TAMARA AUPAUMUT (SHE/HER)

Tamara Aupaumut is a self-taught multidisciplinary artist living on Mni Sota Makoce. She descends from the Stockbridge-Munsee Band of Mohican Indians, the Oneida Nation, and the Brothertown Indian Nation. Aupaumut’s intuitive, contemplative, and experimental creative process involves applying a variety of contemporary and traditional Native disciplines to execute her concepts, with her cultural heritage and ancestors being an integral force behind her research and artistic work. She is a recipient of a 2020 Mitakuye Oyasin Award and a 2022 Next Step Fund. Tamara is working on a collection of multidisciplinary works, This Land Is My Body, that speaks to the healing connection between the land and our bodies.

VERNON VANDERWOOD (THEY/SHE)

Vernon Vanderwood (they/she) is a bio-curious interdisciplinary artist investigating biomaterials and binary juxtapositions.

Living in Minnesota or Mní Sóta Makoce, the traditional and contemporary lands of the Dakota and Ojibwe people, has fostered a continuous curiosity about the landscape's history and how we come to understand it. Vernons life and practice is spent exploring and connecting with the outdoors. They are deeply invested in learning and questioning the world. Their mother, an immigrant and musician working in Minneapolis introduced them at a young age to the city as a space for art and change. The music scene and social activism have been crucial in opening a dialogue of questioning the status quo and the structures of knowledge. Vernons identity as a gender non conforming person has informed a practice and life that strives to decompose lines between their artistic and social goals. The layered histories of their own identity and the place they come from equally contradict and support a practice in pursuit of understanding and healing. Working with living materials they have found a reflection of this non-binary nature and a step towards radical sustainability. 

YASMIN YASSIN (SHE/HER) 

Yasmin is a photographer and director based in Minneapolis by way of Canada. Her artistic practice explores sub-cultures and the ways in which communities gather through shared interests to form networks of connection.

With a background in science, Yasmin brings her research experience along with her to build relationships & understand context before creating her art. Her goal is to tell stories as authentically as possible to their essence, with integrity towards those that invite her into their lives—in the tradition of her East African oral-storytelling heritage. Yasmin recreates feelings in her imagery using the dynamic effect of light and color, while considering the lived experiences of those captured in relation to shared spaces and environments.

YASMIN YASSIN

ANNA LEHNER (THEY/THEM)

Anna Lehner is an interdisciplinary artist working at the intersections of art and structural geology.

In 2019, Lehner received a MA/MFA in Glass at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and was a graduate associate to the Center for Culture, History and Environment within the Nelson Institute. In 2016 received a BFA in 3D Fine Art and a BA in Art History from the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point. Lehner has received multiple awards including a Fulbright Graduate Research Award New Zealand, Jutta Cuny-Franz Memorial Award, and included in professional publications such as New Glass Review of the Corning Museum of Glass. Lehner is currently the Executive Director at Foci Minnesota Center for Glass Arts in Minneapolis, MN. 

ANNA LEHNER

DAHN GIM (SHE/HER)

Identifying herself as a “forever foreigner”, Dahn Gim embraces the concept of hybridity in her material and exploratory endeavors. This process often involves delving into the depths of uncomfortable emotions, such as vulnerability, displacement, isolation, and personal trauma from both past and present experiences. Employing a diverse range of materials, Gim immerses herself in her creative work and encounters unexpected and whimsical outcomes that possess an intriguing blend of the unforeseen, absurd, and uncanny. Her recent studio practice sees water as a metaphor for the intricate nature of women's bodies, encompassing themes that mirror the cyclic aspects of life itself. 

DAHN GIM

IVONNE YÁÑEZ (SHE/HER) 

Ivonne Yáñez is an interdisciplinary artist originally from Mexico City working between soft sculpture, installation, illustration, and painting who utilizes dreams as the medium to represent an ephemeral view of reality. Yáñez explores the subjects of dreams and surrealism via different mediums, ranging from watercolor painting to installation art and soft sculpture. Over the past 18 months of her MFA journey, Yáñez found it interesting how the initial watercolor paintings inform the sculptures and vice versa; recently Yáñez has been interested in producing pieces that create a common thread between the content of my paintings and the texture of the material in her sculptures. Yáñez combines her past training as a fashion designer with sculpture due to the three-dimensionality of the human shape and the fine art process.

IVONNE YÁÑEZ

CAMERON PATRICIA DOWNEY (SHE/THEY)

Cameron Downey is an anti-disciplinary artist and environmental scientist from North Minneapolis, Minnesota. They mediate concepts and bounds of world-building and survival artistry by way of Black, fantastical and precarious spaces and forms. Cameron uses sculpture, film, photography, the written and the performed to tease a language of epics out of the minutiae.

CAMERON PATRICIA DOWNEY

JOCELYN SUZUKA FIGUEROA (SHE/HER)

Born in Kyoto, Japan, Jocelyn Suzuka Figueroa is a hafū fiber artist and painter. She creates plush animal dolls and ghost scroll paintings as a means to examine generational family traditions within histories altered by immigration, loss, and war. Her work, rooted in the maintenance of inherited artistic practices, stems from the belief that the foundational legacies of the past must be investigated before a home can be built for the present.

JOCELYN SUZUKA FIGUEROA

STEPHANIE A. LINDQUIST (SHE/HER)

Along her travels, Lindquist is continually learning among plants, gardeners, farmers, soil scientists, artists and writers to combine concepts across disciplines. While navigating these relationships she has collected soils from Minnesota and West Africa over the last two years. Playing with printmaking, photography, and soil, Lindquist creates tension between obfuscating and divulging images of place and people–her depictions, a negotiation between considering others’ desires and her own.

STEPHANIE A. LINDQUIST

ZOE CINEL (SHE/THEY)

Zoe Cinel (@zcinel) a Curator and Interdisciplinary Artist from a Mediterranean culture. Through art she builds community around human experiences that are isolating and complex to navigate, such as immigration and chronic pain. Starting from a personal journey as a migrant and a patient, she collaborates with other artists and community members to produce social change.

ZOE CINEL

CONSTANZA CARBALLO (SHE/HER)

Constanza Carballo is best known for turning acrylic paintings as well as murals into voice pieces that highlight the marginalized. Inspired by her own bicultural and bilingual upbringing as an immigrant in the south Minneapolis Philips community, Constanza began painting murals at the age of 13 and has since been recognized as a statement maker. Her art, a form of community activism, has travelled through Latin America, Europe, and throughout the U.S. Here in Minnesota, she has brought fellow women artists together internationally and locally through large scale community events to celebrate International Women’s Day and specifically bringing attention to the inequalities women face in all sectors of society including economic, political, workforce, healthcare, and education. Her most recent physical art series; the Monarchildren, gives specific importance to the ongoing crisis at the border, where migrant families are separated, and children are in cages. The series depicts real images of children facing these tragedies as monarchs, while telling the story of actual monarchs who travel every year during their famous migration. The idea is simple, yet forgotten; in(migración) es natural; im(migration) is natural.

GALILEE PEACHES (SHE/HER)

Galilee Peaches is an interdisciplinary artist who studies the dynamics of intimacy and how it shapes our environment. Through drawing, painting, sculpture and poetry she reflects on the tenderness of the body as it moves through time and space. She explores acts of retrieval, disruption and amendment, making images and poems that depict movement or transferal. In sculpture she creates artifacts out of clay, plaster and paper and documents them on film to create elements of history and fiction within her practice. In 2020, she had her first solo show at Fogstand Gallery & Studio in Taiwan and finished an artist residency at the Grand Marais Artist Colony. She received her BFA in Studio Art from the University of Wisconsin-Stout in 2018 and is based in Minneapolis, MN.

GALILEE PEACHES

MARY JANE MANSFIELD (SHE/HER)

Mary Jane Mansfield is an Icelandic-American artist, mother and public art manager living and working in the Twin Cities. Her world is one of creative drawing and sculptural explorations with water and electricity. Whimsical, lighthearted and sometimes serious reflections on family, life, love, desire and dreams are at the heart of it all. Currently she is exploring visual composition, and contemplation surrounding origins of trauma, the transfer of energy and the illusion of space between us. Sound and vibration are critical elements in this work as they mirror the ripple effects of trauma as it moves from the shelter of home to violence in the community. The research portion of this new work lies in pairing her historical practice of utilizing water and electricity with magnetohydrodynamics.

MARY JANE MANSFIELD

ROSHAN GANU (SHE/HER)

Roshan Ganu is a multimedia storyteller and comic artist originally from Goa-India, now based in Minneapolis. She has conceptualised and art directed stories for the Minneapolis Institute of Art and the Minnesota Opera, as a part of the MNiatures cohort of 2020-2021. Ganu is also an awardee of the Next Step Fund Grant 2021 by MRAC, as well as the Artists Respond: Combating Social Isolation grant by Springboard For The Arts, through which she co-founded ‘Aapli Library’, a zine space for community and conversation in Minneapolis. As a comic artist she has taught comic making workshops with a focus on personal narratives at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, Socially Engaged Craft Collective, KCLAS in Coimbatore-India and at Aapli Library. Her work has been recognised by the Star Tribune, MinnPost, MPLSArt and SOTA podcast and has been exhibited at galleries such as Soo Visual Arts Center, Artistry-Bloomington, ArtReach St.Croix, among others.

ROSHAN GANU

Formerly of Louisville, Kentucky, Angela St. Vrain received her BFA in Sculpture from the University of Louisville. Currently residing in Minneapolis, Minnesota, St. Vrain works as a landscaper with experience in carpentry and construction, trades that greatly influence the material choices in her work. Having participated in the demolition and building processes of both indoor and outdoor spaces, St. Vrain is intrigued by the poetry of the in-between space. Imagery of roofless structures, doorways and property lines are vehicles for transition. St. Vrain is further inspired by the homes in which she has lived along with the financial, physical and emotional burdens of the moving process.