW5lch4fMjkxMDgwMDAz/full.jpg" />

<img alt="" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/file_container/RmlsZUNvbnRhaW5lch4fMjcxMDkwMDAz/full.jpg" />Two works from the exhibition Loving. Top:&nbsp;Derek and James,&nbsp;Oil, pastel, and acrylic on panel,&nbsp;48&rdquo; x 48&rdquo;,&nbsp;2017. Bottom:&nbsp;Sweetness,&nbsp;Oil, pastel, acrylic on panel,&nbsp;40&rdquo; x 30&rdquo;,&nbsp;2020

&nbsp;

I wonder if framing joy &ndash; particularly Black joy in America &ndash; as inherently revolutionary is its own kind of theft: disallowing a smile from simply being a smile. In Derricotte&rsquo;s poem, the narrator wonders why a pet fish would mean so much to a young, Black girl.&nbsp;

&nbsp;

&hellip;What does her love have to do

with five hundred years of

sorrow, then joy coming up like a&nbsp;

&nbsp;

small breath, a

bubble? What does it have to do

with the graveyards of the

Atlantic, in her mother&rsquo;s

heart?

&nbsp;

It&#39;s a hell of a weight to put on happiness. Wandering out of the Rituals of Resilience gallery, the last smiles I see at Mia &ndash; at least on the walls &ndash;&nbsp;are in two photos by Gordon Parks. Fittingly, they are on the faces of protestors. Some are&nbsp;dressed in suits, others are wearing sweatshirts printed with Malcolm X&rsquo;s face. His image&nbsp;is stern and serious, but they are smiling, laughing, and hollering.&nbsp;The joy, of course, is part of the fight. The essence of&nbsp;privilege is when your joy doesn&#39;t have to be, when it can exist apart from words like resistance and resilience.

A few years back, Barlow won a State Arts Board grant to create portraits of interracial families as a celebration of the 50th anniversary of Loving v. Virginia. We&#39;ve all been raised to believe that those fights were won, that those chapters in the history books were set in stone. Now, just in the past month, the leaked Supreme Court draft opinion that may well strike down Roe v. Wade&nbsp;also opened the door to roll back Loving as well.&nbsp;As always in this country, the past is present.&nbsp;

But&nbsp;the future is ours to imagine, and Barlow is thinking ahead, in both her painting practice and her community work. &ldquo;How do we break those patterns and try to create something new?&rdquo; she&nbsp;asks.

&ldquo;What happens when we really love up on each other?&rdquo;&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:0.1686830073595047px">◼︎

&nbsp;

<img alt="" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/file_container/RmlsZUNvbnRhaW5lch4fMjYxMjcwMDAz/full.jpg" />

&nbsp;

To see more of the artist&#39;s work, visit <a href="https://www.lesliebarlowartist.com" target="_blank">her website</a> or follow her on Instagram <a href="https://www.instagram.com/ljpinko/" target="_blank">@ljpinko</a>. All images courtesy of the artist.

Banner image:&nbsp;Grandmother and Child (detail),&nbsp;Oil, pastel, acrylic, quilted fabric on panel,&nbsp;48&rdquo; x 48&rdquo;, 2019

Ahead of their upcoming Discussion Series, each of the six 2019 McKnight Fellows in Visual Arts talks to us individually about their practice

2019 McKnight Artist Fellowship Profile: Leslie Barlow

This is the fourth&nbsp;<a href="https://www.mplsart.com/written/mcknight-profiles">in a series of articles</a> profiling the six distinguished artists chosen as 2019&nbsp;McKnight&nbsp;Fellows in Visual Arts, a grant&nbsp;program for&nbsp;mid-career artists in Minnesota&nbsp;that&nbsp;is&nbsp;administered by the Minneapolis College of Art and Design.&nbsp;Culminating the two-year fellowship (delayed last year&nbsp;by the pandemic), there will be two McKnight Discussions, each&nbsp;held in person:

<a href="http://www.facebook.com/events/400213234812760/" target="_blank">The first</a>&nbsp;is on&nbsp;May 24th at 6:30pm&nbsp;at&nbsp;MCAD, featuring Janet&nbsp;Dees,&nbsp;Steven and Lisa Munster&nbsp;Tananbaum&nbsp;Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at The Block Museum of Art, Northwestern University,&nbsp;in conversation with&nbsp;Leslie Barlow,&nbsp;Mary&nbsp;Griep, and&nbsp;Melvin R. Smith.&nbsp;

<a href="http://www.facebook.com/events/927464617889113">The second</a>, featuring&nbsp;Henriette&nbsp;Huldisch,&nbsp;Chief Curator and Director of Curatorial Affairs at the Walker Art Center,&nbsp;in conversation with&nbsp;Joe&nbsp;Sinness,&nbsp;Alexa&nbsp;Horochowski, and&nbsp;Tetsuya&nbsp;Yamada&nbsp;has unfortunately been postponed until the fall, due to&nbsp;Covid-related&nbsp;scheduling issues.

<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:0.1686830073595047px">◼︎◼︎◼︎◼︎◼︎◼︎

<img alt="" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/file_container/RmlsZUNvbnRhaW5lch4fMjcxMDYwMDAz/full.jpg" />Photo by Rik Sferra

&nbsp;

There is a temptation, when you&rsquo;re writing about an artist, to start in the gallery. To begin with their finished works, their completed thoughts, to uncover what the artwork reveals about the artist. It&rsquo;s sort of like solving a puzzle backwards &mdash; placing your pencil in the center of the maze and winding your way back to the start. And in the case of Alexa Horochowski&rsquo;s work, the gallery provides an embarrassment of riches:&nbsp;her large scale installations &mdash; at places like Rochester Art Center, Nemeth Art Center, and the Soap Factory&nbsp;&mdash; are eloquent, sober reflections of both her material and conceptual processes alike.

But these gallery installations also offer an incredibly wide range of media to focus on. Horochowski (pronounced horo-hō-ski) has worked in bronze casting, metalsmithing, video projection, sculptural drawing, found object installation, zine-publishing, and most recently flag-making, to name a few. The artworks she has created all share a sensibility at their core, but to nail down how they all fit together, how such a variety of work can emerge from a single studio practice, you have to leave the exhibition space. You have to go outside. And preferably, if you&rsquo;re able, about 6000 miles south.

&ldquo;I feel like my identity was formed by the Patagonian landscape,&rdquo; she tells me, during a studio visit at her home in Powderhorn Park. Though born in Missouri, Horochowski grew up in Argentina, the granddaughter of immigrants from Spain and Ukraine. Despite moving back to America when she was ten, those wide, wild vistas still call to her. &ldquo;My work is a lot about that &mdash; the landscape and the yearning for that landscape.&rdquo;

What sets a landscape painter apart from a common passerby is simple: they have stopped to pay attention. And this is the foundation of Horochowski&rsquo;s practice: observation. Her work, in any medium, stems from paying a keen level of conceptual attention not just to the natural world but to how we interact with it.

&ldquo;I&rsquo;ve been thinking about my lineage,&rdquo; she says. &ldquo;It&rsquo;s farmers or fishermen, working class people. I visited Galicia, and they have their vegetable gardens and their chickens. They&rsquo;ll cook, they&rsquo;ll fish, they&rsquo;ll harvest stuff from the shore. They are very much in touch with the land, a total immediate connection.&rdquo;

A few moments later, the thought has distilled even further into something simpler and more compact: &ldquo;You know, I&rsquo;m just a peasant,&rdquo; she says, laughing.

&nbsp;

<img alt="" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/file_container/RmlsZUNvbnRhaW5lch4fMjg3MDMwMDAz/full.jpg" />

<img alt="" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/file_container/RmlsZUNvbnRhaW5lch4fMjY3MjQwMDAz/full.jpg" />Top:&nbsp;Installation view of&nbsp;O Horizons&nbsp;at Nemeth Art Center, 2018. Bottom: installation view of&nbsp;Club Dismunuci&oacute;n at&nbsp;the Soap Factory, 2014.&nbsp;

&nbsp;

That connection to life and land is evident in her home studio as well, where her large collection of rather massive plants rub elbows with her artwork. It&rsquo;s the sculptor&rsquo;s dilemma: where do you put all these things when they&rsquo;re not on view at a gallery? Here, Horochowski&rsquo;s pitchfork sculptures &mdash; fiercely simple and elongated like stick figures &mdash; stand in a tight scrum next to a ten-foot-tall Norfolk pine tree. Nearby lays a pile of hand-sewn flags; next to that, a coiling black mass of cast bronze kelp hangs on the wall. It may sound like a clutter, but it&rsquo;s actually all very well organized, dusted, and cared for. On a bookshelf under the window sits a thoughtful display of small sculptures and mementos from Horochowski&rsquo;s youth &mdash; bits of petrified wood and found boleadoras, round projectiles that are used to hunt the South American ostriches native to Argentina.

Through the lens of a love for the land, her wide-ranging work starts to coalesce. The farm provides the context for her pitchforks and weathervanes, her cast&nbsp;bronze&nbsp;John Deere and Asgrow Corporation Farmer Caps. The found world provides much of the rest, as in her dark, hynoptic videos of kelp tossing around like alien spaghetti in the surf. It&rsquo;s all a meditation on connection to and disconnection from what we call &ldquo;the natural world.&rdquo; Our terminology itself keeps the wilderness at arm&rsquo;s length, at our own peril. There is a menace to Horochowski&rsquo;s work, a sense of stomach-pit dread that should be well known to anyone paying a lick of attention to our climate crisis. Much of her work takes the form of a lamentation, though there is also a sense of calm reflection and dutiful documentation as well (she got her BA in Journalism, after all). However you frame them, they are a human reaction to a time in our history when our relationship with the landscape has gone sour.

But she&rsquo;s no scold either. There is an earnest curiosity to her observations, a sense of adventurous wonder that comes through in both her conceptual explorations and her material investigations. A residency at Mammoth Lakes, California, brought her face to face with Methuselah, the oldest known living thing on this planet, a bristle-cone pine tree that is 5,000 years young. &ldquo;People show up, just like me, take a picture and then they walk away,&rdquo; she says, &ldquo;and I was just thinking about that relationship of the super brief moment of snapping a shot and then walking away from this 5,000 year old being who&rsquo;s been there, who owns this history. I was fascinated by this interaction.&rdquo;

Her own snapshot of Methuselah factors in to yet another project &mdash; another medium &mdash; a photo book that ruminates on the scale of time. Preserved on each page are photos capturing moments from the life of this tree (which is much smaller than you might imagine) and the lives of the artist&rsquo;s family. These are moments that have been, in a way, artificially elongated through the medium of photography, snatched from the flow of time and preserved. And of course some day, on the scale of eons, they will be lost as well.&nbsp;

&nbsp;

<img alt="" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/file_container/RmlsZUNvbnRhaW5lch4fMjYzMDMwMDAz/full.jpg" />

<img alt="" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/file_container/RmlsZUNvbnRhaW5lch4fMjY1MTUwMDAz/full.jpg" />Top: One of Horochowski&#39;s two rescue cats, Doodles, sits among the artist&#39;s collection of sculptures and ephemera. Photo by the author.&nbsp;Bottom: The artist with her siblings at a petrified forest in the Patagonia.

&nbsp;

It should also be noted that peasant is a political term, and Horochowski brings an awareness of how class and commerce complicate and inform our relationship to the land. It&rsquo;s no surprise that, in a country where we don&rsquo;t often know our own history, we don&rsquo;t often know where our food comes from either. Certainly not who grows it.&nbsp;

She is interested in those connections as well, perhaps stemming from the way politics have impacted and interrupted her own life. Indeed, her family history is the story of human lives caught on the winds of geopolitical turmoil. Her grandparents fled Europe during the first World War, following a flow of immigrants to Argentina, whose indigenous populations had already been rocked by two centuries of colonial influx. After her father&rsquo;s surgical career took the family from Argentina to Missouri&nbsp;and back again, the family had to flee another crisis, the Dirty War, which landed them back in the United States for good when Horochowski was ten years old. Eventually her father made it back to his home, where he lived among an olive grove for the past 27 years, until, sadly, his passing at the end of April.

The story is reminiscent of one of Horochowski&rsquo;s simplest and most powerful bodies of work, the Vortex Drawings. Here, automatic drawing meets found object sculpture, performance, and videography, as piles of styrofoam cups and packing peanuts coated in graphite or ink are tossed about on large pieces of paper by a&nbsp;circle of carefully arranged&nbsp;industrial fans,&nbsp;angled to&nbsp;produce a man-made current akin to vortices found in nature. What is left behind are portentous, gaping whirlpools of marks made at random but under tight control. It is another form of abstracted lamentation, as though the butterfly got caught in its own hurricane. Single use disposables, like a single life, tossed about by the currents of a closed system.

&nbsp;

<img alt="" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/file_container/RmlsZUNvbnRhaW5lch4fMjkyOTIwMDAz/full.jpg" />

<img alt="" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/file_container/RmlsZUNvbnRhaW5lch4fMjkxMDUwMDAz/full.jpg" />Top: Vortex Drawings at the Highpoint Center for Printmaking, 2017. Bottom: Just a few of the many flags Horochowski has created, hanging in her home studio. Photo by the author.

&nbsp;

Wind gives flags their power as well, but in the case of her new collection of hand-sewn banners, Horochowski is having none of it. Instead of running up poles or streaming above protesters, these flags hang stoic and still inside the gallery. She made the first one as a memorial to George Floyd, an all-black American flag emblazoned with his name. Over the past two years of pandemic and polarization, the series has expanded to touch on Covid-19, the January 6th insurrection, pro-democracy demonstrations in Chile, and most recently the atrocities being committed by the Russian military against the people of Ukraine. An all-white surrender flag features the the Cyrillic word &ldquo;CHILDREN&rdquo; over&nbsp;the&nbsp;crosshairs of a target, referencing the brutal destruction of&nbsp;<a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/russian-bombed-theater-had-children-written-nearby-satellite-images-2022-3" target="_blank">a Mariupol theater&nbsp;in mid-March, </a>which served as a shelter for civilians in the embattled town. Despite having &quot;дети&quot; written so large on the pavement that it could be plainly read by satellite, the Russians bombed it anyway,&nbsp;<a href="https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2022/05/mariupol-theater-death-toll-likely-much-worse-than-reported.html" target="_blank">killing 600 or more civilians</a>. Horochowski&#39;s&nbsp;flag is another landscape, and another lament. &ldquo;Because my father is of Ukrainian descent,&rdquo; she says, &ldquo;it&rsquo;s really hitting a nerve for me.&rdquo;

Her father looms large in her work of late. She shows me an Acapulco chair she created for a show last year at <a href="https://hairandnailsart.com/past/nomeacuerdo-i-dont-remember-land/" target="_blank">Hair + Nails Gallery</a>, carefully woven with leather cording onto a steel frame. Like all of her work, it is simple and elegant (and quite comfortable), though it feels more personal. &ldquo;It&rsquo;s really a portrait of my father,&rdquo; she explains, &ldquo;so I think of it as a sculpture.&rdquo; The elder Horochowski inspired the piece through his lifelong penchant for mending items instead of buying new ones, like the plastic lawn chairs she photographed him fixing during a trip home before the pandemic. There is a sense of care and generosity in&nbsp;a nice piece of furniture &mdash; a work of art scaled to the contours of a human body, telling the story of a human life, and fit for a moment of rest, whether&nbsp;at home or at an art exhibition.

And so we find ourselves back inside the gallery at the end after all, trying to tease out something singular about this wide variety of work. &ldquo;I feel like I can&rsquo;t make a work of art that describes it all,&rdquo; Horochowski says, &ldquo;so I&rsquo;m always assembling parts that together communicate something bigger.&rdquo;&nbsp;

When I ask if she considers herself&nbsp;a sculptor at heart, she demurs. &ldquo;I&rsquo;m a material artist, [but] my material investigation is dictated by an idea or concept. I don&rsquo;t explore and perfect a material or a process [the way a sculptor does] &mdash; I embrace materials and processes that are unknown to me, continually embracing learning.&rdquo;

Exhibitions, at their best, are about that exactly: sharing what the artist has learned, not just what they have created. Gallery spaces are set apart from the world in so many ways &mdash; by access, by class, by attitude. They are places defined by their walls, standing at a distance from the natural world and in some ways from the political one as well, at least in terms of the popular discourse.&nbsp;

That is just one of many disconnections that Horochowski&rsquo;s work seeks to mend, weaving together for us the concerns, interests, and explorations of a life lived curiously. In all of her projects, she offers us a sense of&nbsp;perspective: on time, on place, on the larger forces that shape a society, and on&nbsp;the smaller moments that shape a life.&nbsp;With the exception of the occasional fellowship, there&rsquo;s not a lot of money in big installations like hers. The value comes in the labor and, before that, in the looking.&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:0.1686830073595047px">◼︎

&nbsp;

<img alt="" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/file_container/RmlsZUNvbnRhaW5lch4fMjc1MTQwMDAz/full.jpg" />A collection of objects from&nbsp;NOMEACUERDO LAND&nbsp;at Hair + Nails Gallery, 2021. Left to right: petrified wood, family photo,&nbsp;boleadora,&nbsp;aviator glasses fitted with obsidian lenses, and cast bronze packing peanuts.

&nbsp;

See more of Alexa Horochowski&#39;s work on <a href="http://www.alexahorochowski.com" target="_blank">her website</a> and follow her on Instagram <a href="https://www.instagram.com/alexahorochowski/" target="_blank">@alexahorochowski</a>.

You can also read Russ White&#39;s<a href="https://www.mplsart.com/written/2019/04/perpetual-motions-alexa-horochowski-s-beautiful-sky-at-the-rochester-art-center">&nbsp;review of </a><a href="https://www.mplsart.com/written/2019/04/perpetual-motions-alexa-horochowski-s-beautiful-sky-at-the-rochester-art-center">Beautiful Sky</a>,&nbsp;her 2019 Rochester Art Center exhibition, as well as <a href="https://www.mplsart.com/written/2021/11/democracy-flagging-on-art-protest-and-satire-with-alexa-horochowski">our conversation about her flag series</a>.

Banner image: globe from Beautiful Sky, 2019.

2019 McKnight Artist Fellowship Profile: Alexa Horochowski

This is the third&nbsp;<a href="https://www.mplsart.com/written/mcknight-profiles">in a series of articles</a>&nbsp;profiling the six distinguished artists chosen as 2019&nbsp;McKnight&nbsp;Fellows in Visual Arts, a grant&nbsp;program for&nbsp;mid-career artists in Minnesota&nbsp;that&nbsp;is&nbsp;administered by the Minneapolis College of Art and Design.&nbsp;Culminating the two-year&nbsp;fellowship (delayed last year&nbsp;by the pandemic), there will be two McKnight Discussions, each&nbsp;held in person:

<a href="http://www.facebook.com/events/400213234812760/" target="_blank">The first</a>&nbsp;is on&nbsp;May&nbsp;24th at 6:30pm&nbsp;at&nbsp;MCAD, featuring Janet&nbsp;Dees,&nbsp;Steven and Lisa Munster&nbsp;Tananbaum&nbsp;Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at The Block Museum of Art, Northwestern University,&nbsp;in conversation with&nbsp;Leslie Barlow,&nbsp;Mary&nbsp;Griep, and&nbsp;Melvin R. Smith.&nbsp;

<a href="http://www.facebook.com/events/927464617889113">The second</a>, featuring&nbsp;Henriette&nbsp;Huldisch,&nbsp;Chief Curator and Director of Curatorial Affairs at the Walker Art Center,&nbsp;in conversation with&nbsp;Joe&nbsp;Sinness,&nbsp;Alexa&nbsp;Horochowski, and&nbsp;Tetsuya&nbsp;Yamada&nbsp;has unfortunately been postponed until the fall, due to&nbsp;Covid-related&nbsp;scheduling issues.

<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:0.1686830073595047px">◼︎◼︎◼︎◼︎◼︎◼︎

<img alt="" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/file_container/RmlsZUNvbnRhaW5lch4fMjc1MjAwMDAz/full.jpg" />Photo by&nbsp;Rik&nbsp;Sferra

&nbsp;

When you picture a tourist, what do you see? Dorky white socks maybe; definitely a fanny pack. And they are almost certainly wearing a camera around their neck.&nbsp;Usually a point-and-shoot, nothing fancy &mdash; a simple tool for tracking where they&rsquo;ve been and what they&rsquo;ve seen. I suppose these days smartphones are making that stereotype a bit old-fashioned, but either way the tourist&rsquo;s urge to record remains. For Mary Griep, however, a photograph is useful, but it isn&rsquo;t enough. She has visited a lot of places, and to really remember a place, to honor it, she&rsquo;s got to draw it.

In her second story garage studio in Northfield, MN, Griep (pronounced &ldquo;Grip&rdquo;) has a recent drawing&nbsp;tacked up on the wall with magnets &mdash; 56 sheets of Dura-Lar mapping out the&nbsp;side elevation of a massive cathedral. The whole thing is a good eighteen&nbsp;feet across and taller than the eight foot ceiling will allow. At first, it looks like a blown-up architectural drawing simply&nbsp;embellished with some colors and patterns, until you get closer. It&rsquo;s a recreation of Chartres, the Gothic and Romanesque French cathedral begun in the late 12th century, and the tells are all there: the rose window, the ornate spires, the flying buttresses. But this is no simple photograph, no straight-forward rendering. Shades of blue, gold, and gray&nbsp;balance beautifully within the precise line-work, hiding flashes&nbsp;of green ivy,&nbsp;collaged&nbsp;text, sky blue bubbles, and a thousand other tiny&nbsp;elements.&nbsp;Griep&nbsp;plays with space and perspective, chopping up the building into blocky chunks that repeat disjointedly, like a wallpaper pattern that doesn&rsquo;t quite line up. The building is dizzy with detail.

This piece, which took about a year to complete, is the latest in a series of drawings spanning the past two decades, in which Griep has recreated sixteen 12th century buildings from France, Cambodia, Norway, Turkey, Italy, Mexico, and elsewhere. It&rsquo;s not uncommon for an artist&rsquo;s career to be structured around a singular obsessive interest &mdash; a particular guiding question or undeniable impulse &mdash; and Griep discovered hers in 1998, on a trip across Europe&nbsp;with art history students&nbsp;studying Roman ruins and old churches, among them this very same&nbsp;French cathedral. The artist&nbsp;forewent the tourist&rsquo;s camera in favor of 100 sheets of paper, on which she captured small drawings of the building&rsquo;s intricate details. Back home, her drawings intrigued her, but somehow they weren&rsquo;t enough. &ldquo;I mean, there&rsquo;ve been a lot of drawings of Chartres, you know?&rdquo;

Thinking back on her actual experience of walking inside and around the church, the images started to pile up on each other, and the drawings transformed, creating impossible buildings spliced together from multiple perspectives. &ldquo;What I&rsquo;m really interested in is what happens if you&rsquo;re inside and you&rsquo;re outside [at the same time]?&rdquo; she explains. &ldquo;Because our knowledge of a space isn&rsquo;t that camera vision.&rdquo;

&nbsp;

<img alt="" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/file_container/RmlsZUNvbnRhaW5lch4fMjYxMjIwMDAz/full.jpg" /><img alt="" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/file_container/RmlsZUNvbnRhaW5lch4fMjYxMjMwMDAz/full.jpg" />Top: Studio view, featuring&nbsp;Palimpsest.&nbsp;Bottom: The artist shows the collage work and drawing that happens on the front and back sides of the Dura-Lar sheets, mimicking the inside/outside approach she is taking to her subject matter.

&nbsp;

Here in her studio, this latest drawing of Chartres flattens the whole complex out, mashing up several of the building&#39;s&nbsp;fa&ccedil;ades onto a single plane. At the base of each tower is an abstracted collage, not of the arched windows out front, but of the view from inside looking straight up. It&rsquo;s a sort of architectural cubism, creating a kaleidoscopic vision of interweaving details from the ceilings, floors, and walls, inside and out. Certain aspects repeat themselves, as though you are blinking and catching separate moments of the same structure. The hazy, transparent Dura-Lar allows magazine clippings and silver&nbsp;leaf&nbsp;collaged on the back to show through amongst the ink and colored pencil, leaving the viewer with an immense amount of details to digest.&nbsp;

This contemporary approach to recreating space actually borrows a sensibility from medieval art as well &mdash; fitting for a church of this vintage. If you were an artist in medieval Europe, Griep explains, &ldquo;you should include everything you know. If a horse has four legs, even if you can only see two or three, you have to put four in.&rdquo; Perspective, foreshortening, and what we would call realism were still two or three centuries&nbsp;yet to come.&nbsp;

Fittingly titled Palimpsest &mdash; a word meaning&nbsp;something rewritten or reused, with traces of the original still visible &mdash; it is also a meditation on all of the changes this building has been through over the years &mdash; including <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/01/arts/design/chartres-cathedral-restoration-controversial.html" target="_blank">a recent and controversial restoration</a>. A lot can happen in 800 years, but what is it about that span of time and that particular century&nbsp;that has kept Griep&nbsp;so enthralled?

First of all, she explains, &ldquo;The 12th century is the first time you get a lot of buildings around the world that we still have.&rdquo; Her subjects are all considered sacred sites, but their religiosity is not exactly what interests her. &ldquo;Any building that&rsquo;s left from the 12th century I think is a monument to human attention,&rdquo; she says. Consider the laborers and artisans who crafted all of those magnificent structures, who chiseled the gargoyles and filigrees, who plumbed and leveled the mighty towers so expertly that they stand straight to this day. The people who cleaned them, attended them, defended them, and rebuilt&nbsp;them after calamity. All those names are lost to time. Or at least most of them; interestingly, the 12th century is also the first time in medieval history that we find a carver&rsquo;s signature, chiseled into an ornate stone tympanum at a church in southern France: it reads &ldquo;<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gislebertus" target="_blank">Gislebertus</a> made this.&rdquo;

&ldquo;It was a really interesting time,&rdquo; she continues. &ldquo;For one thing, the technology was better, particularly for growing food. And people were going everywhere.&rdquo; Between robust trade routes, crusading armies and explorers, and the fledgling tourism industry of religious pilgrimage, people got around a lot more than we might assume. And in her own life, Griep was following suit. After completing her first drawing of Chartres (which is similar to this newer version but much more sober and straight-forward), she and her family visited Cambodia, where coincidentally she realized there was another gigantic 12th century religious site nearby: Angkor Wat. &ldquo;I knew they were contemporaneous,&rdquo; she says, so why not draw this place as well? Same scale, same approach, and one thirty-one-foot-long drawing later, the Anastylosis Project had officially become a series.

&nbsp;

<img alt="" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/file_container/RmlsZUNvbnRhaW5lch4fMjg1MTIwMDAz/full.jpg" />

<img alt="" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/file_container/RmlsZUNvbnRhaW5lch4fMjgxMTkwMDAz/full.jpg" />

<img alt="" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/file_container/RmlsZUNvbnRhaW5lch4fMjcxMDgwMDAz/full.jpg" />

Works&nbsp;from the&nbsp;Anastylosis&nbsp;Project. &quot;Anastylosis&quot; means&nbsp;&quot;the reconstruction of a monument from fallen parts.&quot; Top:&nbsp;Angkor Wat&nbsp;(Siem&nbsp;Reap, Cambodia), 2001-2002, Mixed media,&nbsp;8 x&nbsp;31&#39; x 8&#39;. Image courtesy of the artist&#39;s website. &nbsp;Middle, at left:&nbsp;Franziskanerkirche&nbsp;(Salzburg, Austria), 2013, Mixed media,&nbsp;48 x 36&quot;. At right:&nbsp;Ulu&nbsp;Camii&nbsp;(Divrigi, Turkey), 2007, Mixed media, 8 x&nbsp;10&#39;.&nbsp;Images&nbsp;courtesy of the artist&#39;s website.&nbsp;Bottom: Detail of&nbsp;San Marco (The Marble Carpet)&nbsp;(Venice, Italy), 2013-2015, Mixed media,&nbsp;18&nbsp;x 10&#39;.

&nbsp;

What followed has been&nbsp;a career of residencies and world travel, during breaks from teaching at St. Olaf, taking&nbsp;her to study churches, mosques, synagogues, Buddhist temples, and a Mesoamerican pyramid. She still grapples with one nagging question: &ldquo;Is this just a 21st century grand tour?&rdquo; She freely admits that there is tremendous privilege in being able to travel the world like this, though many came due to professional residencies and not mere vacations. Either way,&nbsp;Griep does not take these journeys or this responsibility lightly.

On the bookshelves in her studio are binders stuffed with research materials on each site, each culture, each history, that she has compiled and studied before every drawing begins. Hers is a very tidy studio, but really everywhere you look there are small stacks of papers, stuffed with post-its and full of details pertinent to any one of her many projects. The experience of a building is not just in its stones but in its stories as well. &ldquo;The landscape is visible,&rdquo; she says, &ldquo;but what happened on it isn&rsquo;t.&rdquo;

While living in Thailand for four years in the early 2000s, she says she gained a valuable perspective. &ldquo;The best part of not living in your own culture is you get decentered. I was not important to Thai culture in any way, shape, or form.&rdquo; Still, she feels a responsibility to move through these places with integrity. When traveling with students, she would explain to them, &ldquo;This isn&rsquo;t your trip. You are here to see what you can figure out about not only this place but about yourself and who you are as a citizen of the world.&rdquo;

And as a citizen of history. In addition to these large-scale drawings, Griep also has a penchant for making books. They are mostly small hand-bound volumes that are spiral-bound or that&nbsp;fold out like accordions, chronicling interests ranging from climate change to early carnival culture to specific temples she has visited. But her most recent project, sitting out on the drawing table &mdash; completed but not yet bound &mdash; is a proper tome: some 80 pages, each about 18 x 24&rdquo; in size. Written on the cover amid an ornate set of tiled designs is the title: Home of the 37 Nats. &ldquo;This book is about justice,&rdquo; she says.

&nbsp;

<img alt="" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/file_container/RmlsZUNvbnRhaW5lch4fMjc1MjEwMDAz/full.jpg" /><img alt="" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/file_container/RmlsZUNvbnRhaW5lch4fMjg1MTEwMDAz/full.jpg" />Details of pages from Griep&#39;s artist book&nbsp;Home of the 37 Nats. The Great 37&nbsp;Nats, in Burmese Buddhism, are deities similar to saints or angels.&nbsp;&quot;The nats are a little worrisome,&quot; Griep says. &quot;They have to be propitiated. They are all people who were killed because of injustice, usually royal injustice, and they have to help you figure out how we get justice.&rdquo;

&nbsp;

Inside is a complicated rendering of the very complicated history of Burma, known more commonly today as Myanmar &ndash; <a href="https://apnews.com/article/myanmar-burma-different-names-explained-8af64e33cf89c565b074eec9cbe22b72" target="_blank">though not by everyone</a>. Griep&rsquo;s book is built around yet another 12th century religious site: the Shwezigon, a Buddhist pagoda completed in the year 1102. It, too, is&nbsp;a reliquary for religious pilgrimages, similar to medieval European churches who tout&nbsp;their own sanctified items &ndash; a holy drop of blood, a sacred bit of cloth, a saint&rsquo;s lock of hair. The Shwezigon, it is said, enshrines a bone and a tooth from the Buddha himself.

Griep&rsquo;s big book takes its time working through the history of this place. Some pages are finely detailed recreations of tile and stone work in colored pencil mixed with gold leaf. Others feature lengthy quotations, all drawn out in military-style stencils, the artist methodically building up each letter, each word, each sentence like she&rsquo;s laying bricks. No shortcuts, no skimped labor&nbsp;&mdash; a project crafted by hand with solemn respect. The texts excerpt the temple&rsquo;s construction, its &ldquo;discovery&rdquo; by Europeans, and the country&rsquo;s political history through monarchy, colonization, democracy, and military dictatorship.&nbsp;

Next to the book is another small stack of papers: print-outs of information Griep has received from her Burmese contacts listing details about civilians murdered while protesting against the 2021 coup which overthrew the parliamentary election of Aung San Suu Kyi&rsquo;s National League of Democracy party and established military rule. The data bring Griep&rsquo;s book up close to the present moment, weaving together names and perspectives across a full millennium. It is a sad and serious document, and an incomplete one, as any history will be when retold from the outside looking in. Griep ends her book with a quote from John Steadman&rsquo;s The Myth of Asia: &ldquo;Any interpretation is in a sense a falsification of the system it attempts to interpret.&rdquo;

Back here, just this weekend, my wife and I stumbled upon some of Griep&rsquo;s drawings while out walking our dogs: fifteen sections from her Anastylosis Project drawings all installed together, creating one big patchwork building &mdash; a beautiful, poetic&nbsp;sort of&nbsp;Unitarian&nbsp;Frankenstein &mdash; on view through the windows of the University of St. Thomas&rsquo;s Iversen Center for Faith. It is a portrait of a single species scattered across continents, trying to make sense of their places in the world all at the same time. Each of them reached for the heavens in their own way, magnificently, with great care and likely great suffering. And all of them remain beloved enough to have been maintained all the years since.&nbsp;Griep, it seems, has compressed that creative attention into a single practice, trying to make sense of these places&nbsp;all at once. A tourist, she&rsquo;s not.

&ldquo;I probably feel closest to the monks and nuns who worked on illuminated manuscripts in the scriptoriums,&rdquo; she says. &ldquo;That&rsquo;s how they passed on knowledge. You were one link in the chain.&rdquo;

Her drawings, her studies, her binders of research &mdash; all drops in a river moving ever forward. A few years of a life spent paying attention, seeing people long gone in the stones and the stained glass they crafted and cared for, in the grime and the death and the majesty of these old places. &ldquo;I don&rsquo;t think it&rsquo;s about me,&rdquo; she says. &ldquo;It&rsquo;s part of an ongoing conversation. How many things do we talk about over a thousand years? This is just my two cents worth.&rdquo;&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:0.1686830073595047px">◼︎

&nbsp;

<img alt="" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/file_container/RmlsZUNvbnRhaW5lch4fMjkxMDcwMDAz/full.jpg" />

Tell Me A Story, 2020;&nbsp;Giclee prints, silver leaf, gold leaf;&nbsp;University of St. Thomas Art Collection.

&nbsp;

To see more of the artist&#39;s work, visit <a href="https://marygriep.com/" target="_blank">her website</a>. All images by the author unless otherwise noted.

2019 McKnight Artist Fellowship Profile: Mary Griep

This is the second&nbsp;<a href="https://www.mplsart.com/written/mcknight-profiles">in a series of articles</a>&nbsp;profiling the six distinguished artists chosen as 2019&nbsp;McKnight&nbsp;Fellows in Visual Arts, a grant&nbsp;program for&nbsp;mid-career artists in Minnesota&nbsp;that&nbsp;is&nbsp;administered by the Minneapolis College of Art and Design.&nbsp;Culminating the two-year&nbsp;fellowship (delayed last year&nbsp;by the pandemic), there will be two McKnight Discussions, each&nbsp;held in person:

<a href="http://www.facebook.com/events/400213234812760/" target="_blank">The first</a>&nbsp;is on&nbsp;May 24th at 6:30pm&nbsp;at&nbsp;MCAD, featuring Janet&nbsp;Dees,&nbsp;Steven and Lisa Munster&nbsp;Tananbaum&nbsp;Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at The Block Museum of Art, Northwestern University,&nbsp;in conversation with&nbsp;Leslie Barlow,&nbsp;Mary&nbsp;Griep, and&nbsp;Melvin R. Smith.&nbsp;

<a href="http://www.facebook.com/events/927464617889113">The second</a>, featuring&nbsp;Henriette&nbsp;Huldisch,&nbsp;Chief Curator and Director of Curatorial Affairs at the Walker Art Center,&nbsp;in conversation with&nbsp;Joe&nbsp;Sinness,&nbsp;Alexa&nbsp;Horochowski, and&nbsp;Tetsuya&nbsp;Yamada&nbsp;has unfortunately been postponed until the fall, due to&nbsp;Covid-related&nbsp;scheduling issues.

<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:0.1686830073595047px">◼︎◼︎◼︎◼︎◼︎◼︎

<img alt="" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/file_container/RmlsZUNvbnRhaW5lch4fMjczMjQwMDAz/full.jpg" />Photo by&nbsp;Rik&nbsp;Sferra

&nbsp;

A few blocks from the State Capitol in Saint Paul, a black giant stands quietly in a park. Over thirty feet tall, the steel figure is frozen mid-stride, one solid I-beam leg planted slightly forward of the other. As you move around the sculpture, looking up at its Modernist, geometric torso, it&rsquo;s hard to tell which direction it is headed. Atop its long neck are not one but two faces &mdash; identical and symmetrical, each one an elongated circle that has been creased up the center and squared off on top. They look like Zulu shields by way of Brancusi.

One of many pieces of public art in Western Sculpture Park &mdash; including works by Mark di Suvero and Amy Toscani &mdash; this giant was created by Melvin R. Smith. Though listed on <a href="https://publicartstpaul.org/project/western-sculpture-park/#map-of-western-sculpture-park" target="_blank">publicartstpaul.org</a> as Walking Warrior, Smith refers to it as &ldquo;The Spirit of Rondo.&rdquo;

Fitting then, that the sculpture stands just one block from Interstate 94, the public works project that plowed through the thriving Black neighborhood of Rondo in the 1950s and &lsquo;60s. Over the course of those years, <a href="https://saintpaulhistorical.com/items/show/160" target="_blank">according to Saint Paul Historical</a>, over 600 African-American families were pushed out of their homes and hundreds of businesses shuttered to make way for I-94,&nbsp;despite another, less destructive route proposed to the north. A successful community was successfully destroyed.

Though born and raised in Oklahoma and now based in Eagan, Melvin Smith spent formative years living in Rondo along with&nbsp;his wife Rose J. Smith &mdash; herself an artist, as well &mdash;&nbsp;and the pair have dedicated much of their artistic output to capturing and reconstructing the essence of the community they knew there. A 2019 exhibition, Remembering Rondo at the Weisman Art Museum, showcased both artists&rsquo; works: Rose&rsquo;s oil paintings and Melvin&rsquo;s collages and sculptures.&nbsp;

Each artist&rsquo;s approach to the canvas and the subject is similar but distinct. Both Melvin and Rose create narrative, figurative works, rich in colors and characters, simplifying shapes and compositions down to the bare necessities. They offer us snapshots of life in public spaces &mdash; street scenes, bus stations, family portraits &mdash; and in the exhibition, the very buildings themselves came to life as pedestal-mounted miniatures. The collection of work was cohesive, with a sense of care and clarity afforded to remembering and reconstructing Rondo. But when I ask if the two ever collaborate on artworks, Melvin volleys back a perfectly timed, &ldquo;Oh my god, no,&rdquo; punctuated by&nbsp;a burst of laughter.

&nbsp;

<img alt="" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/file_container/RmlsZUNvbnRhaW5lch4fMjU3MTAwMDAz/full.jpg" />

<img alt="" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/file_container/RmlsZUNvbnRhaW5lch4fMjkyOTMwMDAz/full.jpg" />

<img alt="" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/file_container/RmlsZUNvbnRhaW5lch4fMjgyOTgwMDAz/full.jpg" />Works from the 2019 exhibition&nbsp;Remembering Rondo, courtesy of Weisman Art Museum. Photos by Rik Sferra.

&nbsp;

Based out of their home in Eagan, the two artists may keep separate studio practices, but the boundaries blur when it comes to art storage. Bedroom after bedroom, along with Melvin&rsquo;s basement studio, are crammed full of canvases, framed works, flatfiles, and an endless array of sculptural maquettes &mdash; studies for larger works like the one in Western Sculpture Park. It&rsquo;s quite amazing, the volume of works that have come out of this house and been stored inside of it. &ldquo;This is our life&rsquo;s work stuffed in this house,&rdquo; he says, as he guides me through. &ldquo;You&rsquo;ll see downstairs how cramped we are. But we still get it done.&rdquo;

When I visit, there is a collection of large framed collages stacked in the living room from recent studio visits in preparation for a gallery show in New York. Melvin gamely starts flipping through them to show me. Many of these large compositions are narrative &mdash; brightly colored with abstracted figures and buildings created from cut and torn bits of paper. The source materials come&nbsp;from magazines, newspapers,&nbsp;historical photos, bits of wallpaper, junk mail. &ldquo;I make art out of what I have in my hand,&rdquo; he explains. &ldquo;I don&rsquo;t really look for stuff. Whatever I&rsquo;ve got right there at my disposal, that&rsquo;s what I use to make art out of.&rdquo; With a wry chuckle he warns me: &ldquo;You&rsquo;re gonna see a lot of mixed up crap.&rdquo;

The works not only represent Black American cultural history but are steeped in it as well. As&nbsp;Kind of Blue plays&nbsp;over the stereo, the conversation turns to Jacob Lawrence, whose approach to color and composition are a clear influence, and to Romare Bearden, who created similarly collaged portraits of Harlem street&nbsp;life using magazine scraps, but whose work Melvin says he discovered only after he had already begun his own collages.

For Smith, the artwork&nbsp;clearly happens fast, the pieces of paper ripped and rippled from the gel medium adhesive. &ldquo;I make quick decisions,&rdquo; he says. &ldquo;When I&rsquo;m done I&rsquo;m done, I just walk away.&rdquo; Old handwritten postcards and envelopes give some works the weight of untold stories, of clutter remixed. In others, the saturated gradients of more contemporary magazine ads affix his figures in the here and now. Faces emerge from different shades of black and brown paper, eyes cocked in our direction if they are there at all. Proportions are no matter; these works are all about the vibe. At his heart, he says, he is a surrealist.

As he shows me more, laughing and telling stories the whole time, the history of 20th century collage emerges as a throughline. We talk about Picasso and Braque using the medium in their earliest Cubist experiments. There are Matisse&rsquo;s botanical cut-outs, then the German Dadaists like Hannah H&ouml;ch and Kurt Schwitters, a particular favorite of Melvin&rsquo;s. Other works &mdash; and he shows me dozens &mdash; touch on painters and sculptors as well: Albers&rsquo;s devotion to color, Malevich&rsquo;s experiments in geometry, and Calder&rsquo;s playfulness with wire all echo faintly inside this house. Going through one drawer of a flatfile, I remark on how his cityscapes use space almost theatrically, giving his scenes a flat kind of openness that comes from an exaggerated sense of deep perspective &mdash; very similar to Giorgio di Chiricho. Melvin stands up straight, says &quot;Oh my god,&quot; and&nbsp;starts laughing again. &ldquo;Man, that&rsquo;s my favorite artist!&rdquo;

The conversation feels like a walk through a museum, and there is enough work in the Smiths&rsquo; house to fill one. &ldquo;You ain&rsquo;t seen nothing yet,&rdquo; he says, as we move into the third room full of art, this one dominated by a stack of&nbsp;4&#39;&nbsp;x 5&rsquo; canvases, all finished in the past two years of the fellowship. These are rougher, non-narrative, and seemingly more free-association, composed of ripped up pictures and text from ads, magazines, family photos, and art posters. Artists as wide-ranging as Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Tony Fitzpatrick, and Andy Goldsworthy peek through in sections, part of large kaleidoscopic compositions that are somewhere between stained glass windows and haggard city billboards. The process here is d&eacute;collage &mdash; adding and then subtracting imagery and information.&nbsp;

&nbsp;

<img alt="" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/file_container/RmlsZUNvbnRhaW5lch4fMjczMjUwMDAz/full.jpg" />

<img alt="" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/file_container/RmlsZUNvbnRhaW5lch4fMjg1MDgwMDAz/full.jpg" />

<img alt="" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/file_container/RmlsZUNvbnRhaW5lch4fMjYxMTkwMDAz/full.jpg" />Different approaches to collage, from the figurative and narrative to more abstracted work with d&eacute;collage.&nbsp;Bottom: Detail of a larger work, created during the Fellowship. Middle image courtesy of the artist.

&nbsp;

&ldquo;I like it because I&rsquo;m a journalist,&rdquo; Melvin says, referencing the&nbsp;degree he earned and his early career as a writer, and before that, a newspaper&nbsp;boy. &ldquo;It&rsquo;s a layer of information. You tear one thing off and you go deeper and deeper into history, man.&rdquo;

Journalists, it is said, write the first draft of history, and as Nina Simone declared, artists share that responsibility as well: &ldquo;An artist&rsquo;s duty, as far as I&rsquo;m concerned, is to reflect the times,&rdquo; she said. Without the past, we are lost in the present, and without an awareness of where we are, there&#39;s no telling where we&#39;ll end up.

On either side of the hearth in their living room are two large pieces, each six by five feet: on the left, by Rose, is a painting of an enslaved Black man, head in his hands, shackled by the wrist to a wooden floor.&nbsp;On the right, by Melvin, is&nbsp;a collaged portrait of a Black man in a white, brimmed hat set against a flat wall&nbsp;of old, 19th century newspapers. Both pieces include a yellowed advertisement for a &ldquo;Great Sale of Slaves.&rdquo; It&rsquo;s an obscene relic of a legacy that so many people try to deny, diminish, or whitewash over. &ldquo;Everyday we look at those pictures,&rdquo; he says, &ldquo;so we know where we&rsquo;ve come from and who we are.&rdquo;

The face on Melvin&rsquo;s portrait is sectioned off into planes of white, red, blue, and green. He has a jet black nose and thick black eyes and lips. Melvin points at the face. &ldquo;That&rsquo;s who we are. African-American men are masked men.&rdquo; Spontaneously he recites the opening stanza of <a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44203/we-wear-the-mask" target="_blank">&quot;We Wear The Mask,&quot;</a>&nbsp;a poem by Paul Laurence Dunbar:

&nbsp;

We wear the mask that grins and lies,

It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes,&mdash;

This debt we pay to human guile;

With torn and bleeding hearts we smile,

And mouth with myriad subtleties.

&nbsp;

Masks are everywhere in his work &mdash; and in their home. The hallway is lined with sculptures, assemblages, collages, and prints, all featuring a different style of mask. Downstairs the tabletops are thick with mask maquettes for larger sculptures made out of wood, steel, and cardboard. Even down in the woods behind their house, a monumental mask stares back from between the trees, bright and colorful, constructed out of old car parts. &ldquo;I think everyone is touched by the mask,&rdquo; he says. &ldquo;It connects us all to Africa.&rdquo;

When I ask why he keeps making them year after year, mask after mask, he says, &ldquo;It&rsquo;s a continuum. Every time you do a mask, you create. I like the creativity part of it. The whole idea of mask-making, or doing art period, is that surprise you get when it&rsquo;s done.&rdquo; He pauses for half a second. &ldquo;You know what I&rsquo;m talking about &mdash; you&rsquo;re an artist, I&rsquo;m not talking to the wall here!&rdquo; And he busts out laughing again.

&nbsp;

<img alt="" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/file_container/RmlsZUNvbnRhaW5lch4fMjY3MjkwMDAz/full.jpg" />

<img alt="" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/file_container/RmlsZUNvbnRhaW5lch4fMjY3MjgwMDAz/full.jpg" />Top: The piece hanging in the Smiths&#39; living room, courtesy of the artist. Bottom:&nbsp;Mask sculptures&nbsp;both downstairs and upstairs at their home.

&nbsp;

Here again, Picasso looms large. So much of modern European and North American art history has grown out of his use of the mask motif. And, of course, as with so much that has been taken by so many, he got it from Africa. Scholars point to his earliest introduction to African aesthetics <a href="https://www.palmbeachstate.edu/honors/Documents/picasso_and_africa_how_african_art_influeced_pablo_picasso_and_his_work_nadeenpennisi.pdf" target="_blank">as a Congolese figurine</a>&nbsp;that Matisse brought to a dinner party at Gertrude Stein&rsquo;s house. As the story goes, Picasso was so engrossed with the object that he held it in his hands the whole night; a visitor to his studio the next day, a French writer, described brand new drawings strewn across the floor featuring an abstracted, one-eyed face over and over again. &ldquo;Cubism was born,&rdquo; the writer reported.

Soon thereafter, on a trip to the Musee d&rsquo; Ethnographie du Trocadero in Paris, he encountered masks and figures from Gabon and the Ivory Coast, which soon showed up as the faces of Les Demoiselles d&rsquo;Avignon. &ldquo;The masks were not like any other pieces of sculpture. Not at all. They were magic things,&rdquo; Picasso told another writer years later. They made him understand, he said, &ldquo;why I was a painter.&rdquo;

Back in the park off of I-94, the Spirit of Rondo wears two masks &mdash; one looking forward, the other looking back. Melvin says this piece was inspired by James Thompson, one of Saint Paul&rsquo;s founding fathers and a freed Black man. For the Smiths, Rondo represents the realized potential of peaceful racial integration. &ldquo;Here is a place in America, that nobody knew about, that had a Black founding father. I&rsquo;m proud of that fact. I had relatives who came here in 1919. They were going to school with whites. I had an uncle who graduated from St. Thomas.&rdquo;

Rondo&rsquo;s razing, however &mdash; the forced evictions, the splintered community &mdash; tells a different side of the same&nbsp;story: the vindictive potential of white supremacy. If you doubt it, try to&nbsp;imagine a proposal to demolish all of the homes on Summit Avenue even getting a hearing.&nbsp;Even now, as some are proposing another massive public works project &mdash; a land-bridge over 94 to try to reconnect Rondo &mdash; many activists and residents of Rondo <a href="https://moneypowerlandsolidarity.libsyn.com/preserve-rondo-with-tish-jones" target="_blank">are unimpressed</a>.

Like the giant in the park, the Smiths find a balance between looking forward and looking&nbsp;back.&nbsp;On the easel in Rose&rsquo;s studio is a canvas probably seven feet long, a painting in progress of ladies in mid-century dresses and hats. Upstairs, Melvin pulls out a portfolio packed full with even more of his collages, spanning years. This is someone for whom artwork is a means to both find and make meaning in this life. &ldquo;A song in our souls&rdquo; is how he describes his and his wife&rsquo;s incessant artistic output&nbsp;in writing. In person, he&rsquo;s more direct. &ldquo;It&rsquo;s a disease,&rdquo; he says, with a twinkle in his eye. &ldquo;It don&rsquo;t go away.&rdquo;&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:0.1686830073595047px">◼︎

&nbsp;

<img alt="" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/file_container/RmlsZUNvbnRhaW5lch4fMjc1MTkwMDAz/full.jpg" />&quot;The Spirit of Rondo&quot; in Western Sculpture Park. Photo by the author.

&nbsp;

Banner image: Melvin Smith, Combs Family, 2003, paper collage&nbsp;courtesy of Weisman Art Museum. All photos are by the author unless otherwise noted.

2019 McKnight Artist Fellowship Profile: Melvin R. Smith

This is the first in a series of articles profiling the six distinguished artists chosen as 2019&nbsp;McKnight&nbsp;Fellows in Visual Arts, a grant program for&nbsp;mid-career artists in Minnesota&nbsp;that&nbsp;is&nbsp;administered by the Minneapolis College of Art and Design.&nbsp;Culminating the two-year fellowship (delayed last year&nbsp;by the pandemic), there will be two McKnight Discussions, each&nbsp;held in person:

<a href="http://www.facebook.com/events/400213234812760/" target="_blank">The first</a> is on May 24th at 6:30pm at MCAD, featuring Janet Dees,&nbsp;Steven and Lisa Munster Tananbaum Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at The Block Museum of Art, Northwestern University,&nbsp;in conversation with Leslie Barlow, Mary Griep, and&nbsp;Melvin R. Smith.&nbsp;

<a href="http://www.facebook.com/events/927464617889113">The second</a>, featuring&nbsp;Henriette&nbsp;Huldisch,&nbsp;Chief Curator and Director of Curatorial Affairs at the Walker Art Center,&nbsp;in conversation with&nbsp;Joe&nbsp;Sinness,&nbsp;Alexa&nbsp;Horochowski, and&nbsp;Tetsuya&nbsp;Yamada&nbsp;has unfortunately been postponed until the fall, due to&nbsp;Covid-related&nbsp;scheduling issues.

<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:0.1686830073595047px">◼︎◼︎◼︎◼︎◼︎◼︎

<img alt="" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/file_container/RmlsZUNvbnRhaW5lch4fMjYzMDEwMDAz/full.jpg" />Photo by Rik Sferra

&nbsp;

Let&rsquo;s face it: portraits are really just an elaborate excuse to stare. We&rsquo;re all taught from an early age that looking too long&nbsp;is&nbsp;impolite, but in truth there can be some generosity in it, as well. For the sitter, a portrait can be a chance to feel seen; for the viewer, a chance to see themselves in someone else. For Joe Sinness, whose meticulously rendered colored pencil drawings&nbsp;are sumptuous and symbolic, portraiture is both a personal indulgence and a way to give back. You can tell he&rsquo;s having a good time, but this generosity comes with great gravity, as a matter of life and death.&nbsp;

&ldquo;I&rsquo;m trying to find a way to make queer bodies look beautiful,&rdquo; he says, &ldquo;but also defensive, without looking like we&rsquo;re villains. Because we&rsquo;re being treated like villains constantly.&rdquo;

It&rsquo;s no understatement. Right now, the bigots and charlatans of the American right are waging another disingenuous culture war, as always aimed at the most marginalized among us. In the first quarter of 2022, <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/nbc-out/out-politics-and-policy/nearly-240-anti-lgbtq-bills-filed-2022-far-targeting-trans-people-rcna20418" target="_blank">according to NBC News</a>, there have been nearly 240 pieces of anti-LGBTQ+ legislation introduced in state legislatures across the country, most of them targeting trans people, many specifically targeting children. And that&rsquo;s only the first three months &mdash; a gut-wrenching increase over the 191 such bills proposed in the entirety of 2021. Add to that, if you can imagine, the indignity of having your very existence debated&nbsp;incessantly&nbsp;by pundits, trolls, and allies alike.&nbsp;

When we met for a studio visit at his home in east Saint Paul, Sinness had just gotten back the night before from a trip to Texas for a corporate illustration gig, his suitcase still standing near the back door, not yet unpacked. It was a journey deep into Red America, where &ldquo;Let&rsquo;s go, Brandon&rdquo; is common shorthand for a whole spectrum of aggro unpleasantness. Sinness found it unnerving and spent the plane ride home, he tells me, reading James Baldwin&rsquo;s The Fire Next Time. &ldquo;I am amped the fuck up,&rdquo; he says with a laugh.

This is an artist who has never been shy. Five years ago, at his MAEP show the Flowers, Sinness brought leather bar culture to the Minneapolis Institute of Art, elevating aspects of kink and cruising to museum-quality standards in immaculately detailed colored pencil drawings. One in particular stands out in my memory: Chris, a 31 x 22&rdquo; portrait from the knees up of a burly, muscular man wearing only a black leather jock strap, a studded chest harness, and a leather puppy mask. He is staring straight back at us, fully realized in exquisite detail, no hair or blemish left unobserved. His skin shimmers with layers of yellows, pinks, and purples; the bumps on&nbsp;his nipple, the stitching on his harness&nbsp;&mdash;&nbsp;all of it in sharp focus for our consideration. It is a remarkable, unassailable piece of drawing. It also gives no fucks, and Chris meets our gaze and stares right back, as if daring us to clutch at our pearls. Behind him, a giant puffy cloud fades from pink to white against a dark blue sky, framing this S&amp;M enthusiast in a transcendent, saintly aura. Out of the dungeon and into the shining sunlight.

&nbsp;

<img alt="" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/file_container/RmlsZUNvbnRhaW5lch4fMjY4OTUwMDAz/full.jpg" />Chris, colored pencil on paper, 31 x 22&quot;, 2017. Collection Minneapolis Institute of Art, Minnesota Artist Fund and Gift of Funds from Thomas J. Arneson <a href="https://collections.artsmia.org/art/127246/chris-joe-sinness" target="_blank">2017.102</a>&nbsp;

&nbsp;

Heavenly clouds have been a recurring motif in Sinness&rsquo;s drawings,&nbsp;although he grimaces at such religious terminology. &ldquo;I&rsquo;m trying to divorce myself from the Catholic language I grew up with,&rdquo; he says with another laugh. In reality, the clouds were inspired by the album art for Dolly Parton&rsquo;s 1978 country-disco record Heartbreaker (which honestly still feels a little religious, because Dolly Parton is a&nbsp;saint). Either way, fundamentally Chris is about the elevation and exaltation of kink, both through the backdrop but even more so through the medium.&nbsp;

The level of technical skill on display is a seduction in itself: at first you can&rsquo;t believe it&rsquo;s not a photograph, then that it&rsquo;s not a painting. &ldquo;Colored pencils,&rdquo; you gasp, with indignant surprise. You get closer and marvel at the control, the artistry, the amount of time it must have taken. &ldquo;I really like working with high realism,&rdquo; Sinness says. &ldquo;It gets people&rsquo;s attention, and it makes them pay attention longer.&rdquo;&nbsp;

Of course, in the case of the Flowers, what we are paying attention to are men screwing in the woods, or laying ass-up on a bed, or posing in leather dog masks; not exactly your standard museum fare. They are provocative but tender, ethereal but grounded. These are real people, enjoying real moments, although an element of film-grain fantasy lingers in some of the pieces as well &mdash; a bit of throw-back nostalgia to the necessarily more furtive, coded days of American queer culture.&nbsp;

The walls of Sinness&rsquo;s home studio are peppered with these inspirations: screenshots from old Hollywood films and fuzzy &lsquo;80s TV shows, clippings of glistening buttocks and bodybuilders from &lsquo;70s pin-up mags, and the artist&rsquo;s own photos and sketches from live models, each affixed into these seemingly random mood boards with torn bits of blue painter&rsquo;s tape. In addition to the hyper-real portraits, Sinness also has a years-long interest in still life, masterfully orchestrating disparate elements together in colored pencil drawings that read as tromp l&rsquo;oeil collages. Even the blue painter&rsquo;s tape gets recreated, indistinguishable in one drawing on display from the two actual pieces of tape holding it to the wall.

&nbsp;

<img alt="" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/file_container/RmlsZUNvbnRhaW5lch4fMjc5MTQwMDAz/full.jpg" />

<img alt="" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/file_container/RmlsZUNvbnRhaW5lch4fMjYyOTkwMDAz/full.jpg" />Top:&nbsp;Dawn, colored pencil on paper (note:&nbsp;one piece of blue tape is not like the others). Bottom: Photo references taped&nbsp;to the artist&#39;s studio wall.

&nbsp;

&ldquo;I really liked how still life spaces could become a stage for queer performance,&rdquo; he explains. &ldquo;I take images of people, flowers, and objects, and they interact in a way that is a little bit of an unexpected performance.&rdquo; He has described this work as a queering of time and space &mdash; connecting the old and the new, creating new contexts even as he leaves so much of the cream paper empty. I wonder if this work isn&rsquo;t also queering realism in some way: taking that most traditional benchmark of artistic mastery for a ride, creating generative realities out of rigid academic observation. There is an elegant magic to these compositions, conjuring monuments to desire out of houseplants, gemstones, and polaroids &mdash; or drawings of them, at least.

Realism itself is a fiction, as Magritte pointed out with his pipe. But it&rsquo;s not easy. When I ask Sinness what the point of all this belabored rendering is for him, he gives it to me straight: &ldquo;Part of the gay experience for me was being great at everything to avoid the flaw of being queer.&rdquo; He takes a beat and adds, &ldquo;I have a good therapist.&rdquo;

During the pandemic, he has been slowly working on a new series of portraits, allowing himself the space and the time to lavish each one with as much attention as it deserves. These fellows come across as less saintly, a bit more mischievous, and more directly relatable than the subjects of his previous work. &ldquo;I just want things to be a little bit grittier, a little bit more aggressive,&rdquo; Sinness says of these drawings.&nbsp;

&nbsp;

<img alt="" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/file_container/RmlsZUNvbnRhaW5lch4fMjY3MjIwMDAz/full.jpg" />

<img alt="" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/file_container/RmlsZUNvbnRhaW5lch4fMjg1MDQwMDAz/full.jpg" />

Top: Birthday 2 (detail), colored pencil on paper, 28 x 19&quot;, 2020. Bottom: Untitled, colored pencil on paper, 28 x 19&quot;, 2022.

&nbsp;

They are stunning to look at &mdash; hyper-real in saturated colors that fill each page to its deckled edges &mdash; fully realized scenes of individuals serving a kitschy, knowing bit of cheesecake. There is a homemade-ness to the backdrops that says, This fantasy can happen anywhere; you can create it in your bedroom, in your basement, with anybody, and with any kind of body. The drawings are sweet but not saccharine, certainly funny, and borderline camp &mdash; as with Untitled, in which&nbsp;a man&nbsp;poses&nbsp;nude with a big fake snake draped across his bare shoulders and a silky bit of fabric barely keeping him modest. But as John Waters explained, &ldquo;If you&rsquo;re in on it, it can&rsquo;t be camp.&rdquo; An homage, then, to the playful joys of questionable taste.

It&rsquo;s all part of a creative lineage that Sinness is tapping into and carrying on, a list of names that adds up&nbsp;throughout our conversation: James Baldwin,&nbsp;Edwin B. Willis,&nbsp;Maria Callas,&nbsp;Dolly Parton,&nbsp;Al Parker. Interestingly, you&#39;ll notice a complete lack of self-portraits here.&nbsp;Some drawings look back to those who came before; others look squarely at those who are here now. All of them, though, are&nbsp;about looking both to the community and to the&nbsp;future. &ldquo;I was born in 1980 and didn&rsquo;t grow up with any queer elders,&rdquo; he says, &ldquo;and also a lot of my queer elders died. So now I&rsquo;m thinking, how do I be the queer elder that I never had?&rdquo;

There&rsquo;s a beautiful world somewhere out there, maybe in the past and hopefully in the future, when the sun shines down through the clouds onto a man at the beach being given his flowers. It is simple and tender, with not a fascist in sight, and Joe Sinness invites us to really look, if you like, and take all the time you need.&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:0.1686830073595047px">◼︎

&nbsp;

<img alt="" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/file_container/RmlsZUNvbnRhaW5lch4fMjc2OTUwMDAz/full.jpg" />Gift, colored pencil on paper, 2020.

&nbsp;

To see more of the artist&#39;s work, visit <a href="https://www.joesinness.com" target="_blank">his website</a> or follow him <a href="https://www.instagram.com/joesinness/" target="_blank">on Instagram</a>.

Banner image:&nbsp;Liam&nbsp;(detail), colored pencil on paper, 17 x 13&quot;, 2015.

2019 McKnight Artist Fellowship Profile: Joe Sinness

Ahead of their upcoming online discussion, two of the McKnight Foundation's 2018 Artist Fellows talk to us individually about their practices.

Through a Screen, Brightly: Profiles of Alison Hiltner & Mohamud Mumin

Water Works: Profiles of Sean Connaughty and Shanai Matteson

Ahead of their upcoming Discussion Series, two of the McKnight Foundation's 2018 Artist Fellows talk to us individually about their practices.

Creation Myths: Profiles of Jovan C. Speller and Hend Al-Mansour

What we do on this planet (and other absurdities): Profiles of Jim Denomie & Chris Larson

The following is the fourth and final in a series of articles profiling the eight distinguished artists chosen as 2017 McKnight Fellows, a grant program for mid-career artists that&nbsp;is&nbsp;administered by the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. (The&nbsp;<a href="https://www.mplsart.com/written/2019/01/one-on-one-tamsie-ringler-and-piotr-szyhalski/">first</a>,&nbsp;<a href="https://www.mplsart.com/written/2019/03/a-tale-of-two-garages-andy-ducett-and-bruce-tapola/">second</a>, and <a href="https://www.mplsart.com/written/2019/04/then-and-there-here-and-now-david-goldes-terry-gydesen/">third</a>&nbsp;articles in the series are worth checking out, too.) These two artists will take part in the&nbsp;<a href="https://www.mplsart.com/events/mcknight-discussion-series-may-2019">McKnight Discussion Series</a>&nbsp;on&nbsp;May&nbsp;17th, talking publicly about their work&nbsp;with Irene Hofmann, the Phillips director and chief curator at SITE, Santa Fe. Russ White met the two artists&nbsp;individually ahead of time to understand what drives their&nbsp;practices.

&bull;&bull;&bull;&bull;&bull;&bull;&bull;&bull;&bull;&bull;&bull;&bull;&bull;&bull;&bull;&bull;&bull;

<img alt="" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/file_container/RmlsZUNvbnRhaW5lch4fMjQ2OTMwMDAx/full.jpg" />Photo by Rik Sferra.

Histories are written in black and white, as words on a page, faces in a photograph, or lines in a ledger: the truth in transcription. Truth is a valuable commodity, to be sure, one in increasingly short supply these days. But the past has to speak through interpreters. There&rsquo;s always some data lost and some added, like a game of telephone with our ancestors, many of whom were never allowed near the phone to begin with.

Those are the voices that interest Harriet Bart. Her work&mdash;itself often black and white&mdash;is an ongoing exercise in remembrance, memorializing the stories and sacrifices of soldiers, workers, refugees, and writers. Her studio practice is built around intuitive responses to found objects and historical texts, using them in installations, paintings, sculptures, assemblages, and hand-bound books: blank dogtags on a chainlink fence, long scrolls of hand-written names, cast bronze pomegranates, a pile of numbered stones&hellip; It&rsquo;s a wide variety of media that remains surprisingly unified by a singular aesthetic: refined, somber, and severe. &ldquo;My work is conceptually driven,&rdquo; she explains, &ldquo;so I pick materials that best speak to the subject.&rdquo;

Her subjects provide a through-line as well, paying homage to tragedies from the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire to the World Trade Center to American casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan. Bart&#39;s work is&nbsp;dark but dignified, at a fair distance from despair. It&nbsp;does not shout slogans; it whispers prayers. She mines the black and white of history, looking for the gray and the gold.

I was lucky: when I visited her studio she was preparing for a visit from conservators at the Weisman, which will be mounting a career retrospective of her work next year. So she had everything out, work spanning more than forty years, meticulously sorted and displayed on tables and walls like a miniature museum. Bart&rsquo;s career began in the &lsquo;70s, when she was a founding member of WARM,&nbsp;the Women&#39;s Art Registry of Minnesota, an art collective and gallery space that has evolved today into&nbsp;Women&rsquo;s Art Resources of Minnesota. She worked first in textiles, pushing back against patriarchal ideas about craft and so-called&nbsp;women&rsquo;s work.&nbsp;It&rsquo;s kind of amazing to see an entire career laid out in a single room, even in snippets, not least of all because the work speaks across decades with the same voice, towards the same concerns. She laughs at this, admitting, &ldquo;I&rsquo;ve been so worried that it looks like a group show!&rdquo;

<img alt="" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/file_container/RmlsZUNvbnRhaW5lch4fMjMwOTUwMDAy/full.jpg" />Foreground: Forms of Recollection:&nbsp;Storied; altered books, acrylic,&nbsp;sand, string;&nbsp;8 x 9 x 5 ft;&nbsp;1989/2017. At left:&nbsp;Requiem (Inscribing the Names: American Soldiers killed in Iraq); paper, ink, plumb bobs, cord; 12 x 12 x 3 ft;&nbsp;2003-2011.&nbsp;At right: STRONG SILENT TYPE; blackened steel, magnets, mirror finish chrome steel, felt backing; dimensions variable; 2016.

But nothing seems particularly out of place, ranging here from tiny table-top assemblages to large installations. Taking up the most real estate is Forms of Recollection, a five foot tall spiral wall made of gray brick books, actual texts that Bart has tied with string and coated in an ashy gesso, never to be read again. At first the piece seems ominous (timely, even): an austere wall made of destroyed books, an act of exclusion and censorship. But that&#39;s not it at all. The wall itself welcomes you into its spiral like a brutalist book nook, the titles scrawled into the painted spines forming a playful sort of instant poetry. Most of the books, Bart explains, were actually rescued from landfills, doomed for destruction regardless and now granted a longer life-span as building blocks. &ldquo;The book is such an incredible signifier,&rdquo; she says. &ldquo;It&rsquo;s potent: every idea, every thought, every thing ends up in a book.&rdquo;

No surprise then that her practice began to include actual book-making, beautiful works of laser-focused obsession. They&rsquo;re not so much documentation of her work but pieces unto themselves, expanding on and exploring ideas from her larger practice. One book pairs pages from a nondescript&nbsp;ledger of female names and payments they made with mid-20th century snapshots of unknown, everyday&nbsp;women. Bart then scoured thrift stores and textile shops, looking for fabric swatches that closely match the anonymous women&rsquo;s clothes: a few square inches of plaid, for instance, or a specific floral pattern. Titled&nbsp;Garment Register, the piece is itself a kind of poem, a collage of history weaving together forgotten people,&nbsp;rediscovered fashion, and&nbsp;debts long paid. It&rsquo;s a funny kind of remembering&mdash;lots of details and yet no specifics&mdash;and it&rsquo;s hard to decide if the book is joyful or sad. Again, the gray and the gold.

<img alt="" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/file_container/RmlsZUNvbnRhaW5lch4fMjUwOTAwMDAx/full.jpg" /><img alt="" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/file_container/RmlsZUNvbnRhaW5lch4fMjQ0ODcwMDAx/full.jpg" />Top:&nbsp;Garment Register, letterpress on Rives BFK 280GM,&nbsp;12 1/8 x 10 x 1 1/4&quot;&nbsp;(closed),&nbsp;2000. Bottom: Plumb Bob, letterpress on Koch Antiqua and FF Meta on 200 lb Fabriano Artistico,&nbsp;11 &frac12; x 6 &frac12; x 1 &frac12;&quot;&nbsp;(box), 2009.

Another book is devoted entirely to plumb bobs, the hanging weights that use gravity to find a true vertical. She has used them in several installations over the years, in part quite simply because, she says, &ldquo;I like the shape.&rdquo; It also has a long, rich history, from ancient Egyptian architecture on, offering scientific clarity with artful simplicity. But over the course of creating this book, she found it to be a symbol for character, for moral rectitude and righteousness. As most plumb bobs were originally made of lead, the book begins with the Periodic Table symbol Pb, but it ends with the alchemical symbol for lead. &ldquo;So it&rsquo;s also transformative,&rdquo; she says,&nbsp; &ldquo;and I was transformed doing it. I thought I was doing one thing and ended up doing something else. But that&rsquo;s the nature of art, right?&rdquo;

Bart shows me several other works: a beautiful installation of blackened steel dress pattern pieces, laid out flat like minimalist plates of armor; altered books covered in shards of glass or cut out to create shadowboxes; mixed media paintings featuring erased text and knotted strings, a nod to the lost science of khipu. They are, again, dark studies in grayscale, sometimes elegiac, other times a muffled scream. So the giant pile of brightly patterned fabric bundles in one corner of her studio stands out as a bit of a departure.

This is Bart&rsquo;s newest project, an on-going collaboration with fellow artist Yu-Wen Wu, working with refugee women from across the globe to document their stories and create these bundles, the size of a knapsack or baby bjorn. The pile, which will grow over time and be exhibited later this year at SITE Santa Fe, is a mixture of fabrics, colors, and patterns, roughly lashed together in these little parcels, some with handwritten stories attached. She picks one up and tells the story of a woman barely escaping after the boat she was on capsized in 1991 off the coast of Somalia. These bundles are less refined, less polished&nbsp;than her previous work,&nbsp;but their humble construction makes them&nbsp;almost more real,&nbsp;heartbreaking and comforting at the same time, living histories in living color.

&bull;&bull;&bull;&bull;&bull;&bull;&bull;&bull;&bull;&bull;&bull;&bull;&bull;&bull;&bull;&bull;&bull;

<img alt="" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/file_container/RmlsZUNvbnRhaW5lch4fMjMwOTUwMDAx/full.jpg" />Photo by Rik Sferra.

When it comes to American military incursions, it&rsquo;s not quite true to say we are doomed to repeat our past mistakes. Sometimes we repeat them; other times we manage to come up with all new mistakes. Either way, we save the doom for others.&nbsp;

And what better medium to illustrate that steady, self-assured slide towards chaos than printmaking? Newspaper publishers do it every day&nbsp;in fact, though not always with the same simmering anger and palpable disgust that Jeremy Lundquist brings to the printed page.&nbsp;

I should say pages, though, because there are a lot of them. Our studio visit consists mostly of flipping through stacks of paper, sheet after sheet, revealing print after print&mdash;all in very limited editions or simply as monoprints. He starts with a series of what he terms progressive etchings: different prints made using the same plate. The process itself creates a commentary on information overload and erasure, as the ghosts of past prints build up over time, creating a fog of aberrant details in the background of successive prints.&nbsp;

The subject, in this case, is military intelligence, a phrase George Carlin once disparagingly compared to &quot;jumbo shrimp.&quot; The piece is called Stability Dynamics, a series of twenty etchings&nbsp;installed in a large grid, recreating an absurd diagram created for the Pentagon in 2010 that&nbsp;attempted&nbsp;to explain the situation in Afghanistan with a bunch of bullet points and curved&nbsp;arrows crossing each other&nbsp;willy-nilly&nbsp;in a massive, incomprehensible&nbsp;cloud. The diagram is like Cy&nbsp;Twombly in PowerPoint, maddening in its faux precision and&nbsp;reductive logic. General Stanley McChrystal is quoted at the time joking that &ldquo;when we understand that slide, we will have won the war.&rdquo;&nbsp;

Lunquist&rsquo;s&nbsp;version gradually amplifies the chaos from page to page, ending in the middle with a hazy hot mess of arrows and verbiage, &nbsp;information still barely legible from all twenty pulls off the same plate. &ldquo;For me,&rdquo; he explains, &ldquo;that history, that build up of scraping away, was a way to comment on how much it failed as a diagram. It&rsquo;s trying to be clean and precise, and nothing about [the war] is clean and precise.&rdquo;<img alt="" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/file_container/RmlsZUNvbnRhaW5lch4fMjUwOTEwMDAx/full.jpg" />

<img alt="" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/file_container/RmlsZUNvbnRhaW5lch4fMjM4ODkwMDAy/full.jpg" />Top:&nbsp;Stability Dynamics: Backlash, etching, 22 x 28&quot;, 2013. Bottom: Recognized Impossibility (installation view), solo exhibition at Highpoint Center for Printmaking, 2017.

This progressive method shows up in other print series as well, such as a recreation of a Trump campaign sign that reads simply PROMISES MADE. It&rsquo;s so Orwellian, this piece of real-life propaganda, that you can hardly tell if it&rsquo;s earnest or ironic anymore, another bizarro mile marker on the road to tyranny, another arrow in&nbsp;the ankles of satire. In Lundquist&rsquo;s care, the sign completely degrades over just six prints, the blue and white sign ending in a scratchy, blotted, bloody mess of Republican red.

There&rsquo;s something I&rsquo;ve always admired about printmakers: theirs is a physical, laborious, and very technical practice. In creating the large letter blocks for another installation, spookily spelling out the phrase BEYOND A SHADOW OF A DOUBT, Lundquist spent a good half-hour&nbsp;graining his litho stone, effectively&nbsp;grinding the stone clean by hand&nbsp;between the printing of each letter. Not content to stop there, each piece of paper actually features four different letters, folded up and hung on a rack, again like a newspaper. This is time-consuming work, especially in the age of Adobe. He points out that you can even see a blemish in the litho stone disappear over the course of the prints as it was slowly ground away by the repeated cleaning process. Anyone paying attention to current events can relate, as we&rsquo;re all being ground down, purposefully I think, by a daily deluge of outrage and falsehood.

This fascination with degradation and data loss works particularly well in Confidence to Sing, a departure from traditional printmaking methods. Lundquist has taken a single line from a Christian hymn, complete with musical staffs, and xeroxed it over and over again on a page, and then xeroxed that page over and over and over again, and over again, and again, about 150 times in total, watching the image degrade and distort each time, until a page of clear (if redundant) music becomes one big nasty, slurred rhombus of gray toner. It is hilarious in its simplicity, all the more so because of the presentation: neatly bound into a blue-backed hymnal in an edition of four (&ldquo;for a soprano, alto, tenor, and bass,&rdquo; he explains). The line, from &ldquo;Asleep in Jesus,&rdquo; is &ldquo;confidence to sing That death hath lost its venomed sting.&rdquo; The text itself has died at the hands of a Kinko&rsquo;s, although Lundquist reverses the process back to legibility by the end of the hymnal. This too, though, he&nbsp;relates to war. &nbsp;&ldquo;In my mind,&rdquo; the artist explains, &ldquo;that line directly relates to our desensitization to violence. You just let it wash over you.&rdquo;

<img alt="" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/file_container/RmlsZUNvbnRhaW5lch4fMjQwOTIwMDAy/full.jpg" /><img alt="" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/file_container/RmlsZUNvbnRhaW5lch4fMjQwOTIwMDAx/full.jpg" />

Details of Confidence To Sing, four books printed by the artist using a photocopier, 12 x 9&quot;, 2017. Top: early in the hymnal. Bottom: the same page after being photocopied 150 times.

It&rsquo;s interesting to talk to an artist with such a minimal investment in beauty. None of his works are ugly really, and some of the Stability Dynamics prints are actually quite beautiful on their own, but he has been hesitant to indulge too much in that kind of pleasure-seeking. His source material is&nbsp;too damn real. &ldquo;It&rsquo;s about warfare,&rdquo; he says, &ldquo;and war has been aestheticized throughout history. If I purposely do that too much, I feel like it&rsquo;s not serving the dialogue very well.&rdquo;

Communication, it seems, is the whole point. He ties the success of his work to its ability to find an&nbsp;audience. &ldquo;I&rsquo;m not really interested in the work&nbsp;just being made,&rdquo; he says&mdash;the art needs to be seen. They say sunshine is the best disinfectant; here&rsquo;s hoping gallery track lights still have some potency, too. We need all the help we can get.

&nbsp;

<div>The conversation between these two amazing artists and visiting curator Irene Hofmann&nbsp;will take place Friday, May&nbsp;17th, at 6:30pm&nbsp;in the Pillsbury Auditorium at Mia. For more info and to reserve tickets for this free event, visit their<a href="https://www.mplsart.com/events/mcknight-discussion-series-apr-2019">&nbsp;</a><a href="https://mcad.edu/event/mcknight-discussion-series-mia-6" target="_blank">event page.</a>&nbsp;</div>

<div>&nbsp;</div>

<div>To view more of the artists&#39; work, visit their websites: <a href="http://www.harrietbart.com" target="_blank">Harriet Bart</a> and <a href="https://jeremylundquist.com/home.html" target="_blank">Jeremy Lundquist</a>.&nbsp;All photos courtesy of the artists unless otherwise noted.</div>

Ahead of their upcoming Discussion Series, two of the McKnight Foundation's 2017 Artist Fellows talk to us individually about their practices.

On words and wars: Harriet Bart & Jeremy Lundquist

Then and there, here and now: David Goldes & Terry Gydesen

The following is the second in a series of articles profiling the eight distinguished artists chosen as 2017 McKnight Fellows, a grant program for mid-career artists that&nbsp;is&nbsp;administered by the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. (You can read the first in this series&nbsp;<a href="https://www.mplsart.com/written/2019/01/one-on-one-tamsie-ringler-and-piotr-szyhalski/">here</a>.) These two artists will take part in the <a href="https://www.mplsart.com/events/mcknight-discussion-series-mar-2019" target="_blank">McKnight Discussion Series</a> on March 15th, talking publicly about their work&nbsp;with Eric Crosby, curator of contemporary art at the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh. Russ White caught up with each of them in their garage studios to get a preview of their work and their worldviews.

&bull;&bull;&bull;&bull;&bull;&bull;&bull;&bull;&bull;&bull;&bull;&bull;&bull;&bull;&bull;&bull;&bull;

<img alt="" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/file_container/RmlsZUNvbnRhaW5lch4fMjQyODMwMDAx/full.jpg" />Photo by Rik Sferra.

I want you to picture your childhood bedroom. What size&nbsp;was it? What color were the walls? Were there any windows? Think about the furniture: was there a twin bed, maybe bunk beds? Did you share the room with anyone&nbsp;&mdash; siblings, parents? Was there a desk, a chair, a side table? Now think about all your stuff: the toys on the floor, the posters on the wall. Did you have Legos or Transformers or My Little Ponys? Maybe a kitschy trashcan or trophies on a shelf? Where did all those things, all that stuff, end up? And what meaning do they still have for you, if any?

For Andy DuCett, the clutter of childhood isn&rsquo;t just nostalgia;&nbsp;it&rsquo;s the foundation of his entire practice. His mixed media drawings and found object installations are studies in controlled chaos: objects and images of all descriptions &mdash; lamps, phones, tables, horses, stormtroopers, ashtrays, radiators &mdash; packed tightly into singular compositions, crammed together in a surrealist feng&nbsp;shui, nothing making any sense yet nothing out of balance. It&rsquo;s like if Wesley Willis drew Where&rsquo;s Waldo books: the work is dense, cartoonish, warm, and welcoming, but also pretty bonkers.

<img alt="" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/file_container/RmlsZUNvbnRhaW5lch4fMjM4ODIwMDAx/full.jpg" />

<img alt="" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/file_container/RmlsZUNvbnRhaW5lch4fMjM2ODMwMDAx/full.jpg" />Top: This is all for now &ndash; more will be added as time goes on. So &ndash; (detail), installation of drawings and found objects, Kolman + Pryor Gallery, 2017. Photo courtesy of&nbsp;the artist.&nbsp;Bottom: the artist points out a detail in a drawing he&#39;s been working on since 2007. Photo by Russ White.

This practice of creative recontextualization goes all the way back to DuCett&rsquo;s own childhood bedroom. &ldquo;When I was seven years old,&rdquo; he says, &ldquo;my parents put a limit on how many times I was allowed to rearrange my bedroom in a month. I would rearrange everything like three or four times a week.&rdquo;&nbsp;

&ldquo;I did it for the moment that I woke up in the morning. Those first couple of seconds, similar to waking up in a hotel room, where everything was new even though it was old. I saw all of my stuff in an unfamiliar arrangement from an unfamiliar vantage point.&rdquo; This is the story of a kid who could see gratification a full day in advance and work studiously towards that goal &mdash; and an artist for whom work and play are not too far removed.

This playfulness runs through his entire practice, from the minute details in his black and white drawings to the thrift store dadaism of his found object tableaux to the good-natured absurdity&nbsp;of his&nbsp;participatory installations. He has installed these immersive&nbsp;pieces at venues like the Walker, Mia, the Soap Factory, and the Eaux Claires music festival, inviting&nbsp;viewers to sharpen a stack of number 2 pencils, go record shopping for 25&cent; an album, relax in an open air living room in the woods of Wisconsin, play bubble hockey with a fully-padded goalie, talk to actual middle-aged mothers at one of the artist&rsquo;s Mom Booths, enjoy a live tuba solo in a public bathroom, or even get a free haircut at a museum.&nbsp;

<img alt="" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/file_container/RmlsZUNvbnRhaW5lch4fMjI4ODIwMDAx/full.jpg" />

<img alt="" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/file_container/RmlsZUNvbnRhaW5lch4fMjI4ODMwMDAx/full.jpg" />Top: The Mom Booth, part of&nbsp;More Real: Art in the Age of Truthiness, curated by Elizabeth Armstrong, Mia, 2013.&nbsp;Bottom: Bubble hockey against live goalie, another installation&nbsp;in the same exhibition. Photos courtesy of the artist.

While these performative pieces use a lot of actors and volunteers, DuCett&#39;s drawings and sculptures&nbsp;don&rsquo;t feature very many people at all; they&rsquo;re populated almost entirely with inanimate objects. He&rsquo;s like a happy-go-lucky Ren&eacute; Magritte: the subjects are abstracted not in their rendering but in their context. Just like his ever-changing bedroom, DuCett wants us to see the furniture of our own lives with a fresh sense of wonder every time. And for all the control the artist exerts in choosing his source material, meticulously drawing each object, doodling notes in the margins, and constructing these intricate compositions, he leaves a great deal up to us. Each drawing is a choose-your-own-adventure map, our eyes bouncing from one detail to another: a cowboy statue holding an invisible muffler, a cordless drill with a giant battery, oil derricks, smart phones, ironing boards, lamps (there&rsquo;s a shitload of lamps), a tiny cartoon Sean Spicer behind a White House podium, a staircase banister, and on and on. Each drawing has its own particular architecture, like the open wings of a dollhouse, placid madness spilling out of every room.

&ldquo;I like core samples rather than curations,&rdquo; he tells me at one point. Collecting and composing these objects is not about making pronouncements or delivering sermons. It&rsquo;s about presenting these objects and inviting engagement. In the same way that a random smell can transport you back in time to a memory long-forgotten, all of these items are little lightning rods waiting to be struck. &ldquo;I like the openness of having somebody else tell me what they find.&rdquo;

Sitting in the office loft of his garage studio &mdash; orderly little drawings tacked in grids all over the walls, records and action figures lining the shelves, books by cartoonists like Bill Watterson and Edward Gorey stacked on the floor &mdash; I suspect that we&rsquo;re actually in a version of his childhood bedroom right now. But this isn&rsquo;t a case of arrested development, I don&rsquo;t think. This is a person who&rsquo;s been working on the same problem, fiddling with the same Rubik&rsquo;s Cube, for a lifetime. There&rsquo;s something in the stuff of our lives&nbsp;that he&rsquo;s still puzzling out. Or maybe that&rsquo;s just where he finds the magic. &quot;My favorite spaces have always been workshops and craft rooms,&quot; he says, talking about his&nbsp;love of&nbsp;well-organized tools. &quot;I like how it&rsquo;s an open invitation rather than something that&rsquo;s being utilized at the time.&nbsp;The coiling of the spring is sometimes more exciting than the bounce for me.&rdquo;

He likens his career as an artist to running a marathon, and being awarded the McKnight is like being handed a cup of water along the way, encouraging him to keep going. It&#39;s an important milestone, to be sure, but also a signal of the miles yet to go.&nbsp;On his drawing table sits a piece he&rsquo;s been working on in fits and starts for over twelve years. It has been out the entire time, ready to be worked on, and he says he&rsquo;ll sit down and add to it every once in a while. &ldquo;This is my white whale,&rdquo; he concedes. It&rsquo;s a moment where you can see the frustration that&nbsp;bedevils&nbsp;any studio practice. But I don&#39;t think it&#39;s got him down.

Again, we return to the importance of play. &ldquo;Academics and the art world tend to be very suspicious of play. It&rsquo;s gut, not brain&hellip; I always ask the grad students I work with, What&rsquo;s the R&amp;D section of your practice? You don&rsquo;t have one? Then you need to go to the lab RIGHT NOW: blow shit up, do things that don&rsquo;t fit, do things that you can&rsquo;t name or understand, because those are the things that are going to be the kindling when you need to make a fire.&rdquo;

Before I go, I ask him how often he rearranges his studio. He just chuckles and says &ldquo;not often enough.&rdquo;

&bull;&bull;&bull;&bull;&bull;&bull;&bull;&bull;&bull;&bull;&bull;&bull;&bull;&bull;&bull;&bull;&bull;

<img alt="" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/file_container/RmlsZUNvbnRhaW5lch4fMjQ2ODEwMDAx/full.jpg" />Photo by Rik Sferra.

If they hold a yard sale in the final days of Western civilization, it will probably look something like a Bruce Tapola painting. Perfectly ordered piles of junk stretching for miles into the distance of a landfill landscape&mdash; some stuff priceless, some stuff worthless, but God, so much of it &mdash; a vast coral reef of boxy shapes and totemic items, each placed with care for your consideration.

On the other side of town, in another painting, life has found a way: walls, pipes, boxes, and books are lashed together into some kind of post-Chernobyl mobile home, a makeshift hermit shell for the slack-jawed blowfish at its center. Further into the woods, on yet another canvas, a slapdash settlement of sticks, poles, chairs, and luggage lies abandoned among a Seussian forest of barren, branchless trees. A hand-painted banner slung across a laundry line reads, in tall red letters, NOW.&nbsp;

<img alt="" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/file_container/RmlsZUNvbnRhaW5lch4fMjM2ODUwMDAx/full.jpg" />

<img alt="" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/file_container/RmlsZUNvbnRhaW5lch4fMjIwODQwMDAx/full.jpg" />Top: Crossroad, oil on canvas, 2017. Bottom:&nbsp;Blowfish,&nbsp;oil on canvas,&nbsp;2017.&nbsp;Photos courtesy of the artist.

These are the stories Tapola likes to tell: no beginnings, no endings, just strange snapshots from the middle;&nbsp;dark farces in bright colors. The paintings are vibrant, dense, and illustrative, the product of someone who clearly enjoys the simple pleasure of rendering shapes and surfaces in oil paint. The artist himself is funny and quick to laugh, earnest and self-deprecating. But I get the sense that painting is not just a passion for him; it&rsquo;s a dead serious endeavor. And death comes up more than once over the course of our conversation out in his garage. Now in his sixties, Tapola overhauled his studio practice five years ago, abandoning his more contemporary vocabulary of installation work in favor of simply painting from the heart. His previous work included a wide range of painting styles, some loose and airy, others dark and thick. He says he loved the idea of mounting a solo show that looked like a group show, each piece stylistically different, but eventually that approach just ran out of gas.

&ldquo;I felt like I was just fooling around with art language,&rdquo; he says. &ldquo;This is one of the first times in my life that I have a room full of stuff that all looks like it goes together.&rdquo; Now he works in his studio unencumbered by outside expectations or deadlines, no longer interested in career&nbsp;ambitions. &ldquo;I just need to knuckle down and make my shit, you know what I mean? The clock&rsquo;s ticking. There is a last batch, there is a last painting,&rdquo; he laughs. &ldquo;I don&rsquo;t even feel morbid about it; I feel liberated by it. I better just zero in and find my own aesthetic as best I can.&rdquo;

What has emerged are these surrealist narratives filled with strange symbols and even stranger characters. One large, nearly finished painting stares us down throughout the whole conversation. It&rsquo;s another forest scene with the same tall, leafless trees in the background. A campfire made of burning books rages in the foreground, roasting a hot dog for a man standing ankle-deep in a forest stream, playing a cigar box guitar with a middle finger raised to a passing butterfly and a pair of tighty-whities on his head. All around this fellow are portentous elements with specific symbolic meaning &mdash; a brick, a six-pack of Old Style, a golden trophy full of cigarette butts, Magritte&rsquo;s pipe, Serrano&rsquo;s Piss Christ, and the Venus of Willendorf holding a protest sign, presumably for the last 27,000 years. &ldquo;I kind of wanted to make the world&rsquo;s most symbolic painting,&rdquo; he jokes.

<img alt="" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/file_container/RmlsZUNvbnRhaW5lch4fMjI0ODEwMDAx/full.jpg" />Work in progress (detail), oil on canvas. 2018-2019. Photo by Russ White.

It&rsquo;s not quite a self portrait, not quite a political cartoon. It&rsquo;s more like a fever dream. &ldquo;These all just start as a day of goobering paint around,&rdquo; he says. &ldquo;There is no plan. It&rsquo;s mostly about what I think that I like, and I don&rsquo;t ask a lot of questions about that anymore. If that&rsquo;s what I do, that&rsquo;s what I do.&rdquo;

As nonchalant as he sounds, there&rsquo;s still a deep reverence here for the history of Western painting. The work shares stylistic sensibilities with Eric Fischl&rsquo;s scenes of suburban depravity, Philip Guston&rsquo;s bulbous degenerates, and de Chirico&rsquo;s epic mastery of depth. Well-worn books about Titian and the frescoes of Raphael sit out on a table nearby. And of course there are the surrealists. &ldquo;Someone said a while ago,&rdquo; Tapola says, laughing, &ldquo;that my work was a cross between Yves Tanguy and the Garbage Pail Kids. And you know what, that&rsquo;s not terribly far off.&rdquo;

He&rsquo;s also reverent to the trajectory of Art itself, worried that market forces are prioritizing high-polish pablum over meaningful creativity. &ldquo;I&rsquo;m nervous about sounding like an angry asshole here,&rdquo; he says. &ldquo;Personally I feel like I&rsquo;m generally pretty positive. I&rsquo;m just fighting for something I feel is being a little besmirched&hellip; The idea of how art might be useful to us humans, how it has been throughout the ages. Whatever that use is, I don&rsquo;t quite know. I think it&rsquo;s helped me be a better person, given me some form in my life.&rdquo;

&ldquo;It&rsquo;s probably super corny, but I call it the spirit of art: this human desire to create something, whether it has a functional value or not. In my case, not so much; cave painters, not so much. And then being part of that band of artists all through time is very pleasing to me. I feel proud of that.&rdquo;

<img alt="" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/file_container/RmlsZUNvbnRhaW5lch4fMjE0ODcwMDAx/full.jpg" />Supermodelcitizens, mixed media, 2017. Photo courtesy of the artist.

That camaraderie extends to living artists as well: Tapola is one of about twenty artists that make up Paintallica, a collective that gets together one week a year for around-the-clock collaborative art-making in the same scuzzy vein as the Hairy Who and Ed Roth&rsquo;s &ldquo;Rat Fink.&rdquo; That looseness and gruffness has informed Tapola&#39;s&nbsp;sculptural practice, creating grotesque 3-D cartoon characters with penises and pustules, each its own art world satire or pop culture provocation. He calls them Supermodelcitizens and plans on creating some new ones for a show at Sadie Halie (another garage) in May.

Wrapping up our discussion about lineage and mortality, I ask what success means to him at this point in his career.&nbsp;Surprisingly, for a man so happy to paint his own thoughts at his own pace in his own space,&nbsp;Tapola&#39;s answer is to have a couple of pieces in a museum for the public to enjoy. &ldquo;I&rsquo;d like to be that guy in the future where you&rsquo;re walking past all these awesome paintings by people that you know, and you go &lsquo;who the fuck made that thing?&rsquo; That would be so satisfying to me, that my painting just sits there and that someone gets pleasure or interest from it in the future. I&rsquo;d love to be that weirdo painting, that one-off in the museum, the B-teamer that nobody knows.&rdquo;

There&rsquo;s a humility and a generosity of spirit in that answer that&rsquo;s downright endearing, and a self-awareness, I suspect, from decades spent&nbsp;making things. Sooner or later the stuff of our lives will get sorted, maybe to the permanent collection, maybe to the landfill, maybe to the yard sale. Either way, everything must go.

&nbsp;

The conversation between these two amazing artists and visiting curator Eric Crosby&nbsp;will take place Friday, March&nbsp;15th, at 6:30pm&nbsp;in the Pillsbury Auditorium at Mia. For more info and to reserve tickets for this free event, visit their&nbsp;<a href="https://www.mplsart.com/events/mcknight-discussion-series-mar-2019">event page</a>.&nbsp;

More information on upcoming McKnight Discussion Series events can be found at&nbsp;<a href="https://mcad.edu/about-mcad/fellowships/mcknight-discussion-series" target="_blank">mcad.edu</a>.

A Tale of Two Garages: Andy DuCett & Bruce Tapola

The following is the first in a series of articles profiling the eight distinguished artists chosen as 2017 McKnight Fellows, a grant program for mid-career artists that&nbsp;is&nbsp;administered by the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. The two artists here will take part in the <a href="https://www.mplsart.com/events/mcknight-discussion-series-at-mia-feb-2019">McKnight Discussion Series</a> on February 15th, talking publicly about their work&nbsp;with Susan Cross, curator of visual arts at MASS MoCA. Russ White caught up with each of them beforehand to get a preview of what makes them tick.

<h1>&bull;&bull;&bull;&bull;&bull;&bull;&bull;&bull;&bull;&bull;&bull;&bull;&bull;&bull;&bull;&bull;&bull;</h1>

<img alt="" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/file_container/RmlsZUNvbnRhaW5lch4fMjIzMTAwMDE/full.jpg" />Photo by Rik Sferra.

Wandering down the main corridor of the Minneapolis Institute of Art, past priceless antiquities from China, Japan, Greece, and Egypt, you might be surprised to find a slightly more contemporary antiquity from America: a 1997 Saturn sedan. Parked in the middle of the US Bank Gallery, the car glows golden from tip to tail, completely covered in sheets of bronze-leaf except for a small horizontal slit halfway up the windows. Sitting low on blacked out tires and emanating a steady hum from its illuminated headlights, this gilded clunker welcomes you to the funny and funereal world of Tamsie Ringler&rsquo;s MAEP exhibition, Still Life.

I met Ringler in the gallery one weekday morning right after the museum opened. The school buses were already lined up outside when I arrived, unloading gaggles of school children out on field trips. Alone at first in the space, the physical and emotional weight of Ringler&rsquo;s work sits heavy. Cracked metal castings of framed paintings hang blank and somber; an empty aluminum banquet table supports two crude little offshore oil rigs; and at the back of the gallery, a fiberglass silo stands open, strewn with metal pellets and the hazy, projected images of plant life. Much of the work rests unceremoniously on the floor, the space melancholy and quiet save for the steady chirping of frogs in the distance, piped in over hidden speakers.&nbsp;

<img alt="" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/file_container/RmlsZUNvbnRhaW5lch4fMTc4MTAwMDE/full.jpg" />

<img alt="" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/file_container/RmlsZUNvbnRhaW5lch4fMTM3OTAwMDE/full.jpg" />Still Life (installation details),&nbsp;mixed media,&nbsp;Minnesota&nbsp;Artists Exhibition Program at Mia, 2018-19. Photos by Russ White.

Then one of the school groups comes through &mdash; middle schoolers &mdash; whispering, chattering, and giggling past the golden car and then the golden canoe&nbsp;whose&nbsp;only passenger is a little bronze statue of the meerkat from The Lion King. They quickly make their way to the back and into the grain silo, kicking up an amazing racket crunching and stomping on the bed of taconite pebbles. After a few minutes the chaperones herd them back out, and the quiet again overwhelms: frogs chirping, headlights humming. Stillness has returned. On the floor, a flat tangle of cast&nbsp;iron and paper is laid out like the veins of a river, in the midst of which sits a perfectly sculpted cast iron&nbsp;baby, holding his feet like a yogi in prayer. The whole show is a kind of poetry, familiar but esoteric, with no labels to double-check, no one to hold your hand, just your own questions and your own answers about the work.

Talking to Ringler, on the other hand, is an entirely different experience. With metal smudges still on her hands from an early morning at the studio, the artist is joyful and generous in her explanations, eager to talk about process and intent. All of the many elements in the show were purposefully chosen, and we talk for an hour about how her materials and imagery relate to metal-working, global warming, Midwestern fracking, ancient mythology, her experiences as a mother, and why cars encourage us to be assholes. I ask her why she didn&rsquo;t put up wall labels to share these insights with the viewer.

&ldquo;I don&rsquo;t mean to sound glib, but I don&rsquo;t really care,&rdquo; she laughs. &ldquo;Everybody has something different they bring in. Some people are going to love the gold car, some people are going to love the taconite, and some people have art history up to here, you know? So it&rsquo;s not that I don&rsquo;t care, I just embrace any level of understanding. I want it to be like a dream. You don&rsquo;t have a didactic on a dream.&rdquo; After some thought, she confesses, &ldquo;Really the truth is &mdash; I care too much!&rdquo;

Ringler sees this show as a career retrospective of sorts, a stand-alone installation of metalwork and assemblage combining brand new pieces with much older elements. Oddly enough, that sensibility translates; Still Life feels both contemporary and historical. The installation is certainly in dialogue with Egypt&rsquo;s Sunken Cities, Mia&rsquo;s special exhibit of ancient artifacts recently removed from the Mediterranean Sea. From Ringler&rsquo;s cast iron &ldquo;paintings&rdquo; to the high-water mark horizon line in the sarcophagal Saturn to the flooded metal banks of the river, the objects here have a similar sense of violent history, of having been overtaken by nature. It&rsquo;s a sculptor&rsquo;s take on memento mori, one that&rsquo;s all the more poignant at a time of climate crisis, in a building full of lost civilizations.

Of course&nbsp;Ringler is more used to working outdoors, creating installations for sculpture parks from Franconia to Latvia, Portland to Rio de Janiero. &ldquo;The McKnight has been amazing,&rdquo; she says. &ldquo;I&rsquo;ve been doing sculpture for 35 years now, and there is so little acknowledgement of us as artists. A lot of times you feel like you&rsquo;re working in a vacuum. It&rsquo;s not like a concert where you get applause every night. So to have this award that recognizes your contribution to art and to visual practice is really an honor and also a stimulus to make more work.&rdquo;

<img alt="" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/file_container/RmlsZUNvbnRhaW5lch4fMzgxNTAwMDE/full.jpg" />

<img alt="" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/file_container/RmlsZUNvbnRhaW5lch4fMTg4MzAwMDE/full.jpg" />Top:&nbsp;Iron pour process shot of Ringler&#39;s&nbsp;IRON-R18&nbsp;project at&nbsp;National Sculpture Factory, Cork, Ireland, 2018. Photo by Jedrzej Niezgoda.&nbsp;Bottom: the finished piece, a cast of the River Lee watershed. Photo by Tomas Penc.&nbsp;Photos courtesy of the artist.

She is also matter-of-fact about where that new work may come from. &ldquo;Here in this moment these pieces have all come together as Still Life. They may go off and have some other life after this. I work that way a lot.&nbsp;Things will come together and then they&rsquo;ll grow apart. It&rsquo;s kind of like life, right? It&rsquo;s in process;&nbsp;it&rsquo;s never fixed. A lot of people think of these as permanent materials,&quot; she chuckles.&nbsp;&quot;I don&rsquo;t. If I&rsquo;m not happy with how something turned out, I can just cut them up and melt them down and turn them into something else.&rdquo;

But for the moment, Still Life lives on, at least through February 24th. Who knows, maybe these objects will find new life in a museum centuries from now, helping to piece together the story of a society in denial. &ldquo;We&rsquo;re in mourning,&rdquo; she says, talking about climate change. &ldquo;We&rsquo;re in future grief, because we know what&rsquo;s happening, we know where it&rsquo;s going, and we know it&rsquo;s our fault.&rdquo;

In the meantime, her golden canoe sits on the museum floor, shining brightly in the Saturn&rsquo;s headlights, piloted along this River Styx by a cartoon Charon. Whatever the future may hold for these sculptures and indeed for us all, this little piece of&nbsp;domestic statuary stands ready to accompany us on the journey, his tiny metal chest&nbsp;puffed nobly &mdash;&nbsp;cheerfully even&nbsp;&mdash;&nbsp;against the inevitable.

<h1>&bull;&bull;&bull;&bull;&bull;&bull;&bull;&bull;&bull;&bull;&bull;&bull;&bull;&bull;&bull;&bull;&bull;</h1>

<img alt="" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/file_container/RmlsZUNvbnRhaW5lch4fMjYyODAwMDE/full.jpg" />Photo by&nbsp;Rik&nbsp;Sferra.

Words are very important to Piotr Szyhalski. Whether printed massively on banners, painted delicately onto dinner plates, screenprinted mechanically onto posters, or hand-drawn as calligraphy in salt, words form the through-line in a decades-long artistic practice made up of wildly diverse media. He has worked in mail art, photography, graphic design, painting, drawing, printmaking, sculpture, sound art, and performance art, even using websites as a medium during the early days of the internet. &ldquo;My practice meanders in bizarre ways,&rdquo; he admits.

There is an Orwellian fervor to his fascination with language: he sees the power that words have, the layers of meaning they can convey and imply, and their amazing capacity as tools of both liberation and oppression. Hence the halfway tongue-in-cheek name of his ongoing collaborative art project, Labor Camp.&nbsp;

&ldquo;Growing up in [communist] Poland,&rdquo; he explains, &ldquo;the understanding was always that the thing you&rsquo;re looking at is not the thing. There&rsquo;s something behind it, between the lines, specifically in visual communication. The country was run by liars and cheaters, just like here now. The idea that there&rsquo;s always the second or triple or quadruple meaning involved and it&rsquo;s on you to work your way towards that &mdash; that is absolutely something that will never leave me.&rdquo;

<img alt="" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/file_container/RmlsZUNvbnRhaW5lch4fMjgyNzAwMDE/full.jpg" />

<img alt="" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/file_container/RmlsZUNvbnRhaW5lch4fMTY3OTAwMDE/full.jpg" />Top: We Are Working All The Time!&nbsp;posters, 2018 edition, Nr. 8, ink on tar paper. Photo courtesy of&nbsp;<a href="http://instagram.com/laborcamp" target="_blank">the artist&#39;s Instagram</a>.&nbsp;Bottom: Labor Camp Souvenir Plates, paint on found objects, 2019. Photo by Russ White.

Szyhalski&rsquo;s work is deeply humanist &mdash; empathetic, inspirational, and democratic at heart &mdash; but also darkly hilarious. Labor Camp&rsquo;s de facto motto, screenprinted in a multitude of typefaces onto a series of posters, is &ldquo;We Are Working All The Time!&rdquo; Each new design is graphically impeccable, reminiscent in some ways of Soviet-era propaganda posters, but punctuated with that embarrassingly earnest exclamation point. Is this a celebration or a lament? A promise or a threat?&nbsp;

To the artist himself, it&rsquo;s an honest truth about his own practice: an artist&rsquo;s mind is always working. (&ldquo;Even when you&rsquo;re sleeping and dreaming,&rdquo; he says. &ldquo;It&rsquo;s like a different kind of work.&rdquo;) In this sense, the slogan&rsquo;s enthusiasm is infectious, encouraging an engagement and curiosity that knows no limit. But the phrase could just as easily be lamenting a society that prizes hustle over balance, an economy in which many are left working two or three jobs just to keep their families fed. There&rsquo;s also an eerie similarity to the gut-wrenching motto written into the metal gates of Auschwitz: Work sets you free. These are the triple and quadruple layers he offers us, each work of art an onion we are invited to take a big bite of.

Not all of Szyhalski&rsquo;s imagery is purely text, though. Other symbols recur throughout his drawings, paintings, performances, and installations: the hammer, the coffin (especially fitting now that he has a studio at the Casket Arts Building), and most often the shovel, which he calls &ldquo;the default Labor Camp object.&rdquo; It stems from a story he read about a poet serving time at a work camp in Maoist China, shoveling human shit into a field while she composed poetry in her head. That duality and division between mind and body, between individual and state, between meaningful work and dehumanizing labor, has informed his own work ever since, even down to the Labor Camp logo: an apple-red shovel head pointing down towards the earth.&nbsp;

<img alt="" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/file_container/RmlsZUNvbnRhaW5lch4fMjYyNzAwMDE/full.jpg" />

<img alt="" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/file_container/RmlsZUNvbnRhaW5lch4fMzAyNTAwMDE/full.jpg" />Top: Three Litanies of Labor, mixed media installation at the Soap Factory, 2015. Bottom: THEM, printed banners and Labor Camp printing press at the Soap Factory, 2015. Photos by Rik Sferra,&nbsp;courtesy of the artist.

But Labor Camp is not a one-man-show. It is something of an ongoing collaborational hydra, intertwining Szyhalski&rsquo;s students at MCAD as well as fellow artists, musicians, and members of the public. If Labor Camp were an orchestra (and it has been, setting the text of American military leaflets airdropped on Iraq to music), then Szyhalski is the conductor. &ldquo;I do think that art is a social act,&rdquo; he says, &ldquo;whether it involves two people, or twenty, or two hundred.&rdquo;&nbsp;

Perhaps the most evident and effective examples of this are his giant protest banners, first created with community input in late 2015 after the murder of Jamar Clark. The artist had just installed a solo show at the Soap Factory featuring wall-sized banners printed on a homemade press. The device itself&nbsp;looks like the bottom half of a melamine trebuchet, and he&nbsp;prints&nbsp;these giant words not by hand but by foot,&nbsp;using over-sized&nbsp;letters cut out of two-inch-thick pink insulation foam. In the aftermath&nbsp;of Clark&rsquo;s death and the subsequent public outcry against police brutality, Szyhalski suddenly realized he had made a tool that could be put to use by the community. He posted on Facebook, asking if anyone wanted to&nbsp;use his equipment to print banners. JUSTICE FOR JAMAR&nbsp;showed up soon after on the news, black block letters on a twenty-foot white banner, impossible to ignore.

Now he helps other groups realize their messages, even just two or three people at a time,&nbsp;who join him down in the basement at Casket Arts where his press is set up to stomp out messages like &ldquo;WE WILL NOT FOLLOW FEAR&rdquo;, &quot;ABOLISH ICE&quot;, and &ldquo;VOTE!&rdquo; Unlike his other investigations of language, these protest banners have no hidden subtext. They are public service announcements from the public itself, printed collaboratively at no charge.

&ldquo;I have such a hard time thinking about monetizing my work in any way,&rdquo; he says when asked about his Fellowship. &ldquo;I don&rsquo;t have a frickin&rsquo; cent of entrepreneurial skill or desire, so the grants are this weird backdoor for artists that allow us to somehow earn money with our work without necessarily selling it. I think we&rsquo;re really lucky to have McKnight around, and the way the grant is structured, where there&rsquo;s no project necessarily attached, is amazing. In the end&nbsp;it opens up so many other possibilites for work.&rdquo;

My last question is how he gauges success, whether in a work of art or in his career as a whole, and he pauses for a moment, not quite happy with my choice of words. &ldquo;Success is such a tricky word,&rdquo; he says at last. &ldquo;The banner project is quote-unquote successful because of what happened with it. I am always trying to leave holes where that might happen. I like the work to be porous, like a sponge, where people can lose track of whether they are witnessing or participating. The insistence on the agency that people have with the work is where I would &mdash;maybe&mdash; try to find a measure of success.&rdquo;

&ldquo;But I still would not be using that word.&rdquo; A linguist to the end.

&nbsp;

The conversation between these two amazing artists and visiting curator Susan Cross will take place Friday, February 15th, at 6:30pm&nbsp;in the Pillsbury Auditorium at Mia. For more info and to reserve tickets for this free event, visit their <a href="https://www.mplsart.com/events/mcknight-discussion-series-at-mia-feb-2019" target="_blank">event page</a>.&nbsp;

More information on upcoming McKnight Discussion Series events can be found at <a href="https://mcad.edu/about-mcad/fellowships/mcknight-discussion-series" target="_blank">mcad.edu</a>.