2021 MPLSART Sketchbook Project

&nbsp;

There are only two weeks left&nbsp;to&nbsp;preorder your copy of the limited edition 2021 Sketchbook Project&nbsp;book&nbsp;<a href="http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/mplsart/2021-mplsart-sketchbook-project-book">via our Kickstarter</a>&nbsp;&mdash;&nbsp;your only chance to get your hands on the collected work of 70 Twin Cities artists who contributed to last year&#39;s traveling sketchbooks.&nbsp;

<div>
In addition to the limited edition book, the original sketchbooks will be auctioned in April, and there is&nbsp;a&nbsp;<a href="http://www.mplsart.com/events/2021-mplsart-sketchbook-project-exhibition">group exhibition at Gamut Gallery</a>&nbsp;currently on view through April 9th, featuring new&nbsp;work from many of this year&#39;s contributors&nbsp;&mdash;&nbsp;including this week&#39;s profiled artist: Samuel Fleming!

&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:0.168683px">◼︎◼︎◼︎◼︎◼︎◼︎◼︎◼︎◼︎◼︎◼︎◼︎◼︎◼︎◼︎◼︎◼︎◼︎◼︎◼︎◼︎◼︎◼︎◼︎◼︎◼︎◼︎◼︎◼︎◼︎◼︎◼︎◼︎◼︎◼︎◼︎
</div>

Samuel Fleming (he/him) is a Minneapolis based artist who primarily works with ink on paper showcasing expressive forms with multiple layers of complex, contemporary imagery. He classifies his art in a limbo state between realism and abstract, depicted in ways he says are &quot;grotesque.&quot;&nbsp;Fleming has always found himself gravitating towards becoming an artist, even in his early days, and began to gain his footing within the art&nbsp;world early on. We wanted to take a deeper look into what inspires his distinctive artwork.&nbsp;

&nbsp;

<img alt="" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/file_container/RmlsZUNvbnRhaW5lch4fMjg1MDAwMDAz/full.jpg" />Thomas-Alexandre Dumas (from Encyclopedia Mulattica), ink on paper, 9 x 12&quot;

&nbsp;

Camryn Smith: What pulled you to creating, and how did you begin to pursue your career?

Samuel Fleming: I have been drawing for as long as I can remember, I have no memories of myself without art being a significant part of my life. When I was 14, I decided to pursue a professional career after seeing an art fair in NYC with my father. We saw artists and tents situated up and down the city blocks filled with talented people selling work of all kinds. By the end of the trip, I decided I wanted to sell my art like the artists at the fair.&nbsp;

&nbsp;

CS: What currently influences your work?

SF: I draw inspiration mostly from the work of old Renaissance artists and architects. My favorite artist of all time is Leonardo da Vinci;&nbsp;I love his artistic and engineering work. Today, I find myself gravitating towards Kehinde Wiley and Pablo Picasso as well,&nbsp;resulting in a taste for realism and abstract work. Especially when the two are mixed together, those are the pieces I enjoy making most right now.&nbsp;

&nbsp;

<img alt="" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/file_container/RmlsZUNvbnRhaW5lch4fMjYxMDkwMDAz/full.jpg" /><img alt="" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/file_container/RmlsZUNvbnRhaW5lch4fMjY4OTEwMDAz/full.jpg" />

Top: The Harlem Renaissance (from Encyclopedia Mulattica),&nbsp;ink on paper,&nbsp;9 x 12&quot;.&nbsp;&nbsp;Bottom: Madonna and Child,&nbsp;ink on paper,&nbsp;18 x 24&quot;

&nbsp;

CS: How did you get involved with the Sketchbook Project?&nbsp;

SF: I was contacted by Blaine Garrett. He was introduced to my work through&nbsp;<a href="http://colorspaceartandimaging.com" target="_blank">Color Space Art and Imaging</a> after they had scanned 30 pieces of mine. At the time, I was writing and illustrating a book called <a href="https://store.bookbaby.com/book/encyclopedia-mulattica-vol-1" target="_blank">Encyclopedia Mulattica</a> which is available for free online as an e-book.

&nbsp;

CS: Do you have any upcoming shows or projects you would like people to know about? How can people support you?

SF: I am currently working on a book of exercises to teach people some drawing fundamentals. Unfortunately, due to my school schedule, I haven&rsquo;t had time to participate in many shows, but I sell my artwork on Instagram, <a href="https://www.instagram.com/samueljayart/" target="_blank">@samueljayart</a>, and I am always accepting new commissions. For any who are interested, I would love to participate in more shows and/or collaborate on projects.&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/RmlsZUNvbnRhaW5lch4fMjkxMDAwMDAz/full.jpg" />

<img alt="" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/file_container/RmlsZUNvbnRhaW5lch4fMjgxMDUwMDAz/full.jpg" />Top: Samuel Fleming&#39;s contributions to the 2021 MPLSART Sketchbook Project. Bottom: The artist in thought. All images courtesy of the artist.&nbsp;Banner image:&nbsp;Expression Collage (detail), ink on paper,&nbsp;9 x 12&quot;

A participant in our 2021 Sketchbook Project, Fleming allows us a peek into his bold, figurative drawing practice

Sketchbook Artist Profile: Q & A With Samuel Fleming

<div>&nbsp;</div>

<div>
We at&nbsp;MPLSART&nbsp;are excited to unveil the results of&nbsp;the&nbsp;2021 Sketchbook Project! There is still time to preorder your copy of the limited edition book <a href="http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/mplsart/2021-mplsart-sketchbook-project-book">via our Kickstarter</a> &mdash;&nbsp;your only chance to get your hands on the collected work of 70 Twin Cities artists who contributed to last year&#39;s traveling sketchbooks.&nbsp;

In addition to the limited edition book, the original sketchbooks will be auctioned in April, and there will also be a <a href="http://www.mplsart.com/events/2021-mplsart-sketchbook-project-exhibition">group exhibition at Gamut Gallery</a> opening March 18th, featuring new&nbsp;work from many of this year&#39;s contributors&nbsp;&mdash;&nbsp;including this week&#39;s profiled artist: Mary Gibney!

&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:0.168683px">◼︎◼︎◼︎◼︎◼︎◼︎◼︎◼︎◼︎◼︎◼︎◼︎◼︎◼︎◼︎◼︎◼︎◼︎◼︎◼︎◼︎◼︎◼︎◼︎◼︎◼︎◼︎◼︎◼︎◼︎◼︎◼︎◼︎◼︎◼︎◼︎
</div>

&quot;I like visual clutter,&quot; Mary Gibney&nbsp;once said in an interview. It shows. There&#39;s a&nbsp;delightfully overwhelming density to her work&nbsp;&mdash;&nbsp;not only within each composition but within the entire range of her paintings, drawings, collages, sculptures, and&nbsp;installations. They&nbsp;range&nbsp;in size from giant canvases to small scraps of paper, from thoughtful portraits to intense cartoons. Viewing her work all together&nbsp;is&nbsp;like standing still on a busy city sidewalk with people streaming past you on all sides. Bustling, bristling, full of lives you&#39;ll never know and faces you&#39;ll never see again.&nbsp;

We connected here to talk about the power of sketchbooks and strangers and just who all these faces belong to.

&nbsp;

<img alt="" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/file_container/RmlsZUNvbnRhaW5lch4fMjgxMDEwMDAz/full.jpg" />One of&nbsp;Gibney&#39;s&nbsp;contributions to the 2021 Sketchbook Project.

&nbsp;

Russ White: You have a remarkable range in the works you show &mdash; in terms of size, detail, and tone &mdash; and you are amazingly prolific (every single piece in your recent Rosalux show was from 2021!) The work was so varied and also so honest, it almost felt like looking at sketchbook pages blown up onto a wall. Do you normally keep a sketchbook going, and if so, what kind of stuff do you fill it up with?

Mary Gibney: Sketchbooks are essential! I keep several going.&nbsp;I always carry a small one and have multiple others sitting around my studio.&nbsp;I use them for sketches&nbsp;and words, riffing on themes, future show ideas, anything that pops into mind.&nbsp;Sketchbooks are so necessary for me to explore every silly idea or urge without self-editing.&nbsp;I&#39;m inspired by other artist&#39;s&nbsp;sketchbooks too and have been part of a sketchbook show that was so amazing &mdash; a glimpse into creative minds.&nbsp;Everyone does it differently.&nbsp;Mine are mostly drawn with my favorite&nbsp;Micron 02 pens, sometimes with added watercolor splashes. Occasionally I&#39;ll use a Japanese pen brush to really get loose.&nbsp;I have sketchbooks devoted to collage too, with the same idea of creating an image without judgement.&nbsp;

I have various sizes and styles, but mostly I use slim, cheap 5&quot; x 7&quot; paperback sketchbooks purchased in packs from Art Materials. Decent paper for sketching, but as far from precious as possible. Maybe you know this feeling &mdash; someone gives you a beautifully bound sketchbook that seems far too lovely to defile with half-baked ideas and scribbles.&nbsp;Paralyzed!&nbsp;I like to keep sketchbooks as a record of a moment, and often when I&#39;m flipping through them I see ideas that I&#39;ve forgotten about but may reconsider for my next show or art piece.

&nbsp;

RW: What do you find more challenging &mdash; or perhaps more fun &mdash; working from source images to create realistic portraits of actual people or making up compelling characters out of thin air? Who are these fictional faces smoking cigarettes, crying giant tears, or appearing on the body of your boxing lady?

MG: I think the right word here is FUN. I veer&nbsp;from using photos for face inspiration to completely made-up oddballs. I greatly enjoy&nbsp;using a found image to create a portrait, to make an effort to capture whatever emotion I&#39;m seeing in the photograph, and feeling that I&#39;m somehow making a connection with my re-creation, as if that character actually exists. And then there are the characters who are pure emotion.&nbsp;The women with giant eyes crying huge tears, floating heads and filling bodies, watercolors of tiny characters climbing or perched on the heads of other creatures, harpies, cats.&nbsp;My fascination with body parts &mdash; detached heads, breasts, eyes, mouths.&nbsp;Lately I&#39;ve been on a Harpie flow, producing multiple versions of this kind of beautiful, kind of scary woman-headed bird creature.&nbsp;Is she a protector or a threat?&nbsp;I&#39;m not sure.

&nbsp;

<img alt="" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/file_container/RmlsZUNvbnRhaW5lch4fMjg2OTQwMDAz/full.jpg" />

<img alt="" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/file_container/RmlsZUNvbnRhaW5lch4fMjc1MDkwMDAz/full.jpg" />Top: A new Harpie piece, created for <a href="https://www.mplsart.com/events/2021-mplsart-sketchbook-project-exhibition">Gamut&#39;s Sketchbook Project Exhibition</a>, opening March 18th. Bottom: Cut-out heads&nbsp;from Gibney&#39;s recent Rosalux show.

&nbsp;

RW: One recurrent theme seems to be your interest in people passing through: regulars at old bars, people having their mug shots taken, street photography from the mid-20th century. What do you find so fascinating about these snapshots of strangers?&nbsp;

MG: What is more compelling than the face of another human? Over the years I&#39;ve been fascinated by the &quot;other.&quot;&nbsp;An unknown face in a crowd, nightclub, bar.&nbsp;It started with my urge to paint a stranger, and I needed good quality black and white, well-lit photos &mdash; mugshots and Weegee street scenes were perfect.&nbsp;As I painted these faces of strangers, I became more and more attached to them as people, unknowns yet somehow connected to me. I thought I was doing it as a way to look at and practice creating faces without using the face of someone I know or that others would necessarily recognize.&nbsp;I don&#39;t really care about making accurate representations;&nbsp;it would be boring to recreate them perfectly.&nbsp;I try to give a little emotional twist, to add some weirdness. But not through distortion or deliberate changes to their look, more through my own limitations of skill and addition of feeling.&nbsp;Trying to get to the heart of whatever attracted me to them in the first place &mdash; a look in their eyes?&nbsp; I can&#39;t really explain it.

&nbsp;

<img alt="" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/file_container/RmlsZUNvbnRhaW5lch4fMjgxMDEwMDA0/full.jpg" />Larry Cunningham, 12 x 12&quot;, inspired by Ernest Withers&#39;s photography

&nbsp;

RW: The past comes to life in your work in the form of found images, sometimes playfully as in your recreations of Vaudeville Stage Illusion Patents, and sometimes with a great reverence, as in your portraits of players from the Negro Baseball League. And your collages are full of old ads and ephemera. Is what drives this an interest in artifacts from a bygone era, or is that past still connected to our present do you think?

MG: I do really appreciate artifacts from a bygone era as you say, and I have a ton of source materials &mdash;&nbsp;old newspapers, magazines, hand-written letters, scrapbooks, Playboy magazines, corporate annual reports from the 1960s, black and white snapshots, school notebooks with class notes from the 1950s, maps.. So many things.&nbsp;Part of it is a love of recycling, the desire to turn a thing into another thing, as when I use&nbsp;these materials for collages.&nbsp;To add a layer of meaning to my art through materials that have passed through another life, other hands, now carried forward.&nbsp;

The Negro League player series started because of my love of baseball and the discovery of the photographs of Ernest Withers who documented Memphis baseball players and musicians in the 1950s.&nbsp; The wrestler series and circus sideshow series were both from a desire to show the &quot;other,&quot;&nbsp;and especially with the sideshow freaks,&nbsp;to show their beauty and dignity.&nbsp;

Weirdness, otherness, are important to me to try to portray, maybe I also relate in some way.&nbsp;The vast range of humanity!

From early on I wanted to make something &mdash; to draw something.&nbsp;I have a strong memory of my first artistic frustration in kindergarten when the yarn hair of my pretty girl face portrait (another face!) kept sticking to my fingers instead of the construction paper.&nbsp;I stayed late as my teacher hovered, unable to leave until I finally finished. Not my original vision of a head of curly blonde yarn hair but with one side curly, the other stuck down straight.&nbsp;My first sense of NEEDING to persist and also that it was &quot;good enough.&quot;&nbsp;That desire to just make a thing and to try hard to make it good enough has carried me forward.&nbsp;I&#39;ve always found a way to keep making art while also having a family and&nbsp;working a day job.

&nbsp;

<img alt="" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/file_container/RmlsZUNvbnRhaW5lch4fMjcwOTYwMDAz/full.jpg" />

<img alt="" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/file_container/RmlsZUNvbnRhaW5lch4fMjgyOTUwMDAz/full.jpg" />Pink Suit Man&nbsp;(top)&nbsp;and&nbsp;Strongman from Gibney&#39;s recent show, <a href="https://www.mplsart.com/events/laura-stack-designer-organisms-and-mary-gibney-pile-up-an-exhibition-of-exuberant-paintings">Pile Up</a>, at Rosalux Gallery.

&nbsp;

RW: I know you graduated from the University of Minnesota&nbsp;with a BFA in &rsquo;77. Did you grow up here, and have you been here in Minneapolis since college? What has been your experience as a member of the Rosalux Gallery collective, and more generally, what has been your experience as an artist in the Twin Cities?

MG: I did grow up here, and after graduating with my BFA, I contemplated what to do with that degree. What&#39;s next? Take more classes to become a graphic designer to support myself, then paint for the sake of personal creation?&nbsp;I got some good advice from an artist/graphic designer friend, that it&#39;s very hard to give that passion to two jobs.&nbsp;I took it to heart and my work life has always been separate from my creative life.&nbsp;I&#39;ve always been in the Mpls/St Paul art scene, both as a gallery-goer and a participant.&nbsp;Over the years I&#39;ve been in many shows&nbsp;and also put on my own shows through my friends&#39; bike shop downtown One on One Bicycle.&nbsp;That way I would be able to fill the walls with as much art as I could cram in and then have a big party.

<a href="https://www.rosaluxgallery.com" target="_blank">Rosalux</a> is such a well known creative collective, for&nbsp;20 years now!&nbsp;I&#39;ve been to so many amazing shows at their various locations.&nbsp;When I was invited in 2019 to submit to join I jumped at the chance to be part of it.&nbsp;The pandemic delayed our schedule for over a year, so my recent February show was my first Rosalux show. It&#39;s so wonderful to have a dedicated space and to be able to plan for my next show, Feb 2023, when I have the entire space and can make it into somewhat of an art environment with weird props and other touchable objects as well as art.

&nbsp;

RW: What is the best way for people to follow and support your work? Do you have any shows or events coming up you&rsquo;d like to promote?

MG: My Instagram account <a href="https://www.instagram.com/marygibneyart/" target="_blank">marygibneyart</a> and FB <a href="https://www.facebook.com/MaryGibneyArt" target="_blank">Mary Gibney Art</a> are usually the way I promote and announce art stuff.&nbsp;My website <a href="https://marygibney.com" target="_blank">marygibney.com</a> is mostly a gallery of past art and shows;&nbsp;it&#39;s a good way to see all my obsessions and series. Email mary@marygibney.com&nbsp;to reach me for art requests and to get on my mailing list. Direct messages from IG and FB are good too. I will be in the <a href="https://www.mplsart.com/events/2021-mplsart-sketchbook-project-exhibition">MPLSART Sketchbook art show at Gamut Gallery</a> opening on March 18th, and my next Rosalux show will be a solo show in Feb 2023.&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/RmlsZUNvbnRhaW5lch4fMjgxMDIwMDAz/full.jpg" />The artist, one face among many. Banner image:&nbsp;Fight Me Baby&nbsp;(detail).&nbsp;All images courtesy of the artist.

A participant in the 2021 Sketchbook Project and upcoming Gamut Gallery exhibition, Gibney lets us in to her wild world of everyday characters

Sketchbook Artist Profile: Q & A with Mary Gibney

The local comic artist, who participated in the 2021 Sketchbook Project, offers insight into their own creative and professional evolution

Sketchbook Artist Profile: Q&A with sunshine gao

&nbsp;

We at&nbsp;MPLSART&nbsp;are excited to unveil the results of&nbsp;the&nbsp;2021 Sketchbook Project!&nbsp;

Following the success of the 2020 Sketchbook Project, which was started as a way to connect and support artists during the pandemic, this second iteration features an entirely new roster of 70 local artists, who contributed 120 pages of original work to a series of five sketchbooks that&nbsp;traveled&nbsp;around the Twin Cities throughout 2021. The sketchbooks have been compiled into a beautiful 88 page limited edition hardcover book available exclusively via&nbsp;<a href="https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/mplsart/2021-mplsart-sketchbook-project-book" target="_blank">a Kickstarter Presale</a>&nbsp;is now live. All net-proceeds from the sale of the book will be directly distributed to the participating artists.

As we gear up for the&nbsp;Kickstarter,&nbsp;<a href="https://www.mplsart.com/events/2021-mplsart-sketchbook-project-exhibition" target="_blank">the related&nbsp;exhibition</a>&nbsp;at Gamut Gallery in March, and the auctioning of the original sketchbooks by Revere Auctions in April, we wanted to spend the next few weeks&nbsp;introducing&nbsp;you to some of the amazing artists who contributed to the project in 2021. You can see a full list of participants and timeline of events&nbsp;<a href="https://www.mplsart.com/sketchbook" target="_blank">here</a>, but in the meantime, meet Caitlin Karolczak!

&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:0.168683px">◼︎◼︎◼︎◼︎◼︎◼︎◼︎◼︎◼︎◼︎◼︎◼︎◼︎◼︎◼︎◼︎◼︎◼︎◼︎◼︎◼︎◼︎◼︎◼︎◼︎◼︎◼︎◼︎◼︎◼︎◼︎◼︎◼︎◼︎◼︎◼︎

Caitlin Karolczak&nbsp;(pronounced Ka&bull;Roal&bull;Chek, as the banner on her website explains) has been a fixture of the Northeast Minneapolis arts community for years. Born on Minnesota&rsquo;s Iron Range, she attended the University of MN at 16, where she received a BFA in Fine Arts and a BA in Art History with an emphasis in 19th century medical photography. After founding her studio in NE, Karolczak&nbsp;dove deep into traditional oil painting, developing a practice mining the morose for examples of&nbsp;delicate, complicated beauty, expertly rendered in meticulous, classical painting techniques. Her work has grown to include&nbsp;mixed media experiments&nbsp;as well as&nbsp;installation, sculpture, and performance art, often incorporating objects of biology and antiquity from her personal collection. Her contribution to the MPLSART Sketchbook Project&nbsp;(pictured above) distills these interests beautifully, and it got us talking about sketchbooks, social media, and what we can learn from those who have come and gone.

&nbsp;

Russ White:&nbsp;Do you keep a sketchbook going as part of your normal studio practice? If so, how do you use it, and do you ever share it publicly? &nbsp;

Caitlin Karolczak: I don&rsquo;t keep a regular sketchbook.&nbsp;I collect a lot of symbols and imagery as well as &ldquo;faces&rdquo; I like from vintage photography, scans from books or auction catalogs, museum image databases etc, and keep all that in a folder on a hard drive. I often print things off for inspiration and have several three ring binders full of this random imagery. To start a painting sometimes I loosely plan it out in Photoshop and start sketching directly on panel or canvas (or whatever surface the painting or drawing will be on). I do sketches and experiments on paper and those tend to just be floating about my studio or in my flat file. I have wanted to practice keeping a sketchbook on my travels, but so far it hasn&rsquo;t consistently happened. I mostly end up taking photographs of things on the road and pulling inspiration from that later. &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;

&nbsp;

RW:&nbsp;Was it challenging to make work for the Sketchbook Project, at that scale and knowing it would be part of this public-facing collection?

CK: I&rsquo;ve always been a fan of artists that keep sketchbooks.&nbsp;I admire that they can put their ideas down in such a way so I was excited to be a part of something alongside all these different types of artists. The most challenging part for me was knowing I had to limit my mediums, and I didn&rsquo;t have an unlimited supply of surface to keep re-doing it. I couldn&rsquo;t just keep piling paint or pastel on a surface and then remove it, etc.&nbsp;Oftentimes I&rsquo;ll have a really nice simple drawing but then I keep adding to it like a painting when it&#39;s not. So I&rsquo;ve been trying to keep other artists in mind whose style of drawing I love with a simple yet impactful style. The drawings of Holbein, Jr. or a Japanese artist who I&rsquo;m aware of because I handled some of his work in the past, Leonard Tsuguharu Foujita, came to mind. &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;

&nbsp;

RW: You mix a lot of media and mash up a lot of imagery in your work, mixing the macabre with the mystical, the realistic with the illustrative, the bright with the dark. How planned out is each composition when you start it, and who are these people that you&rsquo;re painting? &nbsp; &nbsp;

CK: In the past I didn&rsquo;t plan out a painting much at all. The end result could have wonderful texture and build up, but it takes forever for me to complete one. Now I work on several paintings at once. Depending on the deadline they will be maybe 50% or more planned out but I still like to work on paintings that I didn&rsquo;t plan much at all in-between so I can have a mental break. &nbsp;

I work from three different sources mostly, as far as people.&nbsp;Myself, antique photos I&rsquo;ve collected, as well as imagery from a large vintage gay physique / erotic / porn collection I bought.&nbsp;I like the images from the 1950s the most because it often features beautiful young men in a vulnerable way, more like how women are usually shown. I don&rsquo;t like my subjects to be too sexy or comfortable. This collection is where I got the imagery for my sketchbook piece Desert Poppies.&nbsp;I used myself as a model for my piece Nightshade&nbsp;to be exhibited at Gamut. &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;

&nbsp;

<img alt="" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/file_container/RmlsZUNvbnRhaW5lch4fMjYxMDIwMDAz/full.jpg" />

<img alt="" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/file_container/RmlsZUNvbnRhaW5lch4fMjcwOTQwMDAz/full.jpg" />

Top:&nbsp;Eve. Bottom:&nbsp;Belle&nbsp;Sant&eacute;;&nbsp;oil, enamel, &amp; dyed silver leaf on panel, 40 x 30&quot;, 2018.

&nbsp;

RW: A lot of people have been noticing ways the pandemic has distorted their sense of time &mdash; it can feel like time has flattened out, both speeding up or slowing down. Some of that, I think, comes from the lack of resolution we have around many of the crises we face, and some of it also comes from spending so much time on social media, living in a present moment that&rsquo;s constantly updating. But much of your work seems to draw inspiration from the past &mdash; from 19th century postmortem portraits, ancient mythology, and antique curios, for example. Your painting process is also typically quite slow and laborious. First off, have you felt pressure lately to speed up in your output to keep pace with contemporary life? And what do you think these old ghosts of the past have to tell us about ourselves today? &nbsp; &nbsp;

CK: Yes, I&rsquo;ve definitely felt the pressure to speed up my output. It has not helped with the production of work. I feel like the pressure different entities put on me as far as expectations to be a &ldquo;successful artist&rdquo; made me reject it all together, and honestly, the last few years I&rsquo;ve purposely not touched certain work. While I&rsquo;ve had spurts of production I decided to have some &ldquo;me time&rdquo; so that I could experience things beyond the pressure put on my career &mdash; something that will never fully define me. &nbsp; &nbsp;

Social media has both been wonderful and horrible. Without it I would not be a professional artist or get side work like appraisals or modeling. For the last decade I have sold almost all of my work exclusively through social media with the sporadic gallery / group show sale here and there. On the negative spectrum, it has to be fed constantly with content so you can stay on people&rsquo;s radar. Images of art&nbsp;get far less likes than &ldquo;selfies with art&rdquo;. You have to beat the algorithm by playing this game just to be seen and then you get criticized for being vapid. Also&hellip; stalkers. I have two different accounts. One just for art and another that&#39;s art / lifestyle / everything else. I post embarrassing or crude things on the latter sometimes, and it remains the more popular account&hellip;. &nbsp;

I love history, archeology, and science. I think imagery from the past is important because it&rsquo;s a deliberate record left by those that came before, a kind of Memento Mori. What was important to this person, and what did they choose to leave behind? All of us are the same at least in one respect because we all die.&nbsp;The knowledge of this keeps our purpose and values in check. &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;

&nbsp;

<img alt="" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/file_container/RmlsZUNvbnRhaW5lch4fMjgwOTkwMDAz/full.jpg" />

<img alt="" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/file_container/RmlsZUNvbnRhaW5lch4fMjU5MDcwMDAz/full.jpg" />Top:&nbsp;Medusa&nbsp;(detail); oil, enamel, gold pigment, and silver leaf on panel;&nbsp;30 x 26&quot;. Bottom:&nbsp;Armoured Bones.

&nbsp;

RW: You&rsquo;ve kept a studio in Northeast for years, first at Solar Arts and now at California Building, and you&rsquo;ve also worked collaboratively as a performance artist, a model, and a curator at your studio-gallery, Storage Contemporary. Broadly speaking, what are your thoughts on the experience of being an artist in the Twin Cities? &nbsp; &nbsp;

CK: I&rsquo;ve actually had a studio in Northeast since 2005. It was in the Bottling House for several years. Then the Solar Arts, and now I&rsquo;ve been in the California Building for I think&hellip;.. 7 years already. It&rsquo;s hard to believe. &nbsp;

There&rsquo;s a lot of great things about the Twin Cities &mdash; different communities and many wonderful galleries and museums. The support for artists in the form of grants is much higher than other states (if you can get one which I have not but hope to someday / will keep trying).&nbsp;The studio space WAS affordable but that is changing fast. I count myself as fortunate to have gotten into a space as well as having a landlord that still values artists. &nbsp;

It can, however, be quite isolating sometimes. If you don&rsquo;t fit into a specific genre or type or fad you can feel overlooked. Luckily I have a great support network here and have been able to use my Minneapolis studio as a home base while befriending like minded creatives around the world, and I&rsquo;m very thankful for that. &nbsp; &nbsp;

<a href="https://www.facebook.com/Storage-Contemporary-2188684954787462/" target="_blank">Storage Contemporary</a> has been on the back burner the last year but I&rsquo;m looking forward to hosting at least a couple shows in 2022 with different curators &amp; artists&hellip;. &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;

&nbsp;

RW:&nbsp;What&rsquo;s the best way for people to follow and support your work, and do you have any shows or events coming up that we should look out for? &nbsp;

CK: I regularly post new work and information about my shows on both of my Facebook and Instagram accounts but one of the best ways to stay up to date is by supporting me on <a href="https://www.patreon.com/StudioSilenti" target="_blank">Patreon</a>.&nbsp;I post time lapse painting videos, blog posts, events private and public, as well as send physical swag through the mail like prints, original art, and objects. &nbsp;

More sporadically I have a mailing list I send out to occasionally. And while I try to keep my website up to date I also have a small web store there that&#39;s updated more often. &nbsp;

I&rsquo;m of course in the upcoming <a href="https://www.mplsart.com/events/2021-mplsart-sketchbook-project-exhibition" target="_blank">Sketchbook show at Gamut</a> but also have some other shows. I have&nbsp;work currently in the <a href="https://hennepintheatretrust.org/events/made-here-alumni-city-place-lofts-minneapolis-mn-2022/" target="_blank">Made Here Alumni Exhibition</a>&nbsp;at The Best Buy Foundation Gallery inside Hennepin Theatre Trust (Hennepin Theatre Trust will be hosting an Art&#39;s Salon in celebration of the exhibition on March 22nd, 6 to 9 pm). A two person show with painter Rachel Bridge at <a href="https://revolutionartgallery.com" target="_blank">Revolution Gallery </a>in Buffalo, NY, which&nbsp;opens on March 18th.&nbsp;I have a solo show,&nbsp;Imitations of Mortality&nbsp;at the <a href="https://thesatanictemple.com" target="_blank">Satanic Temple</a> in Salem, MA, from June&nbsp;&ndash; September, 2022 (opening reception is slated for June 4th). Three of my photographs are to be published in the third edition of <a href="https://www.store.rubbettinoeditore.it/catalogo/il-corpo-solitario-vol-iii/" target="_blank">Il corpo solitario - the self-timer in contemporary photography</a>, published by Rubbettino Editions,&nbsp;Italy.&nbsp;And lastly I&rsquo;m going to be working with <a href="https://www.aliceriot.com" target="_blank">Alice Riot</a>, licensing some artwork and looking into NFTs and the metaverse to see what&rsquo;s possible there&hellip;. &nbsp; &nbsp;

Facebook:&nbsp;<a href="https://www.facebook.com/caitlin.karolczak" target="_blank">@caitlin.karolczak</a> &nbsp;

Instagram - for everything:&nbsp;<a href="https://www.instagram.com/caitlin_karolczak/" target="_blank">@Caitlin_Karolczak</a>,&nbsp;or for only art: <a href="https://www.instagram.com/StudioSilenti/" target="_blank">@StudioSilenti</a> &nbsp;

My Patreon: &nbsp;<a href="https://www.patreon.com/StudioSilenti" target="_blank">https://www.patreon.com/StudioSilenti</a> &nbsp;

My website: &nbsp;<a href="https://www.studiosilenti.com" target="_blank">studiosilenti.com</a> &nbsp;

My email: &nbsp;StudioSilenti@gmail.com&nbsp;<span style="-webkit-text-stroke-color:rgb(237, 22, 144); background-color:rgb(250, 250, 250); caret-color:rgb(237, 22, 144); color:rgb(237, 22, 144); font-family:roboto,helvetica,arial,sans-serif; font-size:15.75px; letter-spacing:0.1686825007200241px">◼︎

&nbsp;

<img alt="" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/file_container/RmlsZUNvbnRhaW5lch4fMjg4OTQwMDAz/full.jpg" />

<img alt="" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/file_container/RmlsZUNvbnRhaW5lch4fMjU0OTcwMDAz/full.jpg" />Top: Nightshade, which will be on view at Gamut Gallery starting March 18th. Bottom: the artist. All images courtesy of the artist. Banner image: Desert Poppies, created for the 2021 MPLSART Sketchbook Project.

Another participant in the 2021 Sketchbook Project, the painter and performance artist talks about her process, her inspiration, and what we can learn from the past

Sketchbook Artist Profile: Q & A with Caitlin Karolczak

&nbsp;

John Sauer&nbsp;(he/him)&nbsp;is a Minneapolis artist, painter, and illustrator. Sauer&rsquo;s work aims to not only connect&nbsp;with people, but to&nbsp;offer&nbsp;an interesting perspective on the world through a wide variety of themes and visuals. As one of the 70 artists who participated in our <a href="https://www.mplsart.com/sketchbook" target="_blank">2021 Sketchbook Project</a>, we wanted to do a deeper dive into his expressive practice. Here he reflects on his persistent desire throughout his life to create, no matter the medium. Throughout Sauer&rsquo;s creative endeavors there are consistent thematic narratives, and it all adds up in some way or another into something he calls a &lsquo;visual mix-tape.&rsquo;&nbsp;

&nbsp;

Camryn Smith: How did you begin creating and why did you feel drawn to making art? &nbsp;

John Sauer: I&#39;ve been making some sort of art my whole life and had parents, teachers, and friends encouraging me all the way. It&#39;s the one thing I&#39;ve always been pretty good at. I had some vague plan to go to college and then do something art-related, but after changing majors a few times, I left UWM to move to MPLS and play in a band with friends that were already here. It was a lot more fun than what I was doing! That lasted for a little while. &nbsp;

At some point I started messing around making band posters and doing cartoony stuff for local zines. A friend who was doing design work gave me a music magazine illustration gig, and that was it! It never occurred to me before that I could make money doing fun stuff. Of course, in hindsight I was looking in all the wrong directions. Over time I met a lot of nice folks that gave me a chance and I was able to basically learn as I went along. &nbsp;

I spent the next couple decades mainly doing illustration work, and occasionally painting pictures on the side for my own amusement, or the occasional commission. After the 2008 recession, a friend gently nudged me into showing art. That went well and I started to transition to doing art/painting nearly full time. I often feel that I came at this sort of backwards with the help of a lot of friends, but that it was an almost inescapable path. I&#39;ve always been drawn to making art and would be doing it in some capacity no matter what or where I was. &nbsp;

&nbsp;

<img alt="" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/file_container/RmlsZUNvbnRhaW5lch4fMjY3MDgwMDAz/full.jpg" />

<img alt="" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/file_container/RmlsZUNvbnRhaW5lch4fMjYyOTMwMDA0/full.jpg" />Top: We Carry These Things 2, oil on panel,&nbsp;20 x 10&quot;&nbsp;Bottom: One of John Sauer&#39;s pages for&nbsp;the 2021 MPLSART Sketchbook Project.

&nbsp;

CS: What does creating bring you? &nbsp;

JS: Primarily the satisfaction of doing something uniquely my own. That may not have been the same answer at one time. For a while I loved the utilitarian aspect of illustration work, just doing a picture for something &mdash; whether it&#39;s an ad, a label, a poster, a game, a magazine, catalog, etc. etc, and then moving on....next! I loved the challenge of that. &nbsp;

Now it&#39;s more personal;&nbsp;I much more enjoy expressing my feelings, or trying to make sense of modern life, people, and the world. That can be in both realist painting or surreal painting, from time to time I switch between them. I love doing landscape and still life as much as surreal art, I&rsquo;ve always thought of them as different sides of the same coin. &nbsp;

I&#39;d love to find time down the road to explore more figurative work too. I always enjoy working on new things, stretching my boundaries, and getting out of my comfort zone. It can get frustrating, but there&#39;s always the payoff, that rewarding &quot;ah-ha!&quot; moment when things click. Along with all that, the satisfaction of connecting with people. &nbsp;

&nbsp;

CS: What about your practice is challenging for you? &nbsp;

JS: I have a tendency to be both a procrastinator AND impatient. I&#39;ll find a million excuses to put off starting something and then get impatient while I&#39;m working on it. I want to be working on the next one...which I&#39;ll end up procrastinating. On the other hand, I can&#39;t stand putting anything out in the world that&#39;s half baked, so I tend to put a lot of time into each painting. Which leads to the biggest challenge of all &mdash; that there&#39;s not enough hours in the day! &nbsp;

&nbsp;

CS: Why did you choose to participate in the 2021 Sketchbook Project? &nbsp;

JS: Tony Cheng (who did awesome work in both the sketchbook for last year&#39;s Project and for the show at Gamut) was kind enough to ask me if I&#39;d be interested in doing it this year and threw my name in the hat. I missed last year&#39;s and had the sads and a bit of FOMO, I seem to miss all the calls for stuff like this, so I jumped right on it. What a great project idea!! &nbsp;

Sketchbooks have always been an important part of the process for me, and I always have a variety of sketchbooks on hand. In the past, I&#39;d sketch anywhere, any time, every day. Recently, sketchbooks are mostly work related, and are a mixed bag of notes, preliminary drawings, and often pages of doodles that seem nonsensical; however they often end up as seeds for larger ideas and paintings. &nbsp; &nbsp;

&nbsp;

<img alt="" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/file_container/RmlsZUNvbnRhaW5lch4fMjU0OTUwMDAz/full.jpg" />

<img alt="" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/file_container/RmlsZUNvbnRhaW5lch4fMjkwOTUwMDAz/full.jpg" />Top: Two&nbsp;pages from Sauer&#39;s own sketchbook, doodling characters and&nbsp;thumbnailing alley landscapes. Bottom:&nbsp;Alley&nbsp;No 92 - 57th St E &amp; 40th Ave S,&nbsp;oil, 14 x 11&quot;

&nbsp;

CS: Do you have any upcoming projects or shows you would like to share? &nbsp;

JS: I do! As part of this Sketchbook Project, I&#39;ll have a new painting in <a href="https://www.mplsart.com/events/2021-mplsart-sketchbook-project-exhibition" target="_blank">the group show at Gamut Gallery</a> in March.&nbsp;

I&#39;m also participating in three&nbsp;other group shows on the horizon:

&bull; Unloved Creatures 3, a group show at Rogue Buddha Gallery (NE Mpls.) in May.

&bull; Beautifully Bleak, a group show at Brassworks Gallery (Portland, OR) opens May 7.

&bull; Reality Mistaken, a group show at Brassworks Gallery (Portland, OR) opens June 4. &nbsp;

All four&nbsp;of those shows are loaded with amazing talent. I&#39;m honored to be part of them! In addition to this I always keep the internet updated: Instagram -&nbsp;<a href="https://www.instagram.com/johnsauerart/" target="_blank">@johnsauerart</a> and my website - <a href="http://www.johnsauer.com">johnsauer.com</a>&nbsp;&nbsp;<span style="-webkit-text-stroke-color:rgb(237, 22, 144); background-color:rgb(250, 250, 250); caret-color:rgb(237, 22, 144); color:rgb(237, 22, 144); font-family:roboto,helvetica,arial,sans-serif; font-size:15.75px; letter-spacing:0.1686825007200241px">◼︎

&nbsp;

<img alt="" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/file_container/RmlsZUNvbnRhaW5lch4fMjU2OTUwMDAz/full.jpg" />All images courtesy of the artist. Banner image: Anomalies (detail), oil on panel,&nbsp;20 x 16&quot;

Ranging from whimsical sci-fi to studied landscapes, Sauer brings a fun mix of techniques to the 2021 MPLSART Sketchbook Project

Sketchbook Artist Profile: A look at painter and illustrator John Sauer’s ‘visual mix-tape’

&nbsp;

We at MPLSART are excited to unveil the results of&nbsp;the 2021 Sketchbook Project!&nbsp;

Following the success of the 2020 Sketchbook Project, which was started as a way to connect and support artists during the pandemic, this second iteration features an entirely new roster of 70 local artists, who contributed 120 pages of original work to a series of five sketchbooks that travelled around the Twin Cities throughout 2021. The sketchbooks have been compiled into a beautiful 88 page limited edition hardcover book available exclusively via <a href="https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/mplsart/2021-mplsart-sketchbook-project-book" target="_blank">a Kickstarter Presale</a> starting March 1st. All net-proceeds from the sale of the book will be directly distributed to the participating artists.

As we gear up for the Kickstarter, <a href="https://www.mplsart.com/events/2021-mplsart-sketchbook-project-exhibition" target="_blank">the related&nbsp;exhibition</a> at Gamut Gallery in March, and the auctioning of the original sketchbooks by Revere Auctions in April, we wanted to spend the next few weeks&nbsp;introducing&nbsp;you to some of the amazing artists who contributed to the project in 2021. You can see a full list of participants and timeline of events <a href="https://www.mplsart.com/sketchbook" target="_blank">here</a>, but in the meantime, meet Hibaaq Ibrahim!

&nbsp;

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

&nbsp;

Hibaaq Ibrahim (she/her) is a botanical and abstract muralist living in Minneapolis, Minnesota. She was born in Sweden and has moved over 20 times. This drives her sense of curiosity and exploration.&nbsp; Every new home and neighborhood was an opportunity to discover:&nbsp;new friends, new flowers, new places to bike to. This carries over into her artistic practice. With her use of bold colors and familiar shapes, she aims to spark joy in viewers. As one of the 70 artists contributing to the <a href="https://www.mplsart.com/sketchbook" target="_blank">2021 MPLSART Sketchbook Project,</a> we wanted to learn more about her and her practice.

&nbsp;

<img alt="" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/file_container/RmlsZUNvbnRhaW5lch4fMjg4OTIwMDAz/full.jpg" />Ibrahim&#39;s mural&nbsp;Zoe&rsquo;s Bakery in Minneapolis

 
Blaine Garrett: How did you get started as a&nbsp;muralist?&nbsp; 
Hibaaq Ibrahim: I&rsquo;ve made art for as long as I can remember. I used to turn all my school projects into art projects. However, when it came time for college, I didn&rsquo;t study art &mdash; I studied philosophy. I still love philosophy, and I probably would not have changed that if I could go back. I deliberately did not choose art because I thought it wasn&rsquo;t a career.&nbsp;This&nbsp;is why I didn&rsquo;t share my art with almost anyone until I was in my mid-twenties. Art&nbsp;was just something I did and I thought no one would care.

Fast forward to the global pandemic in 2020 and suddenly I was spending a lot more time at home. I was working from home for the first time in my life. I could pretty much work on my own schedule, so I started leaving large gaps of&nbsp;time in my days. One night early in the pandemic, I realized I had ran out of cat food. I did a quick Google search, and the only place in town I could find cat food at that hour was Southside&nbsp;Food and Deli. The exterior had a faded mural from over 20 years ago. I had a sudden idea, &ldquo;what if I offer to repaint their mural?&rdquo; I asked the owner and he agreed. I worked on it for about a week in my spare time. I loved the experience so much I wanted to paint another mural. Soon after, I started an Instagram page to share my art and I&rsquo;ve been painting murals ever since.&nbsp;

&nbsp;

BG: Does your artistic&nbsp;practice extend beyond murals?&nbsp; 
HI: I only paint murals right now and occasionally do digital artwork (just for myself). I love painting large, and murals are the only way I can do that. I haven&rsquo;t had a studio so large scale paintings aren&rsquo;t feasible for me. I am getting a studio in about 2 weeks as a new member of Public Functionary Studio 285! I&rsquo;ve wanted to venture into large paintings, prints, and furniture painting for a long time. Murals are my passion but I know they aren&rsquo;t accessible to everyone. Many of my followers rent for example. I would love to provide more ways to get my art to people who want it. Right now, you&rsquo;d have to go where my art is to see it. It would be to nice see my work framed in someone&rsquo;s home! I&rsquo;ve got a lot of ideas and this new studio space will make them possible!

&nbsp;

<img alt="" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/file_container/RmlsZUNvbnRhaW5lch4fMjg0OTMwMDAz/full.jpg" />Ibrahim in front of her mural at&nbsp;Graze Provisions + Libation

&nbsp;

BG: Where might people see your murals out in the &ldquo;wild&rdquo;? 
HI: It would be a lot to mention every place I&rsquo;ve painted at this point, but I&rsquo;ll list 5 of my favorites! The hops themed mural I did at Acadia is one of my proudest. Graze Provisions + Libations is just amazing on it&rsquo;s own. I&rsquo;d recommend taking a photo with my floral mural and getting a latte at The Last Drop Cafe. If you&rsquo;re more into abstract, my mural at A Side Public House is for you! I go to Zoe&rsquo;s Bakery anytime I&rsquo;m near downtown. The mural I did there is super cute and is another one that I think makes for a great photo background.&nbsp;Lastly, a super fun one is at Stella Belle in St. Paul. It&rsquo;s connected to, and also a part of, Cafe Astoria.&nbsp;In a few weeks I&rsquo;ll have a mural map on my website where you can easily see all my public murals.

&nbsp;

BG: You were involved in several of the murals throughout Minneapolis&nbsp;created in the wake of the murder of George Floyd. How did this time affect you as an artist? 
HI: It was just a very confusing time. I, like many other artists, just felt in the dark. I wanted a way to process it and I think that&rsquo;s why I turned to art. I looked around Facebook and Instagram to see what community events were happening. I went to any art centered gathering I could because I really just wanted community. I met muralists for the first time in my life and I started to see it as something I could actively do.

I also co-ran a 4H youth club at a local library. I&rsquo;d often share my art and mural work with the teens who became interested in painting one of their own. My co club leader Alyssa connected me with Smoke in the Pit, a BBQ spot. They were located in George Floyd Square and had been continuously tagged. The club had been looking for a place to paint a mural and it just worked out. All the ideas in that mural came from the youth of 4H through discussion. They wanted to make the mural a message about connecting rather than breaking apart from one another. The quote on the mural is from Black Panther and it reads &ldquo;In times of crisis, the wise build bridges. While the foolish build barriers.&rdquo; This whole experience was about community building. It merged my passions of youth work and art in a way that still impacts me today.&nbsp;

&nbsp;

<img alt="" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/file_container/RmlsZUNvbnRhaW5lch4fMjgwOTMwMDA0/full.jpg" />The mural on&nbsp;Smoke In The Pit Ibrahim created with her 4H group

&nbsp;

BG: How did your involvement with these murals shape your artistic practice moving forward? 
HI: I started to see murals as a community thing. Even though now I paint mainly commercial murals,&nbsp;I consider my work to be centered in community. I paint in spaces that people gather. Places like restaurants, coffee shops, and homes. I love that my art is a part of spaces that hold positive memories for people &mdash; somewhere they go to study with a friend or have a birthday dinner. I always start my mural design process by imagining who will be there.&nbsp;

&nbsp;

BG: You had the distinction of being one of the first and last artists to contribute pages to the 2021 MPLSART Sketchbook Project. In the time between, how did your approach them change? 
HI: When I made the first sketch, I was strictly a botanical artist. I still love that style but since then, I&rsquo;ve found a love for abstract art. My version of &quot;abstract&quot; isn&rsquo;t what you would first think of when you say the word, but I think that&rsquo;s why it took me so long to try it. I thought that abstract had to be moody and chaotic and have lines everywhere! I just wanted to make pretty things I saw in nature. I was not into abstract at all. I was actually against it, which just makes me laugh now.

I had a client who told me &quot;absolutely no botanicals.&quot;&nbsp;I was in a panic. I thought about dropping this client a few times. However, I decided to just see what I could do. It took 2 whole months to get a final mock up, which ended up being abstract. I was pushed every step of the way, further and further from where I felt comfortable as an artist. That experience was the most transformative of my career thus far. In a way, I had to go back to the basics to succeed on this project. I felt like a little kid, learning a new language. That sort of inspired the second drawing. Which has a little girl at the bottom. That&rsquo;s me. The drawing incorporates abstract, botanicals, and lots of color. It&rsquo;s a story about going back to the basics, learning new things, and then fusing that with what I was doing before to create a new lane for myself. All of the things coming out of my head are experiences.&nbsp;

&nbsp;

<img alt="" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/file_container/RmlsZUNvbnRhaW5lch4fMjg0OTIwMDAz/full.jpg" />Ibrahim&#39;s contributions to the 2021 MPLSART Sketchbook Project

&nbsp;

BG: Did you find difficulty transposing your large scale mural style to the small scale of the 2021 MPLSART Sketchbook Project? 
HI: Yes and no. I sketch on regular 8&rdquo;x11&rdquo; paper and on my iPad often. However, it&rsquo;s typically through the lens of knowing it will be large-scale. I tend to draw very simply. With murals, it&rsquo;s important to consider how it will look far away. I&rsquo;m very concerned with the readability of the work so I do minimal linework, large shapes and botanicals, and tend to do solid color. It&rsquo;s also just my taste. My style doesn&rsquo;t always translate well to a typical size canvas. However, I find sketches in ink make more sense to me.

My first sketch [for the Sketchbook Project] had more detail than I typically do, because I could. It was fun to be able to add more lines to the leaves without thinking &ldquo;I&rsquo;m going to have to paint that 10,000 times in real life!&rdquo; I used to paint fairly small-scale landscapes from age 17-20. I tended to only do half of a painting and abandon it. I see now that it was because I don&rsquo;t like painting small, and I also really really don&rsquo;t like painting landscapes!&nbsp;

&nbsp;

<img alt="" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/file_container/RmlsZUNvbnRhaW5lch4fMjkwOTQwMDAz/full.jpg" />An example of Ibrahim&#39;s digital&nbsp;design experiments.

&nbsp;

BG: How do you see your work evolving during 2022? 
HI: I am most definitely going to incorporate furniture into the list of things I paint this year. I also want to casually do an art form that is unrelated to painting or mural work. I&rsquo;m thinking about sculptures but I don&rsquo;t know yet. My top priority right now is to start painting actual paintings again now that I will have more space.&nbsp;I also have a secret project I&rsquo;m working on that will likely take a year, so I&rsquo;m laying the groundwork now.

&nbsp;

BG: Do you have any advice for artists wanting to get into painting murals professionally? 
HI: Yes! Start with your own walls if you can. Or friends/family members. Even a piece of wood from Home Depot (a nice smooth surface). Don&rsquo;t worry about being good, or even sharing on social media. Don&rsquo;t worry about the best paints or supplies. I did my first mural with brushes from the Dollar Store. Just experiment and see what lights you up. And if you don&rsquo;t like painting something, drop it. Dropping landscapes really sparked my creativity. Sometimes you need to let go of the things you think you should be doing in order to make space for the things you want to be doing!

I also recommend&nbsp;finding podcasts by other artists.&nbsp;It helps you stay motivated and gives you great ideas you can apply to your own practice. My favorite podcast is <a href="https://www.creativepeptalk.com/" target="_blank">Creative Pep Talk by Andy J Pizza</a>. If you&rsquo;re local, reach out to me. I love giving all the advice to young people!

&nbsp;

BG: How can people best support you and your work right now? 
HI: My <a href="https://www.instagram.com/moonjuiceart/" target="_blank">instagram</a>&nbsp;is the easiest way to see my most recent work. My <a href="https://www.moonjuicemurals.com/" target="_blank">website</a> is a good place to look too, although it&rsquo;s usually a few weeks behind. Also, take pictures with my murals and tag me &mdash;&nbsp;I LOVE seeing it!

&nbsp;

BG: Thank you so much for your time and contributing your work to the 2021 MPLSART&nbsp;Sketchbook Project. Is there anything else you&#39;d like to say?&nbsp; 
HI: I just want to say thank you to my community, I would not be an artist were it not for your support!&nbsp;<span style="-webkit-text-stroke-color:rgb(237, 22, 144); background-color:rgb(250, 250, 250); caret-color:rgb(237, 22, 144); color:rgb(237, 22, 144); font-family:roboto,helvetica,arial,sans-serif; font-size:15.75px; letter-spacing:0.1686825007200241px">◼︎

&nbsp;

<img alt="" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/file_container/RmlsZUNvbnRhaW5lch4fMjczMDEwMDAz/full.jpg" />Photo of the artist. Photo by&nbsp;<a href="https://www.instagram.com/ryleeann_k/" target="_blank">@ryleeann_k</a>

The local muralist, who participated in our 2021 Sketchbook Project, offers insight into her own creative and professional evolution

Sketchbook Artist Profile: Q&A with Hibaaq Ibrahim

&nbsp;

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

&nbsp;

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

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

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

&nbsp;

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

&nbsp;

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

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

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

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

&nbsp;

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

&nbsp;

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

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

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

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

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

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

&nbsp;

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

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

&nbsp;

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

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

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

&nbsp;

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

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

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

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

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

&nbsp;

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

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

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

&nbsp;

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

&nbsp;

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

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

&nbsp;

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

&nbsp;

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

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

&nbsp;

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

&nbsp;

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

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

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

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

&nbsp;

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

&nbsp;

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

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

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

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

Seeking Common Ground: Joshua Cunningham at Groveland Gallery

&nbsp;

Upon asking Shade Pratt what it was that spurred her dive into the life of art and design, the answer at first was pragmatic &mdash; and profound.

&ldquo;I know design isn&rsquo;t going anywhere&hellip; Everything around me, you, from the computer you&rsquo;re typing on to the bench you&rsquo;re sitting on &mdash; has been designed.&rdquo;

For Shade, though, the value of design in her life doesn&rsquo;t solely consist of its practical use-value. To create something you&rsquo;ve never seen before is always a regenerative act.

Born in Maryland and raised in Minnesota, Shade returned east to the University of Maryland where she graduated with a degree melding art, architecture, engineering, and sustainability. Since then, between her world travels as a professional soccer player, Minnesota has always been home &mdash; her most recent stay elongated by the pandemic. As a designer whose visual acumen spans from shoes to murals to illustrations, Pratt says that&nbsp;&ldquo;Art is a part of everything I do.&rdquo; The value in art&rsquo;s omnipresence is that it&rsquo;s freeing for the artist.

<img alt="" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/file_container/RmlsZUNvbnRhaW5lch4fMjI3NDkwMDAx/full.jpg" />Untitled, acrylic on canvas triptych, each 18&quot; x 36&quot;

In the past few months alone, that same ubiquity has moved Shade Pratt to hone new and long-shelved talents. She tells me she brings her camera everywhere, so when protests started in the wake of the murder of George Floyd, &ldquo;I was out there &mdash; camera in hand &mdash; trying to shed light for everyone who wasn&rsquo;t here [in Minneapolis] on what was really happening.&rdquo;

But, as can be the nature of protest, being on the frontlines took a toll. &ldquo;So I started to paint,&rdquo; she says. By way of bright, dynamic, large scale murals, Pratt tells me how she moved her voice into the visual language of paintings. To be clear, undertaking large&nbsp;scale murals in collaboration with local artists was still a labor, be it of love. They stood long hours under June suns, climbing up and down&nbsp;ladders, paintbrushes in hand. Folks started seeing Shade&rsquo;s work donning the sides of buildings across the city and commissions started coming in. She tells me, &ldquo;I really haven&rsquo;t put down a brush since.&rdquo;

<img alt="" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/file_container/RmlsZUNvbnRhaW5lch4fMjE5NzUwMDAx/full.jpg" /><img alt="" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/file_container/RmlsZUNvbnRhaW5lch4fMjQ5NjUwMDAx/full.jpg" />The artist at work on her mural, The Revolution Will Not Be Televised, at 605 Central Ave NE in Minneapolis.

The pieces that manifest are illustrative and for her, driven by nostalgia and abstraction &mdash; an emphasis placed on negative space. &ldquo;The problem can be knowing when to leave space,&rdquo; she says, &ldquo;where to stop&rdquo;.

When I ask about her process and sources that inspire, Shade tells me, &ldquo;Inspiration can come from anywhere,&rdquo; explaining&nbsp;that any moment in a day, every scene within a scene can be the seed for creative thought. Zooming out, Pratt mentions being inspired by transportation, cosmetics, infrastructure, and music colliding with it all. &ldquo;You can&rsquo;t just stay in your market.&rdquo;

The line isn&rsquo;t straight, and the field isn&rsquo;t level. She shares that since May, much of her practice takes place within her home. Sometimes pieces are wholly driven aesthetically, and like we all hesitate to admit, content can arrive within a work much, much later.

<img alt="" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/file_container/RmlsZUNvbnRhaW5lch4fMjUxNDYwMDAx/full.jpg" />At home as much behind an easel as she is&nbsp;out on the pitch, the artist also has a successful career in professional soccer.

Equally significant to her artistic practice and underlying motivation is the fact that Shade Pratt also happens to be a successful professional footballer, usually playing the position of a winger&nbsp;or attacker&nbsp;for multiple teams spanning continents from North America to Asia. Though with the onset of COVID-19 around the world, her training and playing has been placed on a bit of a hold.

What&rsquo;s revealed itself as critical to any discipline of hers, especially that of art-making, is time management, organization, and getting used to not being in one place for long. So whether it be through mural-making for the public or footwear design internships&nbsp;for the likes of Adidas and New Balance, Shade isn&rsquo;t afraid of fluctuation or of shaking things up. With plans to work with an up-and-coming brewery on a new mural, partnering with local businesses expressing a positive message will always be important to her. She shares that, when it comes to the field, her goal is to inspire girls to pursue sports.

When it comes to art, her goal is to speak to the community, better yet the world.&nbsp;<span style="-webkit-text-stroke-color:rgb(237, 22, 144); background-color:rgb(250, 250, 250); caret-color:rgb(237, 22, 144); color:rgb(237, 22, 144); font-family:roboto,helvetica,arial,sans-serif; font-size:15.75px; letter-spacing:0.1686825007200241px">◼︎

<img alt="" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/file_container/RmlsZUNvbnRhaW5lch4fMjMzNTUwMDAx/full.jpg" />Tumble, acrylic on canvas triptych, each&nbsp;40&quot; x 30&quot;

<img alt="" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/file_container/RmlsZUNvbnRhaW5lch4fMjQxNTkwMDAx/full.jpg" />

For more info and a full portfolio, visit&nbsp;<a href="https://shadepratt.com" target="_blank">shadepratt.com</a>&nbsp;or follow the artist on Instagram <a href="https://www.instagram.com/shadepratt/" target="_blank">@shadepratt</a>.

Banner image: The Revolution Will Not Be Televised (detail), mural at 605 Central Ave NE&nbsp;in Minneapolis.&nbsp;All images are courtesy of the artist.

The 27-year-old professional soccer player and multidisciplinary artist/designer shares a bit about where she is and how she got there.

Shade Pratt Knows That Design Is What Makes the World Go 'Round

Local artist Natalia Berglund&rsquo;s painting and mixed media collages sit at a crossroads, culturally and personally. For her solo exhibition at the Museum of Russian Art &mdash; on view now through September 23rd &mdash; Berglund fills the museum&rsquo;s lower level gallery with images of women undergoing varying levels of empowerment and transformation. Her images combine iconography from both contemporary American fashion and Russian religious art as a way to grapple with the conflicting concepts and roles that women encounter and use to form their identities.

While Berglund&rsquo;s collage works use the stoic faces of fashion models, her latest series of paintings are portraits, titled after her models. Many of these works are similarly titled, referencing warriors. &ldquo;At first, I was seeing each piece as a reflection of a single person, fighting her own daily battles and navigating through life with determination.&rdquo; Berglund says of the earlier images which, while balanced in composition, feel frenetic and show the artist&rsquo;s hand and energy in larger brush strokes and water stains. These warriors come across as almost masked by their own sensuality, the ubiquity of their makeup and conformity to a contemporary standard of beauty. They are on the defensive, their struggle elegantly abstracted by ink and gold leaf. These works, while full and complete, feel like warm-ups for the direction Berglund took next.

&nbsp;

<img class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/written/temp/natalia1.jpg" /> Natalia Berglund, from the Warrior Series, mixed media on paper, 24 x 18&rdquo;

&nbsp;

The artist drew inspiration from a previous show at the Museum titled Russian Sacred Art: Connecting Heaven and Earth. The exhibition was not only an artistic inspiration but a reminder of the artist&rsquo;s personal experiences growing up in the former Soviet Union where religion was effectively outlawed as the &ldquo;opium of the people.&rdquo; Berglund&rsquo;s most memorable experience of the intoxicating aesthetics of religious art was during art school while studying plein air painting and wandering into the church her class was painting. &ldquo;I remember its opulent interior with icons, gold embellishments, dim lighting, and candles,&rdquo; the artist recounts. &ldquo;I have always admired icons as an art form for their stylized representation of people, powerful symbolism, and ornate beauty.&rdquo; It&rsquo;s no surprise then that she is also drawn to the world of fashion, which use those same tools and can be just as enticing.

In the wall text for the show, the work is described as seeking a harmony between the two types of icons &mdash; fashion and religion. Three of the paintings go about this in a direct and assertive manner, collaging images of traditional Russian religious icons with the black and white faces of female models aggressively splashed across the face of the original figure. Other paintings, such as the Shielded Warrior series, combine modern portraiture with the classic aesthetics of red and blue drapery and gilded embossment. Here Berglund&rsquo;s interests in religious art and fashion imagery begin combine in more subtle and intricate ways. No longer are the warrior women fixing us with their steely gaze, nor are they entangled in the painterly battles.

&nbsp;

<img class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/written/temp/natalia2.jpg" /> Natalia Berglund; Shielded Warrior - Natalie; oil, acrylic, cold wax, modeling paste, gold leaf on canvas; 48x40&quot;

&nbsp;

&ldquo;With this series, I am exploring how we can rationalize or come to terms with some of the conflicting aspects of our personalities, such as strength and fragility, femininity and masculinity, or deeply caring about certain issues and being blind to others,&rdquo; Berglund explains. &ldquo;All of these conflicting identities make us who we are.&rdquo; In these portraits, the battles are no longer with an outward opponent: voting rights, equal opportunity, the wage gap&hellip; The battles are now internalized. The Shielded Warriors turn their gaze away from us, perhaps at some looming conflict on the horizon. Those who might otherwise stare back at us are blindfolded or capped by intricate gilding and slash-like brush strokes. Only Nina looks out toward her audience, but it is clear that her attention is elsewhere, her gaze distant and unfocused. These warriors are shielded from their viewers and from the rest of the works in the exhibition as though the content were too much to take in. Even as they sit seemingly self-composed, there is a tension created by Berglund&rsquo;s use of both color and grayscale, dripping and aggressive brush stokes, and colorful graphic elements which often allude to halos.

&nbsp;

<img class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/written/temp/natalia3.jpg" /> Natalia Berglund; The Witness; oil, acrylic, collage, gold leaf&nbsp;on wood panel; 24 x 24&rdquo;

&nbsp;

The exhibition is rounded out by a soundtrack composed by the artist&rsquo;s husband, Alexander Berglund, specifically for these works. The music combines the familiar chants and church bells of religious music with the echoing sounds of high-heeled footsteps. The resonating soundscape builds with techno beats and synth swells that mingle with the choral vocals and chirps of crickets. It seamlessly brings together the artist&rsquo;s old plein air sensibilities with her new contemporary voice, knitting together her early themes from sensual fashion figures with the power of the religious paintings that inspired her.

Overall the exhibition, while themed around warriors and empowerment, feels like a vulnerable look into the artist&rsquo;s growing understanding of herself. No piece expresses this more than a small watercolor titled Gasp. A female head rises as if out of inky waters, her gold leafed lips part just above the dark surface. &ldquo;I&rsquo;ve spent the past few years experimenting with different styles and mediums, trying to find my voice as an artist,&rdquo; Berglund says. &ldquo;I feel that this body of work unifies a lot of different aspects of my own individual identity; the artistic traditions of my ancestral past, the constructivist elements of my Soviet childhood, and the omnipresent fashion imagery of contemporary America.&rdquo; Perhaps it is too simplified to see the gasping figure as a kind of self portrait. Nonetheless, it is satisfying to see her as Berglund coming up for air with new works, the compilation of much thought and personal artistic contemplation and growth.

&nbsp;

<img class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/written/temp/natalia4.jpg" /> Natalia Berglund, Gasp, gold leaf and ink on paper

&nbsp;

<a href="https://www.mplsart.com/events/faces-of-change-natalia-berglund">Faces of Change: Artistic Expressions by Natalia Berglund</a> is on view at the Museum of Russian Art through September 23rd. The Museum is open daily: M-F, 10am - 5pm; Sat, 10am - 4pm; Sun, 1 - 5pm. 

Admission is: Adults, $10; Children 13 &amp; under, Free; Children 14+ &amp; Students with ID, $5; Seniors 65+, $8; and free to members.

The iconography of Christian orthodoxy and western fashion collide in a show of mixed media portraits of women.

Russian Unorthodox: Natalia Berglund’s Portraits at the Museum of Russian Art

I met up with Alex Kuno one afternoon for an interview in our common neighborhood of Lowertown, St. Paul, where Kuno lives and works. I once heard him say that living in this neighborhood sometimes feels like living in an Edward Hopper painting. Rust-colored brick buildings that blush when hit with an early sunrise stand next to empty city streets that suggest a disconnect with the external world. We both joke about the Lowertown art community being like Sesame Street, with a mix of curmudgeons and peacekeepers and many distinct characters, all very lovable in their own way.

Kuno spends a great deal of time painting and drawing in his studio and admits to even spending his days off by looking at tutorials on YouTube, studying different media and methods for creating new work. I am curious about what keeps him so prolific and engaged in a field where others quickly burn out or give up.

&nbsp;

<img class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/written/temp/kuno1.jpg" /> Molting Prophet, ink and watercolor on paper, 11 x 14&rdquo;

&nbsp;

The short answer is his work is a part of him; he simply has to do it. He can&#39;t even imagine having a separate studio from his live-work space because he wouldn&#39;t want to be away from his work for any length of time. His artistic pursuits began in childhood when he would escape to his room to draw, to hide away from things that troubled him. Though not brought up with religion or any particular set of beliefs or traditions to follow, he says he wished he had been. Over time, he created his own personal mythology through his art, which he partly describes as &ldquo;self-deprecating, to mock my own fears about being abandoned or alone.&rdquo;

After graduating from the University of Minnesota in 1999 with a BFA in Studio Art, Kuno moved to New York City. At the time, he had a fascination with Renaissance art, making large oil paintings that bore resemblance to classical paintings. He felt like he needed to create this &ldquo;serious&rdquo; type of work to succeed as a working artist in New York City.

&nbsp;

<img class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/written/temp/kuno2.jpg" /> King of Last Winter, ink and watercolor on paper,&nbsp;11 x 14&rdquo;

&nbsp;

When he moved back to Minnesota in 2005, the return home took a mental shift. &ldquo;I had to decide who I was going to be again.&rdquo; He found a job working in tech support at a call center and would sit face to face with a computer screen, a headset over his ears, a pen clenched in his hand poised over a notepad. Dazed by mundane phone calls, Kuno hypnotically drew circles on the notepad, as if in a half-conscious dream. The circular shapes slowly formed into heads and eventually molded into the faces of children, screaming.

For the next two years, Kuno began to create a series with this work. He figured that if he was going to be starting over with his life, in the place he grew up, then he would create some new art using materials that were from his childhood &mdash; pencils, crayons, markers &mdash; and utilize them on loose pieces of quality paper that he had kept with him through several moves. He began making new work and initially created some timid charcoal drawings that hung in the SooVAC gift shop in Minneapolis.

During the interview we talk about the goodness of dark fairy tales and horror films. It is important to be aware of what frightens you so that you can acknowledge it, rather than always be shielded from it. Kuno is interested in how childhood anxieties form our adult perspectives. While listening to snippets of press conferences from the Bush Administration in the post-9/11 era, he heard statements being given without context, steering the audience toward uninformed conclusions. Kuno mockingly reiterates George W. Bush: &ldquo;They knocked down our buildings because they hate our freedom!&rdquo; He finds something very child-like about these bold and speculative statements, in the same way that a child may only see or hear one element of something frightening and then blow it up in their own mind to be something far worse. He has built a whole mythology around that notion.

&nbsp;

<img class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/written/temp/kuno3.jpg" /> From the Miscreants of Tiny Town series

&nbsp;

His ongoing series since 2007, the satirical dark fairytales titled The Miscreants of Tiny Town, is a depiction of an otherworldly place where all the unwanted children are sent to live. Each painting places the viewer in the middle of a story where both the beginning and the end are uncertain. The children in each story appear lost or confused in a land of petrified trees with branches that reach like pitchforks toward the muted sky. We see glimpses of their lives, where they commingle with serpents, and attempt to cross rushing rivers. They never grow up, they never grow old. Yet you can see the wear in their eyes from enduring days and nights in a standstill dwelling, where their years never move onward. I believe it is just like childhood, when we don&#39;t yet have a frame of reference for time and experience, and the clock moves so slowly that we think our nightmares will last forever and nothing will ever get better.

Whenever Kuno played with his G.I. Joes as a child, he didn&#39;t just want to be the human controlling the battlefield of miniature plastic men; he wanted to be inside that imaginative world, too. He wanted to be a part of it. It&rsquo;s much like how he creates his drawings now. He&#39;s not a puppet-master standing on the safe side of the page, dictating imagery; he is inside the story, often claiming that he &ldquo;has no idea where this piece is going&rdquo; as he works, as it leads him to where it wants to go. He is influenced by the imagery of vintage anatomy drawings and precolonial maps of the United States, diagrams that were created with a na&iuml;ve preconception of what something might possibly look like, without knowing for sure. When there is no right or wrong way to depict something, it requires more from the imagination.

&nbsp;

<img class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/written/temp/kuno4.jpg" /> Land of Vampires,&nbsp;ink and watercolor on paper, 12 x 16&rdquo;

&nbsp;

Kuno is often surprised by the conclusions of his own works. He appreciates when one person has a humorous response to his work, while the next person is horrified. He loves the juxtaposition because it means that viewers are taking away something unique and that his personal mythology can be personal to them, too.

I think that Kuno&#39;s work reminds us that personal or societal fears can overtake us if we let them, but if we face them head on, even laugh at them a little, then maybe we&#39;ll realize that the fear is inside our own head. Or maybe he is prophesying the utter final destruction of the world, in which everything we&#39;ve ever feared since infancy will come barreling down from the sky, encasing us in a giant, mucus-laden cobweb where we will be trapped and forced to relive every traumatic and embarrassing moment of our life before being extinguished by a savage one-eyed shrieking ogre riding a meteorite. I&rsquo;m pretty sure Kuno would be fine with either interpretation.

&nbsp;

<a href="http://alexkunoartwork.com/" target="_blank">Alex </a><a href="http://alexkunoartwork.com/" target="_blank">Kuno</a>&#39;s work will be featured in upcoming national and international exhibitions and publications, including a series of small pieces in LA&rsquo;s Hive Gallery in July, a two-person show at the Talon Gallery in Portland in September, and he will have a painting made specifically for NYC&rsquo;s Spoke Art Gallery&rsquo;s&nbsp;Suggestivism&nbsp;opening and book launch. He is also sending a couple of pieces to the Feinkunst-Krueger Gallery in Hamburg, Germany.&nbsp;Kuno&nbsp;will also be a featured artist in an upcoming issue of France&#39;s&nbsp;Hey&nbsp;Magazine. Upcoming local exhibits include a group show at the Ambiente Gallery in NE Minneapolis in August and Mitre Box Gallery in Minneapolis in November. He currently has artwork up at Nina&#39;s Cafe in Saint Paul through June.

&nbsp;

<img class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/written/temp/kuno5.jpg" /> Tempest And Tumult Trample Through The Tiny Temples (detail); watercolor, graphite, ink, and chalk on paper; 24 x 18&rdquo;

Recreating phantasmagoric fairy tales from the forests of his imagination, St. Paul-based artist Alex Kuno finds life and laughter in the darkness.

The Faces of Children, Screaming: A Profile of Artist Alex Kuno

I walked over from my studio to Lowertown Lofts Artist Cooperative on a winter Sunday morning to interview Ta-coumba Aiken, internationally acclaimed painter, muralist, and public artist. A frigid wind had gathered in the back alley entrance to the building. I shivered my way through it, buzzed the number for Ta-coumba&#39;s studio, and headed inside.

&nbsp;

I had been here before, many years ago with my father. Ta-coumba&#39;s studio was the first art studio in St. Paul that I had visited before I decided to move to Lowertown to begin my art career. I told him I was an artist, too. Maybe I sounded doubtful of myself, because I had not yet begun my career and wasn&#39;t certain if I should be calling myself an artist. That didn&#39;t stop him from believing me.

&nbsp;

A few months later, I ran into him again at Black Dog Cafe and told him I had been accepted into a live/work studio space in the neighborhood. He looked me in the eye and said, &ldquo;Now you really have to start calling yourself an artist,&rdquo; and he smiled an encouraging grin as if to say, You&#39;ve made it, kid. Welcome to the art community. Now be sure to work hard. He has an endearing way of challenging people to live up to their potential.

&nbsp;

<img class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/written/temp/tacouba_07.jpg" /> Ta-coumba Aiken

&nbsp;

Now, twelve years later, I am heading to his studio again but this time as a fellow artist and neighbor, not a stranger. I arrive on the third floor and make my way down a long narrow hallway to the atrium toward Ta-coumba&#39;s home and studio. A bag of clementines hangs on the doorknob outside his door. They were left there by a neighbor. I see it as an omen of the ways that this community will always look out for one another.

&nbsp;

There is a warmth to his studio, beyond just a harbor from the windchill outside. This is the place where he spends most of his time, and it has an embracing calm that is symbolic of his spirit. His art lives with him and around him. &ldquo;Please excuse the mess,&rdquo; he says, as he has been busy working. Pieces of discarded tape caked in paint and other remnants from a creative storm have fallen to the floor like leaves. As a painter myself, I do not view it as a &#39;mess&#39; but rather a charming quality of a busy artist&#39;s life. Canvases rest along a stretch of white wall. The wall is graced with smears of paint. I smile to myself because in most households, coloring on the walls is grounds for punishment. Here in Lowertown, it is a sign of vitality. Here, we are as free as children.

&nbsp;

<img class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/written/temp/tacouba_04.jpg" /> Time Traveler&rsquo;s Portrait, painting by Ta-coumba Aiken

&nbsp;

Ta-coumba offers me a clementine from the bag on his door once I sit down in the comfier of two chairs that he insists I sit in. Bella, a soft black cat, greets me with a purr and leaps into my lap. Ta-coumba sits back in the other chair and begins sharing stories.

&nbsp;

He tells me about his childhood, growing up in Evanston, Illinois. &ldquo;I was always known as Aiken&#39;s &#39;weird&#39; son,&rdquo; he says, in contrast to his brother. Ta-coumba wanted to be an artist from an early age, but his father wanted him to be practical and stable. &ldquo;My mom wanted me to keep the door open, but my dad wanted me to be a lawyer.&rdquo; Artists often get caught between their own dreams and what others want them to be. Ta-coumba persuaded his father so he could understand what his son was meant to do with his life. One day his son would grow into an artist, activist, storyteller, public speaker, and respected leader in the community. One day his son&#39;s art would be seen by hundreds of thousands of people and would be in major collections by the Walker Art Center and Maya Angelou.

&nbsp;

<img class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/written/temp/tacouba_03.jpg" /> Steadfast, painting by Ta-coumba Aiken

&nbsp;

Ta-coumba is a captivating storyteller. I sit and listen, writing notes with my arm skewed so I do not disturb Bella, who still rests on my lap. Ta-coumba continues to tell me stories about his life in vivid detail, growing up during the Civil Rights Movement, and all the experiences that provided a backbone to his purpose as an artist. He learned about life by being a quiet observer, looking in from the outside with a wide-eyed innocence. &ldquo;[There was] something that caused me to be on the outskirts so I could watch people, instead of being on the inside. Then when I was on the inside, I could offer something that no one else could.&rdquo; He knew that he wanted to be involved in the community where his art would find its way into other people&#39;s lives. He began working on murals in the 1970s and has worked on over 300 murals and public art sculptures in collaboration with communities, schools, and organizations, addressing inequities in homelessness, health, education, race, and gender. He helps people identify their problems through art and visualize what they want to do or say. &ldquo;I create my art to heal the hearts of people and their communities by evoking a positive spirit.&rdquo;

&nbsp;

Ta-coumba&#39;s work is inspired by rhythms of African art, a myriad of layers and intuitive marks melding together to form new imagery. His work is ever-evolving. &ldquo;I paint quickly. I take the influence of that moment, or a new moment, and blend them together.&rdquo; His art speaks to people in varied voices. Some people see pain and suffering and the evolution of the human spirit. Some see inner beauty and the power of spirit and ancestors. Some see life and energy, a riot of colors, and vibrant interactions. There are thousands of things to be seen. You can look at his paintings over and over and always find something new.

&nbsp;

<img class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/written/temp/tacouba_06.jpg" /> The artist with his Guinness World Record-setting Lite Brite installation at St. Paul&rsquo;s Union Depot

&nbsp;

Around the mid 1980s, Ta-coumba and his wife began looking for a home to raise their family. They had been moving from house to house, escaping faults and infestations. &ldquo;You&#39;d walk in the kitchen and see a shadow on the floor move,&rdquo; he says with a laugh. &ldquo;We were a young couple, learning.&rdquo; He relayed a vision to his wife of what it could be like to make a home for their family out of a barren space, rather than buy one that was already made by somebody else. They moved into an old shoe factory that became the Lowertown Lofts Artist Cooperative. He is one of the founding members of the cooperative who lead the way for live/work spaces in Lowertown. It was as though he had a premonition about the neighborhood. &ldquo;This was the vortex. I knew the art was going to thrive here.&rdquo;

&nbsp;

He tells me about the current project that he is working on. It is the large-scale painting that stands across from him at the easel, adjacent to the window. He looks directly at it as he speaks about it, squinting through one eye, expressing that his eyes hurt from working on it so hard. The painting subtly reads &ldquo;Minnesota State Fair&rdquo; at the top. He has been chosen as this year&#39;s featured artist to create the Commemorative Poster for the 2017 Minnesota State Fair. He describes his process to me as based on his experience of the State Fair, that there&#39;s a chaos but also a togetherness that he uniquely captures in the painting; layers of memories and echoes of laughter.

&nbsp;

Amidst a multitude of success and a career of diverse projects, he remains humble and true to his artistic mission. He is a leader and a mentor because of an open heart and an outstretched hand.

&nbsp;

When you look up to someone from a distance, their accomplishments and stature make them seem untouchable to you, because you are just a young artist at the foot of the hill. They seem so far from where you are, and it feels like you are chasing something that may disappear from view. But when they reach out a hand to you and smile, suddenly you feel welcomed alongside their path, and it enables you to see your dreams as an attainable goal. I think that is who Ta-coumba Aiken is to other artists in this community. He instills promise in people. He simply wants to reach people and inspire them to do great things with their life.

&nbsp;

<img class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/written/temp/tacouba_08.jpg" /> The artist (and assistant) at work

&nbsp;

Ta-coumba Aiken&#39;s work can be seen at the upcoming exhibition Black is the Knew Black at The <a href="http://theshowgallerylowertown.org/" target="_blank">Show Gallery</a>&nbsp;in Lowertown, St. Paul, starting May 5th with an opening reception on May 12th. He also has a solo exhibition at The Show Gallery in July. To view more of the artist&rsquo;s work, visit his website: <a href="http://ta-coumbaaiken.com">http://ta-coumbaaiken.com</a>.

&nbsp;

All images are courtesy of the artist.

“This was the vortex. I knew the art was going to thrive here.” Ta-coumba Aiken's art has brought him to many different parts of the world, but Lowertown St. Paul remains the place where he lives and works.

Artist Profile: Ta-coumba Aiken

Chances are you may never get a one-of-a-kind <a href="http://luisfitch.com/art/" target="_blank">Luis Fitch</a> piece. It&rsquo;s much more likely you&rsquo;ll see his artwork as a sticker on the street than in a gallery, and Fitch would prefer it that way. Incorporating his guerrilla marketing and branding experience into his fine art practice, the locally-based artist has the unique approach of strategizing how to put his images into the community in such a way that they become instantly recognizable and widely accessible.

Raised in Tijuana, Mexico, Fitch moved to San Diego in 1985 to pursue formal training in graphic design and fine art before settling in Minneapolis, where he founded the cross-cultural design agency <a href="http://unobranding.com/uno/" target="_blank">UNO</a>. Through his company, Fitch works closely with retailers to develop products designed with the Hispanic community in mind. From the branded commercial imagery he creates to the hand-pulled, jumbo-sized art prints he produces, his work is an exploration of the dichotomy of life within these two worlds &mdash; the &ldquo;south&rdquo; (Mexico) and the &ldquo;north&rdquo; (the United States). 

&nbsp;

<img class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/written/temp/LF_FolkloreRemix_preview.jpg" /> Luis Fitch pieces ready to hang for Folklore Remix at Gamut Gallery

 
His three upcoming shows, <a href="http://www.mplsart.com/events/folklore-remix">Folklore Remix&nbsp;at Gamut Gallery</a>, one at the Mexican Institute of Culture in D.C., and another at the Museum of Mexican Art in Chicago, center around how the Mexican holiday D&iacute;a de Muertos (Day of the Dead) has been commercialized and capitalized upon in the U.S. Using discarded images from work his company does for their corporate clients, Fitch repurposes them to bring awareness to Mexican culture and to the violence in Mexico, particularly along the border where he grew up.

&ldquo;Textile manufactures&nbsp;will hire us to do a line of textiles to be used in patterns,&rdquo; he explains, &ldquo;and whatever they didn&#39;t like, or the recycled material, I can grab and put it into a different context, and it becomes a different message.&quot; &nbsp;

With symbolic imagery and a graphic design aesthetic, he is able to tackle intense, real-life stories from Mexican headlines. 5 Heads, for instance, is based on the true story of a Mexican drug cartel leaving five decapitated heads outside an elementary school in Acapulco this past April. Instead of showcasing the bloody gore of such an event, Fitch uses simplified images that can be assimilated and digested by the general public, yet still capture their attention and curiosity to probe further.

&nbsp;

<img class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/written/temp/LF_Blood-03_30X44in3.jpg" />Print by Luis Fitch

 
Last year he began a project which earned him a McKnight Fellowship award devoted to calling attention to the 43 Mexican students that disappeared mysteriously in 2014. Working on recycled corrugated boxes, one symbolizing each missing student, Fitch scattered the artwork in a variety of places throughout Latino neighborhoods, each with a corresponding tweet regarding its whereabouts and the hashtag #FreeArt in both Spanish and English. Through this storytelling project, Fitch created a body of work that united urban residents, raised awareness about the tragic disappearances, and also made artwork easily accessible and consumable to a community often overlooked in the art world.

For Fitch, his work is about starting a dialogue that doesn&#39;t have to happen within the confines of a gallery. It&rsquo;s an experiment that relies on a century&rsquo;s worth of &ldquo;branding,&rdquo; beginning with the iconic image of La Calavera Catrina, first etched and made popular at the turn of the 20th century by Mexican printmaker and illustrator Jos&eacute; Guadalupe Posada.

&nbsp;

<img class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/written/temp/LF_Posada.Catrina.jpg" /> Catrina by Jos&eacute; Guadalupe Posada​

 
The Catrina, itself a satire about European influences on Mexican culture, captures the famous calavera (skull) and has become a ubiquitous image associated with D&iacute;a de Muertos. Fitch&rsquo;s artwork takes an image like the Catrina that is already iconoclastic and revamps it using graphic design techniques to become a more contemporary visual piece.

While stores like Walmart and Target have used traditional D&iacute;a de Muertos images in their Halloween costumes and marketing, Fitch sets out to expand on this idea, heightening the awareness of Mexican culture. &quot;Now you see kids having tattoos, wearing t-shirts with this imagery, you see it on skateboards and surfboards; it&#39;s a crossover that most people don&#39;t even know what it stands for. The way I&#39;m using it is more of a language. I relate to it and it becomes a vocabulary. It&#39;s a tool for me to use to communicate.&quot; &nbsp;

&quot;I look at it more from a graphic design standpoint than a, &#39;oh, I&#39;m Mexican so I have to use it.&#39; I like the idea that I can do a pillow one day, and then the next day I can do a sticker that goes out into the street and then do a museum-quality piece or an art print that might go into a gallery that you can buy for $20. By doing inexpensive reproductions and silkscreens, I make it accessible for everyone, the Hispanic and Mexican community specifically who are afraid to go to museums because they think it&#39;s just for the white people. Instead of the art residing inside of a building, now the art is in the street, sometimes in their yards.&quot;

&nbsp;

<img class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/written/temp/LF_Street-Art_1.jpg" />Prints by Luis Fitch

 
And though his upcoming shows are in gallery settings, Fitch still considers what he is showing as accessible, offering posters, jumbo-sized silkscreens, and other bodies of artwork for under $50. &quot;It&#39;s kind of like the Ikea of art. And now it&#39;s just one more place that the art can be seen.&quot;

&ldquo;When you do guerrilla marketing with fine art, it&#39;s an even bigger interest. When you see a Nike logo, you immediately dismiss it because it&#39;s so ingrained, but when someone sees a poster in the street and they don&#39;t understand what it&#39;s for, they have a bigger drive to discover what it&#39;s all about.&rdquo;

Mixing his marketing and branding background with fine art, Fitch sets out to challenge what is conceptual art and how imprinting public spaces with art strategically unites all sections of society. &quot;Can a piece of art be a sticker in a bathroom at the back of a restaurant? Is that art? Can a poster be pasted outside of the Walker? Is that art? For me, it&#39;s a fun experiment to see how fast it&#39;s picked up and how fast it&#39;s recognized because of the consistency of the image, the colors, the patterns, the technique. It&#39;s repetition of something that implores you to find out more.&quot;

Engaging with Twitter and social media outlets, Fitch has garnered a national following. The curator of the National Institute of Mexican Art saw his work on Facebook and sought him out to be part of the Institute&#39;s 30th annual celebration of the Day of the Dead. For this exhibit, which sees over 88,000 in attendance, Fitch will produce a large-format wheatpaste mural. The show will feature traditional D&iacute;a de Muertos oferendas juxtaposed with modern-day artwork that speaks to the capitalist and consumerist aspects of recreating this style of art. At the end of the exhibit, just before the doors to the gift shop, will be Fitch&#39;s piece entitled Sold Out.

&ldquo;It will be so obvious that it&rsquo;s almost like a retail window shopping of Day of the Dead. It&rsquo;s exactly the kind of work that I&#39;m questioning on one end, and on the other end it&#39;s my way of letting people (mainly the Mexican community) know the problems that we still have in Mexico, specifically with the violence and drugs, but in a symbolic way.&quot;

&nbsp;

<img class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/written/temp/LF_Blood-01_30X44in3.jpg" /> Luis Fitch

--&nbsp;Juleana&nbsp;Enright

&nbsp;

Catch&nbsp;<a href="http://www.mplsart.com/events/folklore-remix">Folklore Remix</a> at Gamut Gallery&nbsp;July 9th&nbsp;through the&nbsp;30th. The exhibition focuses&nbsp;on remixing mythology with street art sensibility &amp; showcasing original work by Rodrigo O&ntilde;ate, Luis Fitch, &amp; Repo.

The opening reception for Folklore Remix is&nbsp;Saturday, July 9th 7PM-11PM with a&nbsp;soundtrack &nbsp;provided by <a href="https://www.facebook.com/djfresko612/">DJ Fresko612</a>. For more information, visit <a href="http://www.mplsart.com/events/folklore-remix">http://www.mplsart.com/events/folklore-remix</a>.

<div>&nbsp;</div>

With “Folklore Remix,” a three-person show at Gamut Gallery opening on Saturday, local artist and designer Luis Fitch brings his Day of the Dead sensibilities out of the street and into the gallery.

Artist Profile: Luis Fitch

This is the first installation in a new and ongoing series of artist interviews. Our goal is to keep them concise in length yet rich in content. We&rsquo;ll speak with Artists from various mediums and at various stages in their careers. We want you to know the person behind the artist. In that vein, there is not a more appropriate artist to start with.

Entering Hilary Greenstein&rsquo;s bright California Building Studio is to walk into your childhood family room. Her paintings, based on vintage found photos, bring back memories of common scenarios we all experienced growing up.

<h2>The Artist as Person</h2>

<img class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/written/temp/hilary2.png" />

Hilary is a recent (2013) MCAD BFA program grad. Given the scale of her work, she knew she needed a studio straight away. When she isn&rsquo;t oil painting, she writes poetry, cooks, and plays with her beloved cat. She knew she wanted to be a painter very early on and got serious about it in High School when she attended MCAD&rsquo;s high school program. Hilary is a thoughtful, mindful person and artist. Her ability to pay attention to detail while keeping the big picture in mind is impeccable. She has a knack for the difficult task of determining when a painting is done. There are just enough brush strokes to complete the painting, but not the image, leaving the rest to the viewer&rsquo;s imagination. Hilary often works on multiple paintings at once to alleviate the natural tendency to overwork a singular piece. She views painting as an act of respect, paying homage to and treating the subject with respect. Balance is good word to describe her; it comes through in her art to be certain.

<img class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/written/temp/hilary1.png" />

Hilary and I spoke at length about her process, which is noteworthy. Though her canvases are enormous, she stretches them herself. She appreciates the balance of the scientific/ mathematical nature of this with the creative nature of painting. There is a right and wrong way to stretch a canvas, there is no wrong way to create a painting.

<img class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/written/temp/hilary3.png" />

<h2>The Art of Familiarity</h2>

Familiarity is a theme that plays out in many ways in her work. Many of the works in her prior collection contain wallpaper patterns painted as the background. Of course these pieces would look great on a wall in your home for obvious reasons, but they also conjure sentiments of home regardless of their resting place. In her current collection in progress she often uses house paints for the background. This accomplishes an interesting juxtaposition of color, but also creates an implicit reminder of home. It&rsquo;s hard not to feel nostalgic in her space. There are enough quintessential youthful scenarios that something will resonate with you. In my opinion, one of the greatest measures of art if whether or not it makes the viewer feel or think in any way. In that regard, these paintings don&rsquo;t just hit the bullseye they punch clear through it.

<img class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/written/temp/hilary4.png" />

Most of the works in her current series in progress contain what she refers to as lacunas. At face value they may be symbols of birth, death, or wounds while perhaps representing the temporary or fleeting nature of youth. The expressions on some of her characters are somewhat somber or serious, but Hilary strives to not only paint the anxious, rather to balance that with happy imagery. That is life, after all.

<img class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/written/temp/hilary6.png" />

&nbsp;

<h2>The Questions</h2>

(Josh Arbit): Why do you make art? 
(Hilary Greenstein): Paintings are my way to communicate. They are open ended, like poetry. A painting doesn&rsquo;t try to convince nor argue a point; rather paintings are open-ended and evocative.

(JA): Why does art matter? 
(HG):&nbsp;Art has been around forever, but every art show you go to presents new ideas and things not previously seen. It inspires and drives human connection, feedback, and reactions.

(JA):&nbsp;What does owning original art add to your life? What do people get from it? 
(HG):&nbsp;It adds dimension to a room, changes the space. Art subliminally influences who you are and what happens in that space. Paintings look back at you. Owning Art should appeal to people because it plays into our desire for the scarce and rare. It resonates with the millennial drive for authenticity and originality. It allows us to curate our persona and show who we are and what we are about.

(JA):&nbsp;What do you like most about the Twin Cities Art scene? 
(HG): It&rsquo;s big and it&rsquo;s small; more personal. It&rsquo;s Midwest friendly. There are many galleries, most of which particularly support emerging artists. The Art scene here is part of the social scene. It is accessible and lacks pretension. Painters here don&rsquo;t take themselves too seriously, nor do they put art on a pedestal.

<img class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/written/temp/hilary5.png" />

Hilary will have her&nbsp;first solo show, Stranger,&nbsp;opening at the Coffman Art Gallery at the University of Minnesota on March 4, 2016. For more details, visit her website&nbsp;<a href="http://hilarygreenstein.com" target="_blank">http://hilarygreenstein.com</a> 
 
-- Josh Arbit

Josh Arbit sits down with emerging artist Hilary Greenstein