Con d'Or Grant Hart Artist Fund
How the fund supports artists (The Con d'Or Grant Hart Artist Fund has provided artist stipends since Second Shift began, and I think it's important to highlight the role it has played in supporting our residents over the years.)
We should also include information about the Grant Hart Collage Book project and add a donate button so visitors can contribute directly to the fund.
Lets include an image of Grant as well. I think we used one before on the website or in printed materials, the younger portrait of Grant.
Grant Hart (1961–2017) is widely known as a pioneering and influential musician, but that framing flattens the full scope of his practice. A lifelong resident of Saint Paul, he was best known as the co-founder, co-songwriter, and drummer for the influential hardcore punk and alternative rock band Hüsker Dü, which achieved international recognition in the 1980s. In parallel with his music, Hart was a prolific and gifted visual artist.
Collage was not a side project or something he dabbled in. It was a sustained, rigorous commitment that ran alongside his music for years. From the archive, we organized nearly 400 individual collages, pointing to an artist who returned to the form again and again, not out of habit, but out of necessity. This was a daily or near-daily practice.
Working primarily from vintage magazines, Hart developed a distinctive process of cutting, weaving, and assembling images, folding them into unexpected visual relationships. The work tracks a mind in motion, pulling from wide-ranging interests in history, technology, outer space, geography, and popular culture.
“I’d say my work is centered on collage at the moment which to me is close to language. A picture can have all sorts of metaphorical meanings.”
For Grant, collage functioned as a language. Images are not fixed. They can be cut, rearranged, layered, and pushed into new relationships. Meaning is not inherent; it is constructed through proximity, collision, and timing.
“It’s just another language. So, just like we incorporate clichés and somebody else’s metaphors into what we write, visually it’s very close to the same thing.”
He was well versed in the Surrealist movement and deeply engaged with its history and ideas. Many of our conversations in my studio circled back to it, not as nostalgia, but as an active framework for thinking through images. You can see it in the work. The collages hold a precise attention to composition, color, and the friction created when two images are forced into a shared space. Edges misalign, scales collapse, figures merge and split. There is a clear affinity with early Surrealist strategies from the 1920s and 30s, where juxtaposition produces tension, humor, and dissonance. But the work never feels derivative. It carries his sensibility, his timing, his way of seeing, shaped by decades of making across disciplines.
“I spent a lot of time doing visual, two- and three- dimensional art and enjoyed the hell out of it,”
That enjoyment is evident, but it is not casual. There is a directness and energy in the work that comes from sustained attention and a real investment in discovery. The work does not feel overworked or over-explained. It stays open, allowing images to do what they do best, holding multiple meanings at once without resolving them. His technique acknowledges the artists that came before him, while continuing to push something forward across multiple forms.
To encounter this body of work is to see another side of Grant’s practice, one that is no less serious or committed. It expands how we understand him, not just as a musician, but as an artist working fluently across mediums, driven by the same curiosity and intensity. It is an honor to share these works with the public for the first time.
Chris Larson, 2026