Curated by Chris Larson and Maria Cristina Tavera, THIRTY THREE VIEWS PLUS TWO is an exhibition of artworks reflecting the vision, energy, and talent of 33 Twin Cities based women and non-binary contemporary artists. On view at the old Swedish Bank Building, as well as in four other locations across Payne Avenue, the exhibit is organized as external programming of the Second Shift Studio Space.
Work by thirty artists will occupy the entire third floor (5000 sq ft) of the vacant Swedish Bank Building at 965 Payne Avenue, Saint Paul. Additionally, a piece by Nooshin Hakim Javidi will be installed in the basement of the vacant furniture building next to the Swedish Bank, and work by Alexa Horochowski will be on view through the front window of Second Shift Studio Space (1128 Payne Avenue). Jon Oulman Gallery, at 1106 Payne Avenue, will house a video installation by multi-media artist Holly Streekstra, titled Spectral Response. Next door, at 1108 Payne Avenue, we will feature work from photographer Jovan Speller and sculptor Erika Terwilliger.
Reception: April 27, Saturday 7-10pm. Hours: Friday April 26 (6–10 pm), Saturday April 27 (12–10 pm), and Sunday April 28 (12–5pm) and visits available on other days by appointment. Performances: Ellen Mueller will perform with Charles Campbell on Friday April 26 (7pm); with Laura Levinson on Saturday April 27 (7:30pm); and with Kaya Lovestrand on Sunday April 28 (12:30pm).
Thirty Three Views Plus Two includes work by Lamia Abukhadra, Silvana Agostoni, Katayoun Amjadi, Rachel Breen, Julie Buffalohead, Sayge Carroll, María José Castillo, Rebekah Crisanta de Ybarra, Candice Davis, Martha Gabriela Driessen, Mara Duvra, Lauren Flynn, Tia-Simone Gardner, Ruthann Godollei, Nooshin Hakim Javidi, Pao Houa Her, Elizabeth Breck Hickman, Alexa Horochowski, Essma Imady, Prerna Jambunathan, Sarah Kusa, Anne Labovitz, Heather Lamanno, Gudrun Lock, Alanah Luger-Guillaume, Paula McCartney, Ellen Mueller, Jenny Schmid, Jovan Speller, Sarah Katherine Stengle, Holly Streekstra, Angela St. Vrain, Erika Terwilliger, Melissa Vang, and Koua Yang (installation in collaboration with Laichee Yang). Read more about the participating artists below.
Lamia Abukhadra
Lamia Abukhadra is a Palestinian American artist based in Minneapolis. Abukhadra’s interdisciplinary research-based practice challenges harmful dominant narratives which perpetuate the settler colonial imagination as well as acts of violence and ethnic cleansing in Palestine and its diasporic spaces. Abukhadra graduated Summa Cum Laude from the University of Minnesota with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in interdisciplinary studio art in 2018. Her work has been exhibited at Waiting Room, the Quarter Gallery, Soo Visual Arts Center, Yeah Maybe, and the Katherine E. Nash Gallery in Minneapolis and in Chicago at Unpacked Mobile Gallery. Abukhadra is a 2018-2019 Jerome Emerging Printmaking Resident at Highpoint Center for Printmaking. Notable projects include The Wall, a temporary public art installation supported by the Soap Factory’s Rethinking Public Spaces program in 2017. lamiaabukhadra.com
Katayoun Amjadi
Katayoun Amjadi was born in Tehran, Iran and resides in Minneapolis. Her studio is in the Q.arma building in Northeast Arts District. She is interested in blurring the boundaries which shape our perceptions of Self and Other, such as religion, gender, politics and nationalist ideologies to create a balanced hybrid style in reconstructing a new hyphenated identity as an Iranian-American. Currently she is a TA and MFA candidate at the University of Minnesota. Previously, an Assistant to the Gallery Director at the Circa Gallery and Curatorial Intern for the Department of Contemporary Art at Mia. She has been exhibited nationally and internationally, including Minnesota Museum of American Arts, Rochester Art Center, Instinct Art Gallery, Weisman Art Museum, Soap Factory, Beijing Film Academy and 7Samar Gallery in Tehran. Amjadi received her BFA in Studio Arts from the U of M in 2013. She is a recipient of an Artist Initiative Grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board (2015, 2019). katayoun.com
Julie Buffalohead
Julie Buffalohead lives and works in St. Paul. She is an enrolled member of the Ponca Tribe of Oklahoma. Her work focuses thematically upon describing Indian cultural experience through personal metaphor and narrative. The iconography draws from a cast of characters from Native stories, such as raven, coyote and deer and is often a critique of the simulacrum of the Old West, and of the prejudicial commercialization of Native culture. She has exhibited nationally and internationally. Solo exhibitions include: Carleton College, St. Thomas University, St. Johns University, Bockley Gallery in Minneapolis, The Plains Art Museum, and Minnesota Museum of American Art. She received her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design in 1995 and her Master of Fine Arts from Cornell University in 2001. She is a recipient of the Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and Sculptors Grant, Jerome Travel and Study Grant, McKnight Foundation Fellowship, Fellowship and Minnesota State Arts Board. She most recently was awarded the prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship. She is represented by the Blockley Gallery. bockleygallery.com/artist_buffalohead
María José Castillo
Currently living in Minneapolis, Colombian artist and graphic designer, María José Castillo focuses on printmaking, lettering, publication design, illustration and installation pieces. Castillo cultivates an art practice that feeds off their curiosity with language and communication. Their conceptual approach incorporates the analysis of cultural background related to the way we read the written word, not only as a functional element in a discourse, but also as an object existing in a spatial field. Castillo’s work is heavy on formal exploration of type and shapes, analyzing how elements such as readability, coding, and context affect the way a message is read. wordsareobjects.com
Candice Davis
Candice Davis is a conceptual artist from San Antonio, Texas and working in Minneapolis. Through primarily digital media, installation, and performance, Davis' work focuses on engaging audiences with social issues. Davis prioritizes the use of art as a dialogic and accessible means of distributing social and political ideology. Many of her pieces examine the identity struggles of marginalized groups, with specific emphasis on her experience as a Black woman in the United States of America. Her practice is reliant on research and examination of the past as a framework for critiquing the present. In the exhibited work, Davis uses modified agricultural tools to witness parallels in violence towards Black bodies. Davis also considers how her blood can be imagined as a lotteried amalgamation of all the blood of her ancestors. With this consideration Davis uses her blood as a proxy for the blood of her enslaved ancestors, to dye a collection of cotton items dating from the civil war period and earlier. Her work often poses questions about social relationships or emphasizes curious situations. Davis is a 2018 MCAD Merit Scholarship Winner. mcad.edu/features
Mara Duvra
Mara Duvra is from Maryland and resides in the Twin Cities. She is a visual artist and writer. Her research-based practice combines photography, poetry, and video to create installations that explore stillness and interiority as critical modes of self-study. Duvra’s current body of work, Tending: meditations on interiority and blackness, uses poetic and ephemeral imagery to understand Blackness beyond resistance or public identity. Duvra received a BA in Studio Art and Psychology from the University of Maryland, College Park, and an MFA in Studio Art from the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. Duvra is currently a Jerome Emerging Artist Fellow, a curator at the Waiting Room, and an instructor of painting, drawing, and printmaking at Saint Paul Academy and Summit School. maraduvra.com
Tia-Simone Gardner
Tia-Simone Gardner she resides in Minneapolis but her creative and scholarly practice are grounded in her relationship to the South, specifically Alabama where she grew up. Gardner is interested interdisciplinary strategies and to engage ideas of ritual, iconoclasm, and geography. She is an artist, educator, and Black feminist scholar. In 2009 she received her MFA in Interdisciplinary Practices and Time-Based Media from the University of Pennsylvania. She recently received her Ph.D. in Feminist Studies from the Department Gender Women's and Sexuality Studies at the University of Minnesota. She has exhibited extensively nationally and received numerous grants and awards including the McKnight Visual Artist Fellowship. Artist residencies include: A Studio in the Woods, New Orleans, LA 2018; Brandywine Workshop, Philadelphia, PA, 2012; IASPIS, Stockholm, Sweden; 2011; and the Cynthia Woods Mitchell Visiting Artist Fellowship in Houston, TX. tiasimonegardner.info
Nooshin Hakim Javadi
Nooshin Hakim Javadi is a sculpture and performance artist from Qazvin, Iran, currently teaching art and residing in Minneapolis. Javadi uses objects as markers of time and place, providing context for the political and social present. Life is the aggregation of all moments of desires—an installation of two identical airplane wings, one suspended and one shredded—was a conscious response to ongoing policies surrounding U.S. immigration. The suspended wing bears markings of numerous flights, once moving easily from place to place. Beneath it lies a pile of metal shavings —the remnants of its twin. Hakim has shown nationally and internationally in Iran, Germany and the United States. She had exhibitions at the Museum fur Neue Kunst, Freiburg, Germany- Open Museum Night (Muka Night), Karlsruhe- kunstverein-grafschaft-bentheim in Germany and Kunstausstellung in Schwarzwald, M Museum, and Grounds for Sculpture. She is the recipient of an Outstanding Student Achievement in Contemporary Sculpture award from Sculpture magazine and a Franconia Jerome fellowship. She is currently artist fellow at the Weisman Museum of Art. nooshinhakimart.com
Elizabeth Breck Hickman
Elizabeth Breck Hickman is from Elk River, Minnesota and currently resides in Minneapolis. She is an interdisciplinary artist with a focus on painting. Her current work aims to reclaim the social narrative put onto trans women through the representation of herself and the spaces she inhabits. She received her BFA from the University of Minnesota in 2018. She has been exhibited in a variety of spaces around Minnesota. Her work has been shown at Hair and Nails, Rochester Art Center, Red Garage, the Larson Gallery, the Nash Gallery, and the University of Minnesota’s Gender and Sexuality Center. breckhickman.weebly.com
Essma Imady
Essma Imady grew up in Damascus, Syria, and was dislocated to Minnesota in 2011. She is an installation and film artist based in the Twin Cities. Her practice addresses the political aspects of the personal, the formation of identities, and the complicated relation between vision and knowledge. Her most recent exhibits include the Minnesota Artist Exhibition Program (MAEP) at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts (Mia) and curating a performance night at the Walker. new.artsmia.org/exhibition
Sarah Kusa
Sarah Kusa lives and works in Saint Paul. She creates sculpture and installations that explore tensions between vulnerability and power, searching out intersections where the two coexist, however precariously. Her mixed-media artworks are rooted in abstraction and use a spare material language to ask questions about connection, protection and resilience. Ephemeral in nature, Kusa’s work takes forms ranging from abstract bodies to three-dimensional drawings to pliable boundaries that interact with the viewer’s own body. Kusa has exhibited her work throughout the United States and was awarded a 2017/2018 Jerome Foundation Fellowship for Emerging Artists. She received a Jerome Foundation project grant in 2015 and the McKnight Next Step Fund in 2012. Kusa has participated in residencies at MASS MoCA (Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art) and Ragdale (Illinois). sarahkusa.com
Heather Lamanno
Heather Lamanno currently resides in North Minneapolis with husband and fellow artist Daniel Lough, and their family. She is an interdisciplinary artist who explores personal and cultural narratives within imaginary psychological spaces. Within her practice, she creates paintings and installations that depict construction sites that exist in an abstract and temporal space in-between the gap of proposal and completion. Lamanno received her BFA in Painting at the Kansas City Art Institute, and is currently completing her MFA from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. She has exhibited her work in numerous solo and group exhibitions throughout the country, and has participated is many residencies and fellowships, including the Urban Culture Project Studio Residency program in Kansas City. heatherlamanno.com
Alanah Luger-Guillaume
Originally from Waterbury, Connecticut, Alanah Luger-Guillaume is a Minneapolis-based painter. Her practice is focused on the interplay and layering of color, patterns, and shapes. In her paintings she builds up the surface slowly depending on each mark to inform the next. She enjoys the challenge of making something abstract using very little from reality to guide her decision-making. Alanah Luger-Guillaume co-founded The White Page gallery, studio, and residency program in 2013. Running a space for and with other artists has been a source of inspiration in her own work. Luger-Guillaume attended Alfred University where she graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in 2010. Luger-Guillaume has shown her work at multiple artist-run spaces such as Tuck Under Projects, Yeah Maybe, and The Front (New Orleans). mnartists.org/alanah-luger-guillaume
Paula McCartney
Paula McCartney was born in Pennsylvania and resides in Minneapolis. She makes photographs, books and ceramics that explore way that people interact with and manipulate the natural world. McCartney earned an M.F.A. in Photography from the San Francisco Art Institute and has received grants from the Aaron Siskind Foundation, the Minnesota State Arts Board and the McKnight Foundation. Her work has been exhibited across the US and is included in numerous public collections including the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Minneapolis Institute of Art, and the artist book collections at the Museum of Modern Art and the Walker Art Center. Her work has recently been exhibited at Soo Visual Art Center and the Minnesota Center for Book Arts. paulamccartney.com
Jenny Schmid
Jenny Schmid lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota where she runs bikini press international and is a Professor at the University of Minnesota Department of Art. Her work explores ideas of gender, identity and liberty, drawing from the tradition of social commentary while creating a decidedly contemporary and humorous take on the question of how identities are constructed (and destructed). She is represented by The Davidson Galleries in Seattle and is in collections including: The Minneapolis Institute of Arts, The Detroit Institute of Arts, The Block Museum, The Spencer Art Museum and the Library of Congress. Awards include: Fulbright Fellowship to Slovakia, the McKnight Fellowship, the Bush Artists Grant, a Jerome Film and Video grant and Minnesota State Arts Board grants. Recent projects include live animation performances with Ali Momeni for the Vertice Festival in Mexico City and for the Nobel Peace Prize Forum at Augsburg University as well as a residency at The Frans Masereel Center in Belgium. jennyschmid.com
Sarah Stengle
Sarah Stengle is an artist from Pennsylvania and resides in Saint Paul. She makes books, sculptures and drawings utilizing a wide range of material. Her work is intimate in scale and refers to ordinary, familiar objects and images, transformed through the intervention of her artistic vision. Familiar objects are augmented either by being used as a substrate for her artwork, or be being treated as symbols rather than artifacts. Her work is included in the collections of the Brooklyn Museum, The Doro Boehme Collection at the Art Institute of Chicago, the Perpont Morgan Library, the Beineke Rare Booke Collection at Yale University, the Brittish National Libaray and the Fogg Museum of Art at Harvard. sarahstengle.com
Angela St. Vrain
Originally from Louisville, Kentucky, Angela St. Vrain is currently residing in Minneapolis. St. Vrain works as a landscaper and has also worked in 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, she is intrigued by poetry of in-between spaces. 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 and the financial, physical and emotional burdens of the moving process. She received her BFA in Sculpture from the University of Louisville in 2016. angelastvrain.com
Kazua Melissa Vang
Kazua Melissa Vang is a Hmong American visual artist, filmmaker, photographer, teaching artists, production manager, and producer based in Saint Paul. Her current photography project is taking portraits of Hmong refrigerators and freezers. Vang is currently a lead artist as well as a teaching artist for In Progress. Her most two most recent photography works were showcased at In Progress under the exhibit, “NEXUS: Honoring the Self-Taught Photographic Artist” (2016), and “Hmong Tattoo,”(2017). From her collection “F R I D G E S,” was featured in the exhibit, “Foodway”(Summer 2018) at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design and in “Sib Pauv Zog” (Fall 2018) at the Hennepin Government Center. She has stage managed for Hmong-Lao/Lao-Hmong Friendship Play with Lazy Hmong Woman Productions and is currently producing Hmong Organization, a comedic web series with writer, May Lee-Yang and Peter Yang, and director, Kang Vang. She received the Forecast Public Art Early-Career Project grant and is currently developing a short experimental and narrative film as a writer/director. in-progress.org/vang-kazua-melissa
Silvana Agostoni
Silvana Agostoni is a visual artist working in Minneapolis and Mexico City. Her work addresses issues of the body as physical geography, identity and landscape. She is particularly interested in photography as the starting point from which to dialogue with other forms of representation such as abstraction and installation. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally at venues including Houston Center for Photography, Museo del Barrio, New York City, Centro de la Imagen, Mexico City, Circulo de Bellas Artes, Madrid, Spain; Centro Fotográfico Alvarez Bravo, Oaxaca, Mexico. She is a six time recipient of grants by the National Fund for Culture and the Arts in Mexico and has been awarded residencies at venues such as Banff Centre for the Arts in Alberta, Canada. Silvana holds an MFA in Photography, Video and Related Media from the School of Visual Arts in New York. agostoni.art
Rachel Breen
Rachel Breen was born and raised in Minnesota. Her ancestors are from Poland, Lithuania and Belarus. Her artwork is a material meditation on our relationship with the people who make the clothes we wear. Rachel is a professor of fine art at Anoka Ramsey Community College. Prior she worked as a community organizer for social justice organizations and political campaigns across the country and is a co-founder of Jewish Community Action in Minnesota. These experiences influence the process and content of her art today. Breen’s social engagement projects have been presented across the state and twice been a part of Northern Spark, an all-night public art festival addressing climate change. She has exhibited her work nationally. She is an inaugural recipient of the Jerome Hill Artist Fellowship, has received several Minnesota State Arts Board grants, a fellowship from the Walker Art Center Open Field and an artist residency at the Virginia Center for Creative Arts. Breen holds an MFA from the University of Minnesota and received her BA from The Evergreen State College. rachelbreenart.com
Sayge Carroll
Sayge Carroll was born, raised and now has a studio in south Minneapolis. She is passionate about arts engagement and art as a social practice. Her art is focused on Radical Healing: a process of unlearning the internalized ideas that keep us from imagining new possibilities and a means to unlock these issues. The last decade has seen Carroll making creative space, as a working artist. Currently Carroll is developing the Ceramic department at Juxtaposition Arts. Carroll holds an annual Harvest Feast at her south Minneapolis studio and, also founded Women of Color Artist Gathering, Art Church, and the Workshop. She holds a BA in Fine Art from the UMN and is an MFA Candidate at UMN in Minneapolis. As an artist, Carroll has held residencies, given lectures, curated shows and received grants.
Rebekah Crisanta de Ybarra
Rebekah Crisanta de Ybarra (enrolled Maya-Lenca, b. Tomah, WI) is an Indigenous-Salvadoran-Norwegian-American contemporary artist and musician whose work seeks to shift consciousness around immigration, borders, exodus and interconnectedness of Indigenous Peoples of the Americas. Her antidisciplinary social practice (music, visual art, theatre, movement) places emphasis on Latinx/Indigenous folk art methods, experimental performance, and Liberation Theology. She writes and performs bilingual music under the pseudonym Lady Xøk, recording with Electric Machete Studios, a Twin Cities Latinx Art and Music production house. Current projects include a music album made possible, in part, by funds provided by the Metropolitan Regional Arts Council (MRAC) through a grant from The McKnight Foundation, a Minnesota Center for Book Arts Jerome Mentorship to foster her ongoing public art project, The Mayan Calendar Project, and Red Eye Theatre’s New Works 4 Weeks Festival cohort for experimental performance artists. rebekahcrisanta.com
Martha Gabriela Driessen
Martha Gabriela Driessen was born and raised in Mexico City and has lived in the United States half of her life. She lives and works in Minneapolis. Bilingual and bicultural, Driessen has maintained deep roots in her native Mexico and strong ties with her people. The series, A Mexican Portrait, is an ongoing project that explores the identity and idiosyncrasies of her fellow-Mexicans on both sides of the border. Today she photographs everyday life on the streets around the world often under the mentorship of Magnum photographer, Nikos Economopoulos. She is also an active member in Tom Arndt’s F-Stop Group. Driessen has participated in juried shows and solo exhibitions and recently exhibited in Singapore. Her work is in private collections as well as in the permanent collections such as the Minnesota History Center and the National Museum of Mexican Art in Chicago. marthadriessen.com
Lauren Flynn
Lauren Flynn is a visual artist based in the Twin Cities. She studied math and studio art at Grinnell College, and this duality continues to inform her work and thoughts. Flynn’s work comes about through the creation of structures which make room for and are transformed by play and coincidence. Currently, she is working on a series of mobiles in which disparate objects temporarily coexist and support one another. She is a co-director of Yeah Maybe Gallery in Minneapolis and an MFA Candidate at the University of Minnesota. Flynn’s work has been exhibited locally at the White Page Gallery, Highpoint Center for Printmaking, and Tuckunder Projects, and nationally at Yes Ma’am Projects in Denver, Colorado, the DeVos Art Museum in Marquette, Michigan and Basement Projects in Santa Ana, California.
Ruthann Godollei
Ruthann Godollei is the Fulbright Canada Spring 2019 Research Chair at the University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada. She is also Wallace Professor of Art at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota. The assemblage of door knockers refers to concepts of access and entrée. Her social commentary work has been exhibited nationally and internationally in shows such as Multiple Ones: Contemporary Perspectives in Printmedia, Hunterdon Art Museum, Clinton, NJ (2018); Pacific States Biennial Juried Printmaking Exhibition, University of Hawai’i at Hilo (2018); Printwork, a survey of contemporary printmaking, AIR Gallery, Pittsburgh, PA (2017); Political/Poetical, the 14th International Print Triennial, Tallinn, Estonia; and the 9th Biennale internationale d’estampe contemporaine de Trois-Rivières, Québec, Canada (2015). She has been a seven-time resident artist at the Frans Masereel Centrum for printmaking in Belgium. She is the author of a DIY printmaking book, "How to Create Your Own ... " (Voyageur Press). macalester.edu/art/facultystaff/ruthanngodollei
Pao Houa Her
Pao Houa Her was born in 1982 in Laos, and was raised in Saint Paul. She currently lives in Blaine, a suburb of the Twin Cities. Her’s work has fluidly between many different photographic genres largely but has focused on documentary photography, studio portraiture, and still life. Many works reflect Her’s interest in photo manipulation and the idea of the constructed image. In 2012, she received a MFA in Photography from the Yale University School of Art, New Haven, CT and in 2009 a BFA in Photography from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. Her is a 2016–2017 recipient of a McKnight Foundation Visual Artist Fellowship. In 2013, she received a Jerome Foundation Fellowship for Emerging Artists, and in 2009, 2012 and 2018; Her was awarded Initiative Grants from the Minnesota State Arts Board. She is represented by the Blockley Gallery. bockleygallery.com/artist_her
Alexa Horochowski
Alexa Horochowski is a dual citizen of Argentina and the United States. Her art practice includes sculpture, photography and video. Artist residencies in Chile – at MAM, Chiloé (2017), and CASAPOLI, Coliúmo (2013) – significantly impacted her material and geopolitical research into the interrelationship between the environment and humankind. Horochowski holds a Master of Fine Arts from the University of Michigan, and a Bachelor of Art and Journalism from the University of Missouri. She has exhibited nationally and internationally, at venues such as, the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; The Drawing Center, NYC; Braga Menéndez Gallery, Buenos Aires; Diverseworks, Houston; Minneapolis Institute of Arts, MN; The Soap Factory, Minneapolis, MN. Selected fellowships include an Efroymson Artist Fellowship (2018), a McKnight Visual Artist Fellowship (2014/2003), an Artist Inititative Grant (2014/2012), and a Bush Artist Fellowship (2004). Horochowski is sculpture professor at Saint Cloud State University, St. Cloud, MN. alexahorochowski.com
Prerna Jambunathan
Prerna is a multidisciplinary artist born in Mumbai and currently based out of Minneapolis. She moved to Minnesota to study art and completed her BFA at the University of Minnesota in 2018. She is interested in the idea of returning her work back to the “place it belongs” and critiquing the norms of making and presenting in an institutional setting. The video consists of selected questions, from 16 forms on the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services website, that reframe and re-present the blunt and crudely asked questions of micro-aggresive systems that force self-categorization. She plays on the idea of “filling out a form” by laser etching into drywall and using spackle to answer the prompts- redacting, erasing, and in a sense finishing the wall by refilling the surface. She was recently awarded a solo show at SooVAC (Minneapolis). prernaunknown.com
Anne Labovitz
Anne Labovitz is an American artist, whose practice includes painting, drawing, and printmaking as well as film and sound. Central to her work is an enduring interest in people—the human spirit, its emotional resonance, and the way it manifests in relationships. Labovitz led the project 122 Conversations: Person to Person, Art Beyond Borders a cultural, social engaged collaboration: working with more than 4500 people to co-create over 500 works. Labovitz’s key works from the project were exhibited in Canada, Iraqi Kurdistan, Sweden, Russia, Japan and Duluth. Receiving an MFA in Creative Practice in 2017 (Trans-Art Institute: Berlin, New York), Labovitz has further expanded her praxis to include audience and public interventions, and incorporates the use of textual elements derived from this engagement. Labovitz’s current initiative is the I Love You Institute, an artist-led, site-specific project that combines art-making, social justice and radical kindness as an alternative to division and conflict. labovitz.com
Gudrun Lock
Gudrun Lock is a Minneapolis based artist originally from Montreal, Canada. Her work reflects materialist practices where she uses the detritus of culture in response to dwindling resources and overextended landfills. Beauty, humor, and the abject reoccur as themes in her work which has been shown in galleries in the US and Canada. Lock has also installed projects in foreclosed homes, storefronts, bars, a houseboat, and a soon-to-be-demolished apartment building as well as in Union Square Park, the Atlantic Ocean, and a hole in her backyard. She received her MFA from the University of Minnesota in 2007 and has taught in their Time and Interactivity department, as well as at Macalester College. She currently teaches at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design and is a member of the Minneapolis-based Studio North. gudrunlock.com
Ellen Mueller
Ellen Mueller is a Twin Cities based interdisciplinary artist exploring issues related to the environment, hyperactive news media and corporate management systems. She creates experiences that engage with social and political issues through a variety of media. She has exhibited nationally and internationally as an interdisciplinary artist exploring issues related to the environment, hyperactive news media and corporate management systems. She received her MFA from University of South Florida and is currently the Director of the MFA Program at Minneapolis College of Art and Design. Selected artist residencies include Ox-Bow, Ucross Foundation, Nes Artist Residency (Iceland), VCCA, Signal Culture, Playa, Bunker Projects, and Künstlerhaus Lukas (Germany). Mueller has also published Elements and Principles of 4D Art and Design with Oxford University Press, and Remixing and Drawing: Sources, Influence, Styles with Routledge. ellenmueller.com
Jovan Speller
Jovan C. Speller is a Minnesota based artist and curator, originally from Los Angeles, CA. Her creative practice is influenced by women, childhood, and the land. It explores the juxtaposition of beauty and deterioration, and the beauty of deterioration. As a result, her artistic practice has a meditative quality. Her photographs are an effort at unity between personal reconciliation and global observations. Speller holds a BFA in photography from Columbia College Chicago, and studied art at Maryland Institute College of Art. She is a recipient of the 2018 McKnight Visual Artist Fellowship, a 2018 Next Step Fund Grant, and a 2016/2017 Jerome Emerging Artist Fellow. Replace Home surveys plots of land in Winsdor, North Carolina – sites of ancestral memory. The fields where the Speller and Smallwood slaves labored and then lived, had and then lost. This series captures what remains of this land, its legacy and its descendants, while attempting to contain the inherent generational trauma that inhabits these grounds. jovanspeller.com
Holly Streekstra
Holly Streekstra is a sculptor and installation artist who employs multiple modes and forms of expression. Coupled with a background in theater, music, and dance, her work has explored perception and make-belief to investigate our inner subjective states and psychic vulnerability in the contemporary world. She is especially interested in the willing suspension of disbelief and our capacity for doubt. Shot with an infrared camera and a captivating young circus student, Steekstra’s film, Spectral Response explores the psychology embodied by the spaces within a three story house. Her work has been shown at SooVAC, Minnesota Museum of American Art, and Franconia Sculpture Park, in Minnesota; the Invisible Dog, Brooklyn; and the Good Children Gallery, New Orleans. She was a 2016 Jerome Emerging Artist Fellow. In 2013, she was a Fulbright Scholar in Hungary. She holds a BFA from the University of Minnesota Twin Cities, and an MFA from Louisiana State University. hollystreekstra.com
Erika Terwilliger
Erika Terwilliger born in Eau Claire Wisconsin but now resides in Minneapolis. She works primarily in ceramics and fibers to craft multi-work installations that investigate domestic collections as sites for rotation, stagnation and protection. Her work relies on time and labor intensive making processes to explore relationships between the human and the natural, the organic and the inorganic. Born and raised in Eau Claire Wisconsin Terwilliger is influenced by a childhood spent planting, harvesting, and preserving produce from her family’s large garden. She attended St. Olaf College and received her B.A. in studio art with distinction in May of 2016. She took part in St. Olaf’s 5th year emerging artist program and is currently pursuing her MFA at the University of Minnesota. During the summer of 2018 Terwilliger received a grant for a residency at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design to research fiber practices in Scotland. At the end of the residency she exhibited work completed over the summer at Duncan of Jordanstone’s Master’s Show. erikaterwilliger.com
Koua Mai Yang
Kuab Maiv Yaj, Koua Mai Yang (she/her/hers) is a Hmong American female artist based in Saint Paul, exploring identity in her studio art practice. The heart of her work is to hold space for the possibilities of addressing the legacy of statelessness, wars, invisibility, and the layers of oppression in Hmong female experiences. She is currently a MFA candidate at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities. This installation is a collaborative installation with Laichee Yang (she/her/hers), a multidisciplinary artist, designer, and dancer who lives and works in St Paul, Mni Sota Makoce. Her home/studio practice involves the utilization of materials from mundane routines that happen within the daily processes of maintaining one's body and livelihood. Laichee’s exploration of shifting the boundaries between home and studio is embedded in deepening her connections to her ancestral art making and culture bearing practices. kouamyang.com