Sydney Acosta, Artist • Groundwork

Sydney Acosta (b. 1987, San Antonio, TX) received her M.F.A. in painting and drawing from UCLA in 2021 and her B.A. from Sacramento State University in 2015. She has exhibited her work at the CASTLE gallery (2022), Onsen Confidential with Kristina Kite gallery hosted by Aoyama Meguro in Tokyo (2022), Root Division in San Francisco (2021), and Axis gallery in Sacramento (2019). She has been supported by the MacDowell Fellowship and residency, the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation, the LA Lakers emerging artist grant and the American Austrian Foundation. She has upcoming exhibitions at Human Resources Los Angeles, Michael Benevento gallery, Kristina Kite gallery, and DREAMSONG. She lives and works in Los Angeles.

Location: Dreamsong

Project: Groundwork, presented by Dreamsong, is a group exhibition that takes terra firma as both subject and medium. A signifier of place, territory, and identity, a wellspring of life-giving nutrients, and a site of conflict over land-based indigenous rights and environmental protection, soil offers a rich prism through which the present may be both imagined and imaged. Through excavating diverse histories in artworks that take the ground as subject and material, the exhibition aims to encourage discussion about its preservation, its meaning, the claims that are made to it, and the sustenance, both spiritual and physical, that we derive from it. 

All My Relations Native Writers Group • Green Roof Poetry on the Walker Hillside

Location: Walker Art Center

Drew Arrieta, Artist • It’s the People

Drew Arrieta is a visual storyteller and artist whose work tells stories about resistance, reimagining our world and the magic of joy. His work shines a spotlight on people and their resilience. Photography is his primary medium because of its willingness to reveal truths and bare witness, making it the perfect medium to demonstrate humanity’s adaptability and strength.

Location: Hennepin Theatre District

Project: Hennepin Theatre Trust’s 2023-24 edition of It’s the People features large-scale photo banners along Hennepin Avenue in downtown Minneapolis. This public art initiative is inspired by the exceptional, everyday people whose experiences, contributions and stories create the unique vibrancy of our shared communities.

Larraja Austin, Artist • Flower Power VII

Location: Mounds Park

Teresa Baker, Artist • Groundwork

Teresa Baker (Mandan/Hidatsa, b.1985) currently lives and works in Los Angeles, CA. Through a mixed media practice combining artificial and natural materials together, Baker creates abstracted landscapes that explore vast space, and how we move, see and explore within them. The materials, texture, shapes, and color relationships are guided by Baker's Mandan/Hidatsa culture to explore how identity can relate to innate objects. Baker has had recent solo exhibitions at de boer, Los Angeles, Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, Scottsdale, AZ; Pied-à-terre, San Francisco; Interface Gallery, Oakland; and The Art Museum of Southeast Texas, Beaumont, TX. Recent group exhibitions include Ballroom Marfa, Marfa, TX, Nerman Museum, Kansas City, KS, and Marin MOCA, Marin, CA. Baker is a 2022 Joan Mitchell Fellow, and was an artist-in-residence at Fogo Island Arts in Newfoundland in 2022. Baker was the 2020 Native American fellow at the Ucross Foundation in Ucross, WY, and has been an artist-in-residence at MacDowell in Peterborough, NH, and a Tournesol Award artist-in-residence at Headlands Center for the Arts, Sausalito, CA. Her work is in the public collections of Whitney Museum of American Art, Portland Museum of Art, and Forge Project, among others. Baker received her B.A. from Fordham University, and MFA from California College of the Arts.

Location: Dreamsong

Project: Groundwork, presented by Dreamsong, is a group exhibition that takes terra firma as both subject and medium. A signifier of place, territory, and identity, a wellspring of life-giving nutrients, and a site of conflict over land-based indigenous rights and environmental protection, soil offers a rich prism through which the present may be both imagined and imaged. Through excavating diverse histories in artworks that take the ground as subject and material, the exhibition aims to encourage discussion about its preservation, its meaning, the claims that are made to it, and the sustenance, both spiritual and physical, that we derive from it.

Alisa Banks, Artist • Paper Is People: Decolonizing Global Paper Cultures

Alisa Banks (she/her) is a visual artist based in Dallas, Texas who investigates connections to contemporary culture, her Creole heritage, and the African diaspora through the lenses of home, terrain, and the body, using Southern Louisiana as a point of entry. Her sculptural artist books, mixed media work, and textile collages, often incorporate fibers and found materials and reference traditional craft forms. Alisa’s work has been exhibited in internationally, and is housed in private and public collections, including the Smithsonian Institution, the US Library of Congress, and The British Library.

Location: Minnesota Center for Book Arts

Project: Paper Is People: Decolonizing Global Paper Cultures, co-curated by Tia Blassingame and Stephanie Sauer, offers a new definition of paper within a global and decolonial framework, opening up a conversation around what paper is across cultures today. In the Indigenous and oral cultures represented here, weavings, tapestries, and other handmade substrates act as vessels and embodiments of collective culture and memory. See paper samples and source materials, watch papermaking processes from source to finish, read interviews and watch videos from traditional practitioners, experience how contemporary artists are finding new applications for ancient technologies, and participate in a variety of workshops and talks. Join us at mnbookarts.org/paper-is-people

Leslie Barlow, Artist • Group Exhibition at Public Functionary

Location: Public Functionary

Moria Bateman, Artist • Groundwork

Moira Bateman creates assemblages from silk, stained with waterway sediments. Her chosen fabrics are soaked for days, months, and even years in the waters, mud, and sediments of rivers, lakes, and bogs of Minnesota. Past collaborative projects with authors, poets, theater makers, and scientists have monitored and documented the conditions of Minnesota’s watersheds. Bateman’s work has been exhibited across the region including the Minnesota Museum of American Art, the Science Museum of Minnesota, and the Minnesota Marine Art Museum in Winona. By Way of Water was presented as a solo installation at the Bowery Gallery in New York City in 2019, and her work was recently featured in a virtual exhibition at the Integral Museum of Akademgorodok, Novosibirsk, Siberia. She holds a Master’s degree in Landscape Architecture from the University of Minnesota.

Location: Dreamsong

Project: Groundwork, presented by Dreamsong, is a group exhibition that takes terra firma as both subject and medium. A signifier of place, territory, and identity, a wellspring of life-giving nutrients, and a site of conflict over land-based indigenous rights and environmental protection, soil offers a rich prism through which the present may be both imagined and imaged. Through excavating diverse histories in artworks that take the ground as subject and material, the exhibition aims to encourage discussion about its preservation, its meaning, the claims that are made to it, and the sustenance, both spiritual and physical, that we derive from it.

Rachel Breen, Artist • Yoke: Garment Solidarity Pennants (ESFL), Towards a Common Future: Banners for Solidarity (Weisman)

Through acts of sewing and dismantling, Rachel Breen creates projects and spaces for cultivating deeper understandings of labor rights and solidarity. Her work has been shown widely across the country, including a solo exhibition at the Minneapolis Institute of Art in 2020. Her solo exhibition, The Price of Our Clothes, at the Perlman Museum, was included in Hyperallergic’s 2018 Top 20 Exhibitions Across the US (December 20, 2018). Rachel was the recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship to India in 2022 and was awarded an artist residency at MacDowell and the Virginia Center for Creative Arts. Rachel is an inaugural recipient of the Jerome Hill Artist Fellowship, has received four Minnesota State Arts Board grants and a fellowship from the Walker Art Center Open Field. Rachel’s social engagement projects have been presented across the state including two projects commissioned for Northern Spark, a public art festival addressing climate change in Minnesota. Rachel holds an MFA from the University of Minnesota and a BA from the Evergreen State College. She lives in Minneapolis, MN, maintains an active studio practice and is a professor of art at Anoka Ramsey Community College.

Location: East Side Freedom Library & Weisman Art Museum

Projects: Yoke: Garment Solidarity Pennants seeks to lure viewers in as cheerful, colorful pennants, yet suggest something more sinister as a “yoke” – something used to control animals. This work represents the way garment workers are held captive by international clothing brands responsible for unsafe workplaces and below standard pay, endangering workers’ health and livelihoods. The pennants are made from the yoke of used shirts that have been purchased by the pound at a Goodwill Outlet. These pennants bring attention to the way our clothes contain a range of histories – both those of workers and those of wearers – raising essential questions about how garments are discarded and the impacts of overproduction on the climate. I am an artist with an eye on this core question – how can art contribute to the public’s willingness to rethink existing economic systems? I hope to contribute to larger social movements addressing climate change and garment workers’ rights through expressions of mutual aid and solidarity.

Towards a Common Future: Banners for Solidarity // Banners represent a unique combination of the importance of the hand in the making process, the way textiles contain meaning and their history as symbols of protest and resistance. I made these banners to signify the importance of solidarity with workers around the world who make our clothes. To me, solidarity means to empathize and respect the many struggles for social justice. Garment workers around the world grow and weave fabric, cut and sew this fabric into garments, handling these materials so that we have clothes to wear. My interest in labor rights stems from histories of Jewish activism in the garment industry and my own family history as immigrants and activists.

These banners are made from organic Kala cotton, a drought-tolerant variety of cotton indigenous to India. The visual vocabulary printed on these banners references a variety of important symbols I have designed. Sewing stitches – which I see as a mark and symbol of human interdependence – point toward the possibility of repair and social change. Two halves of a circle speak to my yearning for coming together and being whole – a visual representation of solidarity. Made to be hung in galleries or carried at marches and protests, these banners were additionally inspired by Labor Day banners made in the early 1900s by the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, which I saw in the archives of Cornell University’s Kheel Center for Labor-Management Documentation & Archives.

Strong Buffalo, Artist • Flower Power VII

Location: Mounds Park

Sayge Carroll, Artist • Prairie|Concrete

Artist and advocate Sayge Carroll has been tending the soil of community through art for more than 20 years. Carroll is a recent graduate of University of Minnesota MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts and Social Practice and holds a BA from the University of Minnesota. Carroll is currently enrolled in the Master Gardener program at the University of Minnesota.Through visual art, sound design and civic engagement Carroll has devoted their career and life work to connecting ancestral wisdom, lineage and knowledge of natural resources to the present.

Location: Frogtown Farm, Hidden Falls Regional Park & Western Sculpture Park

Project: Prairie|Concrete is an outdoor embodied movement project by lead artist, Pramila Vasudevan and the Aniccha Arts collaborative, commissioned by Public Art St. Paul (PASP). This project will bring visibility to plant cycles and growing practices through embodied listening and movement sessions with communities in St. Paul, Minnesota. The commission will unfold across 3 City of St. Paul Parks – Frogtown Farm, Hidden Falls Regional Park and Western Sculpture Park – through one rehearsal, 3 movement workshops, and one event at each site as part of the first Wakpa Triennial Arts Festival.

Mary Casanova, Artist • Waking Worlds: Wondrous Reads for Curious Minds

Mary Casanova is an award-winning children's author of novels and picture books. Many of her books stem from her life on the Minnesota-Canadian border; yet some of her stories have taken her as far away as France, Norway, and Belize. Whatever the setting for her books, Casanova writes stories that matter — and stories that kids can't put down. With 38 books published, she divides her time between writing and traveling. Nationally and internationally, at schools and conferences, Casanova shares her love of writing and reading with children and adults. She is the author of Wake Up Island (2016) and Hush Hush, Forest (2018) from the University of Minnesota Press.

Location: Minnesota Marine Art Museum

Project: The exhibition features original illustrations from three book projects; Mary Casanova’s Wake Up Island (University of Minnesota Press) and Hush, Hush, Forest (University of Minnesota Press) as illustrated by printmaker Nick Wroblewski, and World of Wonders: In Praise of Fireflies, Whale Sharks, and Other Astonishments (Milkweed Editions) written by Aimee Nezhukumatathil and illustrated by Fumi Nakamura. Selections from all three books will be accompanied by wood carvings from the Minnesota Marine Art Museum’s collection of Leo and Mariylyn Smith folk art - a collection of sculptures informed by the whimsy and wonder of the Mississippi River marine environments - interspersed throughout the gallery.

Hannah Chalew, Artist • Paper Is People: Decolonizing Global Paper Cultures

Hannah Chalew is an artist, educator and environmental activist raised and currently working in New Orleans. Her artwork explores what it means to live in a time of global warming with a collective uncertain future, and specifically what that means for those living in Southern Louisiana. Chalew’s practice explores the historical legacies that got us here to help imagine new possibilities for a livable future. She received her BA from Brandeis University in 2009, and her MFA from the Cranbrook Academy of Art in 2016. Chalew has exhibited widely around the U.S. Her work has been featured in Garden & Gun, BOMB, Hyperallergic, Burnaway, the LA Times, the Boston Globe and more. Chalew’s work is included in two creative atlases by writer and activist Rebecca Solnit, Unfathomable City: A New Orleans Atlas, co-authored with Rebecca Snedeker and Nonstop Metropolis: A New York City Atlas, co-authored with Joshua Jelly-Schapiro. She is the 2022 South Arts Southern Prize winner as well as the South Arts Louisiana State Fellow.

Location: Minnesota Center for Book Arts

Project: Paper Is People: Decolonizing Global Paper Cultures, co-curated by Tia Blassingame and Stephanie Sauer, offers a new definition of paper within a global and decolonial framework, opening up a conversation around what paper is across cultures today. In the Indigenous and oral cultures represented here, weavings, tapestries, and other handmade substrates act as vessels and embodiments of collective culture and memory. See paper samples and source materials, watch papermaking processes from source to finish, read interviews and watch videos from traditional practitioners, experience how contemporary artists are finding new applications for ancient technologies, and participate in a variety of workshops and talks. Join us at mnbookarts.org/paper-is-people

Page Chang, Artist • Paper Is People: Decolonizing Global Paper Cultures

Page Chang is a Native Hawaiian artist, teacher, and kapa maker. She born and raised in the suburbs of Washington, D.C., and was passionate about learning Hawaiian cultural practices when she moved to Hawaiʻi 24 years ago. Chang looks to the ʻāina and the renewable resources found here in Hawaiʻi as a means of solving the ecological and social emergencies faced locally and as a global community. She recently received the Award of Excellence at the “Annual Hawaiʻi Craftsmen Juried Exhibit” for a kapa malo. Chang’s artwork ranges from paintings to textiles to plastics, and incorporates traditional Hawaiian and modern motifs. Her newest passion is Hawaiian kapa along with Native Hawaiian and other natural dyes. She has worked with Kumu Dalani Tanahy, to learn to grow, harvest, process, and dye kapa, as well as make all of the tools that she needs.

Location: Minnesota Center for Book Arts

Project: Paper Is People: Decolonizing Global Paper Cultures, co-curated by Tia Blassingame and Stephanie Sauer, offers a new definition of paper within a global and decolonial framework, opening up a conversation around what paper is across cultures today. In the Indigenous and oral cultures represented here, weavings, tapestries, and other handmade substrates act as vessels and embodiments of collective culture and memory. See paper samples and source materials, watch papermaking processes from source to finish, read interviews and watch videos from traditional practitioners, experience how contemporary artists are finding new applications for ancient technologies, and participate in a variety of workshops and talks. Join us at mnbookarts.org/paper-is-people.

Julio Laja Chichicaxtle, Artist • Paper Is People: Decolonizing Global Paper Cultures

Julio Laja Chichicaxtle, Otomi, creates papel amate works of art from bark harvested from a tree called popova in the Ñühü language. The tree was selected because it is the only one that can produce four different colors of paper, and is known as a “generous tree” because it can be harvested all year long without causing damage. Once the bark is collected, each art piece takes a few days to make. Julio has taken this art form to a new level. Strips of the paper are braided, twisted and inserted seamlessly into the design. Through his work, Laja also connects with his family’s lineage of art-making, which he learned from his grandmother at ten years old. His family has been making papel amate for more than 200 years, passing the knowledge down through the generations.

Location: Minnesota Center for Book Arts

Project: Paper Is People: Decolonizing Global Paper Cultures, co-curated by Tia Blassingame and Stephanie Sauer, offers a new definition of paper within a global and decolonial framework, opening up a conversation around what paper is across cultures today. In the Indigenous and oral cultures represented here, weavings, tapestries, and other handmade substrates act as vessels and embodiments of collective culture and memory. See paper samples and source materials, watch papermaking processes from source to finish, read interviews and watch videos from traditional practitioners, experience how contemporary artists are finding new applications for ancient technologies, and participate in a variety of workshops and talks. Join us at mnbookarts.org/paper-is-people.

Kelly Church, Artist • Paper Is People: Decolonizing Global Paper Cultures'

Kelly Church is Ottawa/Pottawatomi, descended from the Gun Lake and Grand Traverse Bands. She has an experienced master’s eye for selecting the best black ash tree to provide the best material for her to create a vast array of baskets, from designed black ash baskets to Summer Strawberry Blossoms. The traditional Anishinabe process of creating a black ash basket from start to finish is an awe-inspiring and learning experience that goes beyond the artistic practice to include discussions in biochemistry, forest management, invasive pest control, traditional language skills, and deep personal memories of family history. Growing up in southwestern Michigan during the 1970s, Church studied the Odawa language from her paternal grandmother and learned black ash basketry from her father, Bill Church, and cousin, John Pigeon. She has since passed her knowledge on to her daughter, Cherish Parrish. She received an associate of fine arts degree from the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and earned a BFA from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Church then realized her personal artistic mission was to bring people together in workshops to harvest the black ash trees, process the logs into splints, and create personally designed baskets while learning patience, commitment, beauty, and pride in the Native tradition and culture. By the early 2000s, it was discovered that the Emerald Ash Borer (EAB), an invasive and voracious black ash tree bug from Asia with no known predators, had arrived in the Michigan region and began to devour black ash trees at an enormous rate, resulting in the near extinction of ash trees in Michigan. Church was alarmed that without black ash trees available to harvest, generations of knowledge, experience, and traditional expressions might be lost. She recognized the necessity of researching and documenting, collecting seeds, and collaborating with national and international agencies in getting the word out about this environmental and cultural disaster. Church’s artistic, activist, mentorship, and tradition bearer journey to advocate for the survival of Native traditions has involved many national and international art programs, exhibitions, and work with government agencies such as tribal and U.S. Forest services. She has been named the Eiteljorg Artist in Residence, received a Native Arts and Cultures Foundation’s National Artist Fellowship, and been a four-time Artist Leadership Program participant of the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian.

Location: Minnesota Center for Book Arts

Project: Paper Is People: Decolonizing Global Paper Cultures, co-curated by Tia Blassingame and Stephanie Sauer, offers a new definition of paper within a global and decolonial framework, opening up a conversation around what paper is across cultures today. In the Indigenous and oral cultures represented here, weavings, tapestries, and other handmade substrates act as vessels and embodiments of collective culture and memory. See paper samples and source materials, watch papermaking processes from source to finish, read interviews and watch videos from traditional practitioners, experience how contemporary artists are finding new applications for ancient technologies, and participate in a variety of workshops and talks. Join us at mnbookarts.org/paper-is-people

Zoe Cinel, Artist • Second Shift Resident Exhibtion

Zoe Cinel (she/they) is an interdisciplinary artist and curator from Italy whose work builds community around human experiences that are isolating and complex to navigate, such as immigration and chronic pain. Starting from her journey as a patient and an immigrant and collaborating with other artists and community members, Zoe’s work’s ultimate goal is to connect and produce social change. Cinel received an MFA in Visual Studies from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. Her artistic and curatorial work has been shown in institutions such as the Walker Art Center, the Minneapolis Institute of Art, the Gordon Parks Gallery at Metropolitan State University, St Paul, and the Rochester Art Center. Since 2017, she has been a member of the CarryOn Homes, an artistic collective dedicated to telling the stories of immigrants in MN.

Location: Second Shift Gallery

Project: Second Shift Studio’s Resident Group Exhibition is part of the Wakpa Triennial Arts Festival and features the work of the studio’s current resident artists, Cameron Patricia Downey, Jocelyn Suzuka Figueroa, Stephanie Lindquist, and Zoe Cinel. This is an exhibition of the work of the four studio artists in residency at Second Shift Studio, where they have spent the past year working, making, and thinking alongside each other.

Za’nia Coleman, Artist • Constellation: Video Storytelling

Za’Nia Coleman is an interdisciplinary artist experimenting with textiles, digital media, and cultural curation. Her primary medium is film focusing on documentary, oral history, and digital projections. With projections, she is exploring how to reclaim the outside spaces both figuratively and literally that Black Femmes are subjected to by using projection mapping to visualize or give imagery to their worlds. The goal is to experiment with how to visualize the intersections of the archive, Black Folklore, and Black Science Fiction. The root of her work is archiving Black traditional and historical practices around love, pleasure, cultural expression, and community building. She is Co-Founder and Executive Director of Tangible Collective, an art collective that creates space devoted to Black Millennial thought and expression. Za’Nia holds a Bachelor's degree in Film Studies and Film Theory and Culture.

Project: Constellation is a cohort of seven artists, Constellation: Video Storytelling, each creating a short video to be presented in a looped series that will be projected onto the downtown City of Saint Paul George Latimer Public Library on Rice Park on September 14th, 15th, and 16th at dusk. Videos will interact with the architecture of the library building, transforming it into new visions for public space and public knowledge. Artists include: Za’nia Coleman; Boo McCaleb; SEE MORE PERSPECTIVE; Witt Siasoco; Miko Simmons; Jonathan Thunder; and Moira Villiard.

Location: Rice Park, Downtown Saint Paul

September 14, 15, and 16

5-10 PM

Four Ravens, Gordon Coons

Gordon Coons, Artist • Gidibaajimomin - 'We Tell Stories'

In Gidibaajimomin - 'We Tell Stories,' Gordon Coons’ work comes from his heritage of Ojibwe. He is an enrolled member of the Lac Courte Oreilles Band of Lake Superior Chippewa Indians of Wisconsin. he currently lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and have been a resident here for the past 46 years. He uses his traditional Ojibwe clan animal stories to educate people about our shared relationship with the natural world. He creates Ojibwa stories of celestial events, animals, and man by painting in the Ojibwa Woodland art style, reduction block prints, and transferring cedar smoke to paper. His creations are a journey to a better place by creating a stronger relationship between animals and nature.

Gordon Coons creates artworks in a variety of mediums, including cedar smoke, linoleum relief prints, paintings in oil or acrylics, pen and ink, and stone and wood-assembled sculptures. His artworks portray a contemporary view of traditional Native stories. Coons is a self-taught artist who has shown in exhibitions around the country, including Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian on the national mall in Washington, D.C.; Santa Fe Indian Market, New Mexico, Eiteljorg Museum of Indianapolis; Cherokee At Market in Tulsa Oklahoma; Dakota Discovery Museum in Mitchell, South Dakota. Coons has won numerous awards and commissions and is represented in permanent collections of institutions such as the Red Cloud Indian School Heritage in Pine Ridge, SD; the Summit Medical Center of Oakland, CA; Essentia Health in Duluth, MN; Red Earth, Oklahoma, OK; and Akta Lakota Museum and Cultural Center, Chamberlain, SD; Madison College – South Campus, Madison, WI. Coons states: “My inspiration comes from my Ojibwa and Ottawa heritage. I express my culture through artworks using a contemporary style. I enjoy incorporating playfulness in my images, telling stories of the relationships between western and Native culture, and the connections we have to our shared historical events. My goal as an artist is to channel my creativity, eliciting a more universal interpretation of my work and heritage.”

Location: The Confluence Gallery at the Minnesota Valley National Wildlife Refuge, 3815 American Blvd. East, Bloomington, MN 55425

June 16 - August 20

Cecilia Cornejo (Sotelo), Artist • Threads of Connection and Belonging

Cecilia Cornejo (Sotelo) is a Chilean-American documentary filmmaker, artist and educator based in Northfield, Minnesota, the occupied ancestral land of the Wahpekute Band of the Dakota Nation. Locally rooted yet globally minded, her work examines notions of home and the immigrant experience while exploring the traces of historical trauma on people and places. An inaugural recipient of the 2020 McKnight Fellowship for Community-Engaged Artists, Cecilia’s work has received support from the Minnesota State Arts Board, the National Association of Latino Arts and Culture (NALAC), the Jerome Foundation, and the Southeastern Minnesota Arts Council. Her film work has shown nationally and abroad and is currently distributed by Women Make Movies.

Project: Through sound, images, and the written word, Cecilia Cornejo’s collaborative work engages community members to reflect on ideas of home, connection, and belonging. Cornejo has embraced multiple ways of sharing stories. From the high tech—indexed databases, touchscreens, and sound domes—to traditional practices of embroidery, "Threads of Connection and Belonging" shares broad perspectives united by one idea: What does it mean to be home? The multiplicity of voices that populate the exhibition have been gathered in Southeastern Minnesota over the past five years through Cornejo’s multiplatform project, "The Wandering House," which features an inviting mobile audio recording studio. “Cecilia has built connections with many people, including and especially those whose stories aren’t always highlighted,” says Artistic Director Stephanie Rogers. “Through her work, the stories collected are given back to the people and places they came from in a framework that invites reflection and discovery.”

Location: Anderson Center

Joe Davis, Facilitator of The Role of Faith and Faith Communities in Building Networks of Mutuality with Pilgrim Lutheran Church

Tuesday, August 15, 6 – 8 PM, light meal served

Pilgrim Lutheran Church, 1935 Saint Clair Ave., Saint Paul, 55105

Come back for the registration link!

Critical Conversations: How do we recognize and build our “networks of mutuality?” are a series of events to gather public audiences to connect in thoughtful reflection and deep engagement with probing questions such as, How are we related? How do we overcome divisions? How can art help us to consider our mutuality with each other so that everyone thrives? Who is included in our networks of mutuality? How can art help us to envision new futures. Join one conversation or each in the series. Each event offers a slightly different focus with different facilitators and activities and takes place in different locations.

All programs are free of charge but require advance registration.

Joe Davis is a poet and artist living in North Minneapolis; using art, spoken word, and poetry as an opportunity to create space for folx to find healing, their own inner voice, and one another. Growing up, mentors urged him to share his work with others, so Joe began to share his work at open mic events. Through these events he learned that art is a tool of empowerment for both children and adults alike. Through his work, Joe encourages others to use art as a communal space of healing, liberation, and joy.

Pilgrim Lutheran Church is a progressive congregation with strong commitments to equity and inclusion and to reaching out to people beyond their own members. Join Pastor Jennifer Rome, with facilitators Joe Davis, poet and performer; Jess Grams, artist in residence at Luther Seminary, and other faith leaders to be announced. People of every faith are invited to join in the discussion about how faith and faith communities can build networks of mutuality beyond denominations and congregations.

Location: Pilgrim Lutheran Church, 1935 Saint Clair Ave, Saint Paul

August 15, 6 – 8 PM

Isabella Dawson

Isabella Dawson, Artist • Flower Power VII

Flower Power artists, when you collect all our efforts together, we represent layers and decades of working for truth, goodness, peace, and gentle wisdom. We are young and old, each with a different story that brings us to a shared world vision. People and flowers are both powerful species on Earth. Flower Power has organically grown out of the Minnesota landscape, out of public demonstration and opposition to state violence, incarceration, and climate crisis. We are individuals trying to present a more compassionate world; our cut flower installations are like portraits that help us deal with complex and abstract problems of injustice. We dedicate a whole day to paying respect to the injustices served, the hardships suffered, and the joy that persists. It’s a time when we use our art and spend it as a community to change the course of past directions. We are different minds and yet of the same heart. We stand with humanity and the Earth as protectors of land and life.

Project: Flower Power VII

Saturday, August 5, sunrise to sunset

Indian Burial Mounds Regional Park

10 Mounds Boulevard, Saint Paul 55106

Oyate Hotanin, a Native-led arts, thought, and social justice organization, presents of Flower Power VII, an annual event aimed at helping us all to remember who we are, to work to eliminate our incarceration state, rescue our planet, and lead a worldwide movement of a billion good relatives, Flower Power centers on the creation of an ephemeral work of art, made from cut flowers. Over the course of a day, artists arrange the blooms in a mosaic-like pattern on the grass surrounding the sculpture, Sacred Bowl, by Ojibwe artist Duane Goodwin.

Location: 

Saturday, August 5, sunrise to sunset

Indian Burial Mounds Regional Park

10 Mounds Boulevard, Saint Paul 55106

Cameron Downey, Artist • Second Shift Resident Exhibition

Cameron Downey (she/they) is an anti-disciplinary artist born and raised in North Minneapolis, Minnesota whose work oscillates between photography, film, body, sculpture, curation and otherwise. Seeing instruction in the incidental, the precarious and the misremembered, their work strives to archive, unfurl, make-altar-of and bring fantasy to the Blues of Black life and relation. Downey graduated from Columbia University in 2021 with a double concentration in visual art and environmental science. Downey’s art has been exhibited by HAIR+NAILS, Minneapolis; Aronson Gallery, New York; Kunstraum Kreuzberg/Bethanien, Berlin; Engage Projects, Chicago; as part of Midway Contemporary Art’s Off-Site program; M+B Gallery, Los Angeles; and Museum of Contemporary Art Santa Barbara (forthcoming).

Location: Second Shift Studios

Project: Second Shift Studio’s Resident Group Exhibition is part of the Wakpa Triennial Arts Festival and features the work of the studio’s current resident artists, Cameron Patricia Downey, Jocelyn Suzuka Figueroa, Stephanie Lindquist, and Zoe Cinel. This is an exhibition of the work of the four studio artists in residency at Second Shift Studio, where they have spent the past year working, making, and thinking alongside each other.

Aaron Dysart, Artist • Commune

Aaron Dysart is a sculptor interested in using the vocabulary of visual language to give hidden stories a broader audience. His environmental interventions showcase his love of light shows and unseen infrastructure, while his objects highlight material’s ability to carry content. He has partnered with numerous organizations including the National Park Service, Army Corp of Engineers, District Energy St. Paul, Mississippi Park Connection, Three Rivers Park District, and Public Art Saint Paul. Dysart has received awards from the Jerome Foundation through Franconia Sculpture Park, The Jerome and McKnight foundation through Forecast Public Art, The Knight Foundation, and The Minnesota State Arts Board. Having shown nationally, his work has been in Art in America, Hyperallergic, The Dallas Morning News, Berlin Art Link along with others. Dysart is a City Artist embedded in the city of St. Paul through Public Art Saint Paul collaborating across city departments to create art out of the life-sustaining systems of the city while advising on major city initiatives.

Location: Upper Landing Park

Project: Aaron Dysart has proposed a tree sculpture, called Commune, that will be installed at Upper Landing Park along the Mississippi near downtown Saint Paul. Appearing in two horizontal sections--one part the tree roots and stump, the other the trunk and branches—there will be a 50 ft. gap between the two sections. A concave form called an acoustic mirror will cap each end of the trunk and offer magical experiences for conversations. Audience members will be able to communicate across this distance without raising their voices.

Liz Ensz, Artist • Groundwork

Liz Ensz was born in Minnesota to a resourceful family of penny-savers, metal scrappers, and curators of cast-offs. Ensz received a BFA in Fiber from the Maryland Institute College of Art (2005), and an MFA in Fiber and Material Studies from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2013). With an interdisciplinary approach, their work presents a comparative study of the mass-cultural investment in disposability and the human desire to imagine permanence through emblems, monuments, and commemoration. At the heart of their practice lies a determined material engagement, scavenger impulse, and a sincere hope for the rethinking of the valuation of people, resources, the environment, and living things. Liz Ensz is based in Baltimore, MD.

Location: Dreamsong

Project: Groundwork, presented by Dreamsong, is a group exhibition that takes terra firma as both subject and medium. A signifier of place, territory, and identity, a wellspring of life-giving nutrients, and a site of conflict over land-based indigenous rights and environmental protection, soil offers a rich prism through which the present may be both imagined and imaged. Through excavating diverse histories in artworks that take the ground as subject and material, the exhibition aims to encourage discussion about its preservation, its meaning, the claims that are made to it, and the sustenance, both spiritual and physical, that we derive from it.

Jared Fessler, Artist • It's the People

Jared Fessler has enjoyed photography for as long as he can remember. He took a photography film class back in high school, but photography did not really come back to him until post-secondary education when he was trying to figure out what he was going to do next. Fessler invested in a camera and for fun, just started taking photos of everything but mostly enjoyed photographing people and once his work spread, people started reaching out to him to photograph them. He decided that if he was going to do this, he needed to learn more about his camera and photography. He decided to get his certificate in photography and to this day, Fessler still attends photography workshops and classes.

Location: Hennepin Theatre District

Project: Hennepin Theatre Trust’s 2023-24 edition of It’s the People features large-scale photo banners along Hennepin Avenue in downtown Minneapolis. This public art initiative is inspired by the exceptional, everyday people whose experiences, contributions and stories create the unique vibrancy of our shared communities.

Jocelyn Suzuka Figueroa, Artist • Second Shift Resident Exhibtion

Born in Kyoto, Japan, Jocelyn Suzuka Figueroa (she/her) 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.

Location: Second Shift Studio

Project: Second Shift Studio’s Resident Group Exhibition is part of the Wakpa Triennial Arts Festival and features the work of the studio’s current resident artists, Cameron Patricia Downey, Jocelyn Suzuka Figueroa, Stephanie Lindquist, and Zoe Cinel. This is an exhibition of the work of the four studio artists in residency at Second Shift Studio, where they have spent the past year working, making, and thinking alongside each other.

Sabrina Ford, Curator • Public Functionary Group Exhibition

Location: Best Buy Foundation Gallery

Silent Fox, Artist • Group Exhibition at Public Functionary

Location: Public Functionary

Gita Ghei, Artist • Illuminating Solar Peace Pole for Western Sculpture Park

Location: Western Sculpture Park

Hannah Lee Hall, Artist • Groundwork

Hannah Lee Hall lives and works in St. Paul, MN. My work is about touch and change. Each piece is formed through an accretion of sand, paper pulp, string, and detritus. I feel them out as I go, letting each piece develop its own internal logic, like my hands are stumbling through an invisible maze. Some contain multitudes of layers, mostly unseen, informing the surface from below. I am an amasser of remnants and broken bits, and likewise my paintings are entrenched with debris. They contain residues from my life. My process is sculptural and regenerative; the excess of one painting often seeps into the next. My love of textiles informs my method of dyeing paper fiber, my use of pattern and repetition, and the woven nature of these compositions.

Location: Dreamsong

Project: Groundwork, presented by Dreamsong, is a group exhibition that takes terra firma as both subject and medium. A signifier of place, territory, and identity, a wellspring of life-giving nutrients, and a site of conflict over land-based indigenous rights and environmental protection, soil offers a rich prism through which the present may be both imagined and imaged. Through excavating diverse histories in artworks that take the ground as subject and material, the exhibition aims to encourage discussion about its preservation, its meaning, the claims that are made to it, and the sustenance, both spiritual and physical, that we derive from it.

Monica Moses Haller, Artist • Listening to the Mississippi

Monica Moses Haller’s work spans media including photography, video, sound, writing, installation and design. Most often she collaborates long term with individuals and small groups of people. These works focus on personal details to address large systems that are political, psychological and environmental. These works include “Riley and his story” and the “Veterans Book Project,” both offering multi-layered narratives of the U.S.-led wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Haller’s recent work brings her to the eroding wetlands of the Louisiana coast, land that has been in her mixed-race “Creole” family for six generations. This work explores the violence within philosophies of ownership, the social construction of race, and the possibilities of this wetland’s terrain. Monica's work is exhibited in the US and internationally at museums and public spaces including Pompidou, Paris, Leipziger Baumwollspinnerei, Germany, the Minneapolis Institute of Art, Milwaukee Art Museum, along the banks of the Mississippi River and many other sites. She has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, McKnight Foundation, Jerome Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts funding of the Veterans Book Project among others. Her public art projects include Can you listen to the same river twice? commissioned by Northern Spark, 2013, St. Paul, MN, and Listening to the Mississippi, with Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW).

Check Out Locations: Capitol City Station, City House, Mississippi National River and Recreation Area Visitor Center, Carl W. Kroening Nature Center

Project:

Monica Moses Haller will create a new iteration of her ongoing work, Listening to the Mississippi, for which she records sounds of the river from below its surface, capturing animal, human, machine, and water noises. She and partnering composers weave together these recordings into experiential compositions that offer multi-sensory and unexpected perspectives of the Mississippi. Visitors can access the compositions and a booklet with essays about the river at several Check Out Locations in Saint Paul and one site in Minneapolis. A QR code will link listeners to a website to access the River compositions. Bring your smart phone and ear buds. Limited access to head phones is available at each location. Go to the riverside and let the sounds prompt you to deeper experiences of the river. What is your relationship to this water relative? How are you part of the Mississippi River watershed?

Check Out Locations:

1. City House Restaurant

(Located in an historic 6-story grain elevator on the banks of the Mississippi River, just west of Upper Landing Park)

258 Mill St.

St Paul, MN 55102

2. Capitol City Station

1205 S Homer St

St Paul, MN 55116

3. Mississippi National River and Recreation Area Visitor Center (Located in the Science Museum of Minnesota, First Floor Lobby)

120 W Kellogg Blvd

St Paul, MN 55102

4. Carl W. Kroening Nature Center (Located in the North Mississippi Regional Park)

4900 N Mississippi Dr

Minneapolis, MN 55430

Maiya Lea Hartman, Artist • Group Exhibition at Public Functionary

Location: Public Functionary

Sequoia Hauck, Artist • Prairie|Concrete, Mináǧi kiŋ dowáŋ: a Zitkála-Šá opera (Director)

Sequoia Hauck (they/them) is a queer, non-binary, two-spirit, Anishinaabe and Hupa filmmaker and interdisciplinary artist and director who is interested in creating new work that explores ways to decolonizes the process of art-making. Their work weaves Indigenous epistemologies, queer identity and the possibilities of Indigenous futurism. They make art surrounding the narratives of continuation and resiliency among their communities. Sequoia is a 2023 Jerome Hill Artist Fellow and First Peoples Fund Cultural Capital Fellow as well as an Aniccha Arts Artistic Associate.

Project: Prairie|Concrete is an outdoor embodied movement project by lead artist, Pramila Vasudevan and the Aniccha Arts collaborative, commissioned by Public Art St. Paul (PASP). This project will bring visibility to plant cycles and growing practices through embodied listening and movement sessions with communities in St. Paul, Minnesota. The commission will unfold across 3 City of St. Paul Parks – Frogtown Farm, Hidden Falls Regional Park and Western Sculpture Park – through one rehearsal, 3 movement workshops, and one event at each site as part of the first Wakpa Triennial Arts Festival.

Location: Frogtown Farm, Hidden Falls Regional Park, Western Sculpture Park

Mináǧi kiŋ dowáŋ: a Zitkála-Šá Film Screening at the Minnesota Humanities Center

August 29, 6 PM

987 Ivy Ave E, St Paul 55106

Light dinner served

Come back for the registration link!

Mináǧi kiŋ dowáŋ translates to "My Spirit Sings" in Dakota. The film honors the life of Dakota activist and artist Zitkála-Šá, who was born in 1876 on the Yankton Reservation in South Dakota. Separated from her family and sent to boarding school in Indiana as a young girl, Zitkála-Šá suffered from the efforts to suppress her Native culture and language. She was drawn to music and became a violinist and pianist, eventually studying at the Boston Conservatory. She went on to work in Washington, D.C, where Zitkála-Šá became secretary of the Society of American Indians in 1916, the first civil rights organization created by and for Native Americans. In 1926, she founded the National Council of American Indians and continued to pursue reforms through public speaking and lobbying efforts. Zitkála-Šá was instrumental in helping Indigenous peoples gain citizenship with the 1924 Indian Citizenship Bill. Produced by the Twin Cities’ An Opera Theatre, the film presents a poetic telling of Zitkála-Šá’s life using opera as a musical vehicle with a libretto in both English and Dakota.

For more information, click here.

Co-presented by An Opera Theatre, Public Art Saint Paul, and Minnesota Humanities Center.

Mináǧi kiŋ dowáŋ: a Zitkála-Šá opera. Documentary by Director Sequoia Hauck, Librettist Hannah Johnson, Composer Lyz Jaakola, and Visual Artist Moira Villiard Produced by An Opera Theatre (AOT)

Kristine Heykants, Artist • It's the People

Kristine Heykants is a digital media artist with a curiosity about the influence of patriarchal traditions on women’s lives. She has long used varying genres of photography to examine gender roles and their presentation in history, religion and the media, as she seeks to provide a counterpoint to the mainstream narrative. Whether composing a portrait in an evocative location or in the studio, her artistic practice centers the stories of her subjects as community members. Carl Jung’s archetypes provide her with a framework for looking at the past, as she thinks about symbols and behaviors that have existed throughout time in the unconscious mind of us all. Working in a straight-forward and unromanticized photographic approach underscores the foundation of her work in the realism of contemporary life.

Location: Hennepin Theatre District

Project: Hennepin Theatre Trust’s 2023-24 edition of It’s the People features large-scale photo banners along Hennepin Avenue in downtown Minneapolis. This public art initiative is inspired by the exceptional, everyday people whose experiences, contributions and stories create the unique vibrancy of our shared communities.

Hong Hong, Artist • Paper Is People: Decolonizing Global Paper Cultures

Born in Hefei, Anhui, China, Hong Hong (she/hers) earned a BFA from State University of New York at Potsdam and MFA from University of Georgia. Since 2015, she has traveled to faraway and distinct locations to create site-responsive, monumental paper-works. In this nomadic practice, ancestral methods of Chinese paper-making coalesce with painting and monastic rituals. Recent projects map interstitial relationships between exile, landscape and the Chinese Diaspora through cartographic, symbolic, temporal and material languages. Hong is the recipient of a United States Artist Fellowship (2023), a Carnegie Foundation Fellowship at MacDowell (2020), a Helen Frankenthaler Foundation Fellowship at Vermont Studio Center (2019), an Artistic Excellence Fellowship from the Connecticut Office of Arts (2019), and a Creation of New Work Grant from the Edward C. And Ann T. Roberts Foundation (2018 – 2019). She currently lives and works in Massachusetts.

Location: Minnesota Center for Book Arts

Project: Paper Is People: Decolonizing Global Paper Cultures, co-curated by Tia Blassingame and Stephanie Sauer, offers a new definition of paper within a global and decolonial framework, opening up a conversation around what paper is across cultures today. In the Indigenous and oral cultures represented here, weavings, tapestries, and other handmade substrates act as vessels and embodiments of collective culture and memory. See paper samples and source materials, watch papermaking processes from source to finish, read interviews and watch videos from traditional practitioners, experience how contemporary artists are finding new applications for ancient technologies, and participate in a variety of workshops and talks. Join us at mnbookarts.org/paper-is-people

Alexa Horochowski, Artist • Post Tenebras Lux, After Darkness, Light • Groundwork (Dreamsong)

Minneapolis-based artist Alexa Horochowski’s work exists at the intersection of what is human and what is not. Informed by a life immersed in radically different landscapes — the desolate Argentine fringes of Patagonia’s Atlantic coast where she was raised, and the fertile Midwest woodlands hugging the great lakes — chance encounters with various materials, natural or man-made, often provide a starting point for her works in sculpture, photography, and video. Drawing from natural substances such as Antarctic kelp, obsidian, and organic matter, Horochowski constructs sculptures and assemblages that emphasize human impermanence within geological deep time. By exploring the intersection of the human and natural worlds, her interdisciplinary practice explores how political upheaval and man-made climate change reshape the temporal construction of memory and meaning. Alexa Horochowski is a dual citizen of Argentina and the United States. Her art practice includes sculpture, photography, and video. Artist residencies at Forest Island Project, Mammoth Lakes, CA (2018), 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, a Bachelor of Art in Creative Writing, and a Bachelor of Journalism from the University of Missouri. Her artwork has been exhibited in Minnesota at the Walker Art Center, the Minneapolis Institute of Art, Highpoint Center for Printmaking, the Rochester Art Center; the Nemeth Art Center, and The Soap Factory. She has also exhibited nationally and internationally. Selected fellowships include a Warhol Visual Arts Fund (2022), Efroymson Artist Fellowship (2018), McKnight Visual Artist Fellowships (2019/2014/2003), Artist Initiative Grants (2014/2012), and a Bush Artist Fellowship (2004). Horochowski teaches studio arts at St. Cloud State University.

Location: Moon Palace Books & Dreamsong

Projects: Post Tenebras Lux, After Darkness, Light serves as a memorial to all the lives lost to Covid-19 and a beacon awakening us toward healing our more-than-human world. The gold logo on the banner is a modified image of the Eye of Providence, found on the US$1 bill and on the Great Seal of the United States. A rendering of the coronavirus orb with spike proteins takes the place of the eye’s iris and looks back at us. Able to upend global markets and instill fear, novel viruses like the coronavirus also propel us to question the status quo and imagine a future where we tread lightly on this biosphere, we call Earth. The juxtaposition of these images prompts questions about the intertwining of global financial networks and biological networks that link all humanity. The Capitalocene refers to the current geologic epoch in which the capitalist formula of unbridled accumulation has penetrated all aspects of the planet’s biophysical environment, to a degree where the capitalist system’s survival is an existential threat to the survival of humanity. Post Tenebras Lux speculates on a post-human, life-sustaining, ecology of repair. 

Groundwork, presented by Dreamsong, is a group exhibition that takes terra firma as both subject and medium. A signifier of place, territory, and identity, a wellspring of life-giving nutrients, and a site of conflict over land-based indigenous rights and environmental protection, soil offers a rich prism through which the present may be both imagined and imaged. Through excavating diverse histories in artworks that take the ground as subject and material, the exhibition aims to encourage discussion about its preservation, its meaning, the claims that are made to it, and the sustenance, both spiritual and physical, that we derive from it.

HOTTEA, Artist • Kismet

Artist HOTTEA began his work with typography on fences, turning an ordinary everyday object into something designers and artists use each day – the grid. The foundation behind the work of HOTTEA is to use the existing infrastructure and create an artwork or idea that is in harmony within the given space. In addition to adapting to the physical qualities of a space or surface – the artist plays close attention to the movement and life in and around the space. When experiencing the artist’s work – you almost feel as if the piece was designed for you because you are exactly who he was thinking of. When the viewer has a personal connection with a piece of artwork, there is a good chance it will become a lasting memory and remind that person of the space. When artwork is able to create a lasting impression, even after the artwork is gone, the artwork lives on forever within the subconscious of the viewer.

Project: Kismet: A hypothetical force or personified power that determines the course of the future events. After meeting with Toua Xiong, the creator of HmongTown Marketplace, and his family, it felt a lot like kismet. While listening to Toua talk about growing up and how much it impacted the future, I wanted this installation to reflect his family history and the journey they have been on. This installation functions a lot like a timeline in that it depicts a series of events in chronological order via a series of pictograms. The images are rendered in yarn attached to a grid. As you walk underneath the installation, the images change, following the stories and memories shared directly with me from Toua and his family. I hope to capture the spirit and passion behind these individuals to portray a sense of family, love and connection. Even though this is one family's story, they express many concepts and beliefs shared by many which embody the idea of interdependence.

Location: HmongTown Marketplace

Kahlil Robert Irving, Artist • Groundwork

Kahlil Robert Irving is an artist born in San Diego, California, in 1992, currently living and working in the USA. He attended the Sam Fox School of Design and Visual Art, Washington University, in St. Louis (MFA Fellow, 2017) and the Kansas City Art Institute (BFA, Art History and Ceramics, 2015). In December 2021 Irving opened his first museum solo exhibition - Projects: Kahlil Robert Irving at the Museum of Modern Art. Irving recently participated in Social Works II at Gagosian Gallery in London. He has also participated in the Singapore Biennale, Singapore; Soft Water Hard Stone; The New Museum Triennial; and Making Knowing at the Whitney Museum of Art. Works by Irving have been included in group exhibitions at the Abrons Art Center, New York; The Anderson Collection at Stanford University, San Fransisco; and Mass MOCA, North Adams. He was an Artist in Residence at Art Omi in summer 2018. Also, he was awarded the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Biennial Award in 2019 and the Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant in 2020. Irving’s work is in the collections of the Ken Ferguson Teaching Collection at the Kansas City Art Institute, Kansas City, Missouri; J.P Morgan Chase Art Collection, New York, New York; the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Overland Park, Kansas; the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; the RISD Museum, Providence, Rhode Island; the Riga Porcelain Museum, Latvia; the Foundation for Contemporary Ceramic Art, Kecskemet, Hungary; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. In 2018, Irving’s first institutional solo exhibition took place at Wesleyan University’s Center for the Arts, Connecticut, and was accompanied by a full-color catalogue with essays and an interview. In 2023, Irving will present a solo exhibition at the Walker Art Center.

Location: Dreamsong

Project: Groundwork, presented by Dreamsong, is a group exhibition that takes terra firma as both subject and medium. A signifier of place, territory, and identity, a wellspring of life-giving nutrients, and a site of conflict over land-based indigenous rights and environmental protection, soil offers a rich prism through which the present may be both imagined and imaged. Through excavating diverse histories in artworks that take the ground as subject and material, the exhibition aims to encourage discussion about its preservation, its meaning, the claims that are made to it, and the sustenance, both spiritual and physical, that we derive from it.

Lyz Jaakola, Composer • Mináǧi kiŋ dowáŋ: a Zitkála-Šá opera

Film Screening at Minnesota Humanities Center
987 Ivy Ave E, St Paul 55106

August 29 at 6 PM

Come back for the registration link!

Light dinner served

Mináǧi kiŋ dowáŋ translates to "My Spirit Sings" in Dakota. The film honors the life of Dakota activist and artist Zitkála-Šá, who was born in 1876 on the Yankton Reservation in South Dakota. Separated from her family and sent to boarding school in Indiana as a young girl, Zitkála-Šá suffered from the efforts to suppress her Native culture and language. She was drawn to music and became a violinist and pianist, eventually studying at the Boston Conservatory. She went on to work in Washington, D.C, where Zitkála-Šá became secretary of the Society of American Indians in 1916, the first civil rights organization created by and for Native Americans. In 1926, she founded the National Council of American Indians and continued to pursue reforms through public speaking and lobbying efforts. Zitkála-Šá was instrumental in helping Indigenous peoples gain citizenship with the 1924 Indian Citizenship Bill.

Produced by the Twin Cities’ An Opera Theatre, the film presents a poetic telling of Zitkála-Šá’s life using opera as a musical vehicle with a libretto in both English and Dakota. For more information, visit https://anoperatheatre.org/-zitkla-sa

Co-presented by An Opera Theatre, Public Art Saint Paul, and Minnesota Humanities Center.

Mináǧi kiŋ dowáŋ: a Zitkála-Šá opera. Documentary by Director Sequoia Hauck, Librettist Hannah Johnson, Composer Lyz Jaakola, and Visual Artist Moira Villiard Produced by An Opera Theatre (AOT)

Leeya Jackson, Artist • Group Exhibition at Public Functionary

Location: Public Functionary

Amy Sundby Jeanchayaphum, Artist • It’s the People

Amy Sundby Jeanchayaphum believes photography, like art, is universal. Photographs tell a story that words simply cannot convey. Images visually connect us to moments, memories and places. Communication and understanding are key. Jeanchayaphum successfully collaborates and co-creates with clients to achieve stunning visual imagery. While shooting, she continually adapts to unique personalities, settings and conditions. She has found that the best photographs often emerge organically. With more than 20 years of national and international experience, a BFA from the University of Minnesota, her creative skills and talents are deeply rooted. Born in the Midwest, she has an inherent understanding of people, land, traditions and a knowledge of what people hold near and dear. Connecting to people and stories generates the inspiration and fuel for her creative nature.

Location: Hennepin Theatre District

Project: Hennepin Theatre Trust’s 2023-24 edition of It’s the People features large-scale photo banners along Hennepin Avenue in downtown Minneapolis. This public art initiative is inspired by the exceptional, everyday people whose experiences, contributions and stories create the unique vibrancy of our shared communities.

Hannah Johnson, Librettist • Mináǧi kiŋ dowáŋ: a Zitkála-Šá opera

Mináǧi kiŋ dowáŋ: a Zitkála-Šá Film Screening at the Minnesota Humanities Center

August 29, 6 PM

987 Ivy Ave E, St Paul 55106

Light dinner served

Come back for the registration link!

Mináǧi kiŋ dowáŋ translates to "My Spirit Sings" in Dakota. The film honors the life of Dakota activist and artist Zitkála-Šá, who was born in 1876 on the Yankton Reservation in South Dakota. Separated from her family and sent to boarding school in Indiana as a young girl, Zitkála-Šá suffered from the efforts to suppress her Native culture and language. She was drawn to music and became a violinist and pianist, eventually studying at the Boston Conservatory. She went on to work in Washington, D.C, where Zitkála-Šá became secretary of the Society of American Indians in 1916, the first civil rights organization created by and for Native Americans. In 1926, she founded the National Council of American Indians and continued to pursue reforms through public speaking and lobbying efforts. Zitkála-Šá was instrumental in helping Indigenous peoples gain citizenship with the 1924 Indian Citizenship Bill. Produced by the Twin Cities’ An Opera Theatre, the film presents a poetic telling of Zitkála-Šá’s life using opera as a musical vehicle with a libretto in both English and Dakota.

For more information, click here.

Co-presented by An Opera Theatre, Public Art Saint Paul, and Minnesota Humanities Center.

Mináǧi kiŋ dowáŋ: a Zitkála-Šá opera. Documentary by Director Sequoia Hauck, Librettist Hannah Johnson, Composer Lyz Jaakola, and Visual Artist Moira Villiard Produced by An Opera Theatre (AOT)

Seitu Jones, Artist • artARK • Groundwork (Dreamsong)

Integrating art, nature and place, Seitu Jones has created over 30 large-scale public artworks. He was Millennium artist-in-residence for 651 Arts, in Brooklyn, NY, and was the City of Minneapolis’ first Artist-in-Residence.

Working with his neighbors, Trust for Public Land and the City of St. Paul. he helped create Frogtown Farm, a 5-acre organically certified farm located inside a new 12-acre park St. Paul. Seitu was awarded a Forecast Public Art Grant to build a floating sculpture to act as a research vessel for the Mississippi River and is the recipient of the 2017 Distinguished Artist Award from the McKnight Foundation.

A 2013 Joyce Award, from the Joyce Foundation allowed Seitu to develop, with Public Art Saint Paul, CREATE: The Community Meal, a dinner for 2000 people at a table ½ mile long that focused on access to healthy food. His 2017 HeARTside Community Meal for 250 people in Grand Rapids, MI, was awarded the Grand Juried Prize for ArtPrize Nine. In 2019, Seitu created a meal for the Indianapolis Art Museum, and in 2021 he created a meal for the Bemis Center for Contemporary Art in Omaha.

Locations: artARK at the Watergate Marina and other locations (schedule to be posted); Groundwork exhibition at Dreamsong.

Masanari Kawahara, Artist • Prairie|Concrete

Masanari Kawahara 川原正也 is a mover/multidisciplinary theatre/teaching artist from Japan. His performance training began in Twin Cities where he learned from Theatre de la June Lune, creating physical theatre in ensemble; via In the Heart of the Beast Theatre, puppetry and working with objects in community setting; past 13 years focusing his time in Butoh movement practice via Gadu Doushin, which brings so much joy, stillness and freedom.

Location: Frogtown Farm, Hidden Falls Regional Park, Western Sculpture Park

Project: Prairie|Concrete is an outdoor embodied movement project by lead artist, Pramila Vasudevan and the Aniccha Arts collaborative, commissioned by Public Art St. Paul (PASP). This project will bring visibility to plant cycles and growing practices through embodied listening and movement sessions with communities in St. Paul, Minnesota. The commission will unfold across 3 City of St. Paul Parks – Frogtown Farm, Hidden Falls Regional Park and Western Sculpture Park – through one rehearsal, 3 movement workshops, and one event at each site as part of the first Wakpa Triennial Arts Festival.

Douglas Kearney, Artist • Silverwood Poetry Trail

Douglas Kearney has published eight books ranging from poetry to essays to libretti. His most recent collection, Optic Subwoof, collects lectures from Kearney’s Bagley Wright Lecture Series. His 2021 collection, Sho (Wave Books), is a Griffin Poetry Prize and Minnesota Book Award winner, and a National Book Award, Pen America, and Big Other Book Award finalist. He is the 2021 recipient of OPERA America’s Campbell Opera Librettist Prize, created and generously funded by librettist/lyricist Mark Campbell. Kearney is a 2022 McKnight Writing Fellow. A Whiting Writer’s and Foundation for Contemporary Arts Cy Twombly awardee with residencies/fellowships from Cave Canem, The Rauschenberg Foundation, and others, he teaches Creative Writing at the University of Minnesota–Twin Cities.

Location: Silverwood Park

Project: Silverwood’s Poetry Trail is a self-guided audio tour featuring work by local and regional poets and writers. Six stops are located next to a bench along a paved trail that loops around the park moving from forest to lake to prairie. The 2023 - 24 poets were curated by Su Hwang.

R.J. Kern, Artist • It’s the People

R. J. Kern is a Minneapolis-based artist whose work explores ideas of home, ancestry and the sense of place. Inspired by master painters of the 19th-century, he embraces the heightened expressivity of natural and artificial lighting techniques paired with tableaux narration. His awards and accolades include three Artist Initiative Grants from the Minnesota State Arts Board (2016, 2018, 2020). He was the Commemorative Artist for the 2019 Minnesota State Fair. His work has been presented in a number of publications, including a feature in National Geographic. Selected collections include: Minneapolis Institute of Art, Plains Art Museum, Minnesota Historical Society and Museum of Fine Arts in Houston.

Location: Hennepin Theatre District

Project: Hennepin Theatre Trust’s 2023-24 edition of It’s the People features large-scale photo banners along Hennepin Avenue in downtown Minneapolis. This public art initiative is inspired by the exceptional, everyday people whose experiences, contributions and stories create the unique vibrancy of our shared communities.

Stacy King, Artist • The Sounds of Frogtown

Location: Center For Hmong Arts and Talent

Laura LeBlanc, Artist • Flower Power VII

Location: Mounds Park

Chris Larson, Artist • The Residue of Labor

Chris Larson is a multimedia artist that lives and works in Saint Paul, Minnesota. He integrates actions of sculpture, video, photography and drawing to respond to specific architectural spaces, sites, and their histories. Using relocation, replication, and repetition, he questions the inextricable relationships between body, machine, labor, and home. He disassembles the idea of the permanence of architecture, and introduces a new concept of fluid architecture that he uses to analyze the illusion of stability and draw attention to and challenge the unintended consequences of progress. He acknowledges that the conversations of the everyday hold vast potential for the examination of socio-historical complexities and the transcendental realities of object and body. Through gathering, archiving and restoration as a means of transformation, Larson’s work continues to evoke actions of reverence and renewal.

Location: Empty Walgreens downtown St Paul

Chenta Laury, Artist • Paper Is People: Decolonizing Global Paper Cultures

Originally from O’ahu, Chenta Laury is a Maui-based artist and educator. She has exhibited in shows throughout the country and her work is held in numerous private collections, including the Four Seasons Hotels & Resorts, as well as in the Hawai’i State Art Museum in Honolulu. Chenta received an undergraduate degree in studio art and art history from Oberlin College, a Masters from Harvard University, and a Certificate in Applied Arts from the Fiber Crafts Studio in Chestnut Ridge, NY. Chenta’s recent work straddles the lines between craft and fine art, representational, abstract, and conceptual vocabularies, and merges artistic traditions related to her biological origins: patchwork quilting (African-American) and felting (Finnish), with tapa (barkcloth) and artistic traditions from Hawai`i.

Location: Minnesota Center for Book Arts

Project: Paper Is People: Decolonizing Global Paper Cultures, co-curated by Tia Blassingame and Stephanie Sauer, offers a new definition of paper within a global and decolonial framework, opening up a conversation around what paper is across cultures today. In the Indigenous and oral cultures represented here, weavings, tapestries, and other handmade substrates act as vessels and embodiments of collective culture and memory. See paper samples and source materials, watch papermaking processes from source to finish, read interviews and watch videos from traditional practitioners, experience how contemporary artists are finding new applications for ancient technologies, and participate in a variety of workshops and talks. Join us at mnbookarts.org/paper-is-people

Aimee Lee, Artist • Paper Is People: Decolonizing Global Paper Cultures

Aimee Lee is an artist who makes paper, writes, and advocates for Korean papermaking practices. Designated as an Ohio Arts Council Heritage Fellow, she is a two-time Fulbright scholar to Korea, where she learned about making hanji, its applications, and its tools, and has studied with various Korean national and provincial holders of intangible cultural heritage since 2009. Her research is embodied in her artwork, teaching, and practice at her dedicated hanji studio in South Euclid, Ohio.

Location: Minnesota Center for Book Arts

Stephanie Lindquist, Artist • Groundwork

Stephanie Lindquist is a visual artist and cultural producer from Los Angeles. Her work is rooted in experimentation and research particularly in relationship with plants, history, and materiality. Lindquist received her BA in Visual and Urban Studies from Columbia University in 2009 and MFA in Interdisciplinary Art and Social Practice from the University of Minnesota in 2022. Her work has been exhibited throughout New York City and more recently in the Midwest. She looks forward to participating in a forthcoming ecological exhibition at the Law Warschaw Gallery at Macalester College in summer/fall 2023. Stephanie is presently an Artist-in-Residence at Second Shift Studios and Macalester College where she is thinking and feeling through her relationship with the Mississippi River among activists, artists, humanities scholars, and scientists.

Location: Dreamsong & Second Shift

Project: Groundwork, presented by Dreamsong, is a group exhibition that takes terra firma as both subject and medium. A signifier of place, territory, and identity, a wellspring of life-giving nutrients, and a site of conflict over land-based indigenous rights and environmental protection, soil offers a rich prism through which the present may be both imagined and imaged. Through excavating diverse histories in artworks that take the ground as subject and material, the exhibition aims to encourage discussion about its preservation, its meaning, the claims that are made to it, and the sustenance, both spiritual and physical, that we derive from it.

Gudrun Lock, Artist • Groundwork

Gudrun Lock works with performance, sculpture, video, painting, and collaborative, socially engaged art practices. In 2019 and 2020 she received grants from the University of Minnesota’s Institute on the Environment and in 2021 and 2022 from their Institute for Advanced Study to engage human and other-than-human partners in a long-term project focused on revitalizing the buffers of active rail land. Lock knows that trees, rocks, and rivers are part of a living metabolism whose transformative powers endure even amidst ongoing extraction, colonialisms, and unsatiated consumption. Born in California, and raised in Montreal, she has lived in Minneapolis for 24 years. Her work has been installed in galleries in the US and Canada, foreclosed homes, empty storefronts, the Atlantic Ocean, and a hole in her backyard.

Location: Dreamsong 

Project: Groundwork, presented by Dreamsong, is a group exhibition that takes terra firma as both subject and medium. A signifier of place, territory, and identity, a wellspring of life-giving nutrients, and a site of conflict over land-based indigenous rights and environmental protection, soil offers a rich prism through which the present may be both imagined and imaged. Through excavating diverse histories in artworks that take the ground as subject and material, the exhibition aims to encourage discussion about its preservation, its meaning, the claims that are made to it, and the sustenance, both spiritual and physical, that we derive from it.

Yue Lor, Artist • The Sounds of Frogtown

Location: Center For Hmong Arts and Talent

SaraNoa Mark, Artist • Groundwork

SaraNoa Mark (Bronx, NY) pursues a drawing practice that investigates traces left by time, as they exist in landscapes and in collective memory. SaraNoa's work has been supported by a Fulbright research fellowship in Turkey. SaraNoa has received grants from Artadia, U.S. Embassy Mission Grants Program in Turkey, Luminarts Cultural Foundation, Foundation for Contemporary Art Emergency Grant, John Anson Kittredge Fund, Illinois Arts Council, Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events Individual Artists Program (DCASE), West Collection LIFTS aquision grant, and a SPARK grant. Upon graduating from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts SaraNoa was awarded a European travel scholarship. SaraNoa has been an artist in residence at the Chicago Artists Coalition, Montello Foundation, Wave Hill, the Jackman Goldwasser Residency at the Hyde Park Art Center, the Lois and Charles X. Carlson Painting Residency, Sedona Summer Colony, and Art Kibbutz. Recent exhibitions of their work have taken place at the Chicago Cultural Center, Chicago, IL; Daniel Faira Gallery, Toronto, CA; Bridge Projects, Los Angeles, CA; Davis & Langdale Company, New York, NY; Goldfinch Gallery, Chicago, IL; Sultan Han, Turkey among others. SaraNoa was one of NewCity’s 2021 breakout artists. SaraNoa is a co-director at the 4th Ward Project Space in Chicago.

Location: Dreamsong

Project: Groundwork, presented by Dreamsong, is a group exhibition that takes terra firma as both subject and medium. A signifier of place, territory, and identity, a wellspring of life-giving nutrients, and a site of conflict over land-based indigenous rights and environmental protection, soil offers a rich prism through which the present may be both imagined and imaged. Through excavating diverse histories in artworks that take the ground as subject and material, the exhibition aims to encourage discussion about its preservation, its meaning, the claims that are made to it, and the sustenance, both spiritual and physical, that we derive from it.

Boo McCaleb, Artist • Constellation: Video Storytelling

Boo is a video artist whose content creations are rooted in the community and seeks to convey intimacy through art. They believe in the empowerment and immortality of the marginalized through images and digital mediums.

Location: Rice Park

Cassandra Meyer, Artist • Prairie|Concrete

Cassandra Meyer has collaborated with Aniccha Arts on projects since 2015. She graduated from the University of Minnesota with a Bachelor’s degree in Civil Engineering and a double-major in American Indian Studies. Additionally, she has completed graduate work in Sustainable Design. She taught in a Dakota language immersion program for 4 years after her undergrad experience and has now worked at the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency for over 10 years in air quality permitting. She currently sits on the board of a local food co-op, working to support the social and environmental values the co-op promotes. Broadly, Cassandra is interested in amelioration, living with integrity, healing, and humor.

Location: Frogtown Farm, Hidden Falls Regional Park, Western Sculpture Park

Project: Prairie|Concrete is an outdoor embodied movement project by lead artist, Pramila Vasudevan and the Aniccha Arts collaborative, commissioned by Public Art St. Paul (PASP). This project will bring visibility to plant cycles and growing practices through embodied listening and movement sessions with communities in St. Paul, Minnesota. The commission will unfold across 3 City of St. Paul Parks – Frogtown Farm, Hidden Falls Regional Park and Western Sculpture Park – through one rehearsal, 3 movement workshops, and one event at each site as part of the first Wakpa Triennial Arts Festival.

Jane Ramseyer Miller, Artist • ReMembering: Singing Waters

Location: Walker Art Center

Alva Mooses, Artist • Groundwork

Alva Mooses is a New York-based interdisciplinary artist. Through her art practice, she investigates the relationships between bodily traces, migration, and informal semantic systems as they emerge from processes of fugitive mark-making. Her work across print media, cast paper, book arts, and sculpture engages with earth-based materials like volcanic stones, adobe bricks, sand, cement, and clay to create an index of place and signal the memory of geological time. Alva Mooses received her BFA from The Cooper Union and MFA from Yale University. She has exhibited her work, curated exhibitions, and organized educational projects in the U.S. and Latin America for over a decade. She is co-founder/director of the collective LAZO, and serves on the Editorial Advisory Board for the online platform Latinx Spaces. Alva has completed residencies and fellowships at Greenwich House Pottery, The Center for Book Arts, The Lower East Side Print Shop, Socrates Sculpture Park, The Clemente Center, The University of Chicago, and Columbia College, among others. Recent exhibitions include All That Light (Logan Center for the Arts, Chicago), (Be)Longing (TSA, Brooklyn), Space Coiled Like A Serpent (LES Print Shop), You Enter Dancing/ There’s Always Sign (The Clemente Center), Cito, Longe, Tarde, (Haynes Project, Chicago), Se Entra Bailando (Socrates Sculpture Park), Buen Vivir (Mexic-Arte Museum, Austin), Retrato de un Paisaje (Museo Sívori, Buenos Aires), A Day’s Dust (Studio17, Stavanger, Norway), and Internalized Borders (John Jay College). Alva has taught Printmaking, Sculpture, and Drawing at The Cooper Union and Cornell University. She is currently an Associate Professor at Hunter College.

Location:Dreamsong

Project: Groundwork, presented by Dreamsong, is a group exhibition that takes terra firma as both subject and medium. A signifier of place, territory, and identity, a wellspring of life-giving nutrients, and a site of conflict over land-based indigenous rights and environmental protection, soil offers a rich prism through which the present may be both imagined and imaged. Through excavating diverse histories in artworks that take the ground as subject and material, the exhibition aims to encourage discussion about its preservation, its meaning, the claims that are made to it, and the sustenance, both spiritual and physical, that we derive from it.

Fumi Nakamura, Artist • Waking Worlds: Wondrous Reads for Curious Minds

Fumi Nakamura is an artist and illustrator based in New York City. Born in Shizuoka, Japan, she moved to the Bay Area of California when she was 12. She is represented by Thinkspace Art Projects in Los Angeles, and her commissions include original work for clients such as Harper's Magazine, HarperCollins, Milkweed Editions, Puma, GAP, Dior, Urban Outfitters, and the Cornucopia Institute. Nakamura illustrated Aimee Nezhukumatathil’s best-selling book World of Wonders: In Praise of Fireflies, Whale Sharks, and Other Astonishments (2020, Milkweed Editions).

Location: MN Marine Art Museum

Project: The exhibition features original illustrations from three book projects; Mary Casanova’s Wake Up Island (University of Minnesota Press) and Hush, Hush, Forest (University of Minnesota Press) as illustrated by printmaker Nick Wroblewski, and World of Wonders: In Praise of Fireflies, Whale Sharks, and Other Astonishments (Milkweed Editions) written by Aimee Nezhukumatathil and illustrated by Fumi Nakamura. Selections from all three books will be accompanied by wood carvings from the Minnesota Marine Art Museum’s collection of Leo and Mariylyn Smith folk art - a collection of sculptures informed by the whimsy and wonder of the Mississippi River marine environments - interspersed throughout the gallery.

Sarah Nassif, Artist • Waking Worlds: Wondrous Reads for Curious Minds

Location: MWMO

Ryan Gerald Nelson, Artist • Groundwork

Ryan Gerald Nelson (b. 1983) is an American artist working across various mediums and scales. His works include artist books, large-scale silkscreen works on paper and canvas, experimental printmaking, sculpture, and writings regarding the Image as an entity and cultural force.

Location: Dreamsong

Project: Groundwork, presented by Dreamsong, is a group exhibition that takes terra firma as both subject and medium. A signifier of place, territory, and identity, a wellspring of life-giving nutrients, and a site of conflict over land-based indigenous rights and environmental protection, soil offers a rich prism through which the present may be both imagined and imaged. Through excavating diverse histories in artworks that take the ground as subject and material, the exhibition aims to encourage discussion about its preservation, its meaning, the claims that are made to it, and the sustenance, both spiritual and physical, that we derive from it.

Crystal Norcross, Artist • Flower Power VII

Location: Mounds Park

Sabrina Nur, Artist • Flower Power VII

Location: Mounds Park

Jacqueline Nuzzo, Artist • Group Exhibition at Public Functionary

Location: Public Functionary

Margaret Ogas, Artist • Prairie|Concrete

Margaret Ogas (she/her) is the program manager for Prairie|Concrete. She is a choreographer, performer, and teaching artist based in Saint Paul. Using an interdisciplinary approach rooted in dance and informed by Chicana cultural sensibilities, her works tell surreal everyday stories through a collage of movement, text and sound. Ogas is a 2023 Jerome Hill Artist Fellow. She received a 2022 Next Step Fund grant from the Metropolitan Regional Arts Council and was a 2021 Naked Stages Fellow at Pillsbury House + Theatre. When she’s not dancing, Margaret works at Belwin Conservancy, a land-based nonprofit in Afton, MN.

Location: Frogtown Farm, Hidden Falls Regional Park, Western Sculpture Park

Project: Prairie|Concrete is an outdoor embodied movement project by lead artist, Pramila Vasudevan and the Aniccha Arts collaborative, commissioned by Public Art St. Paul (PASP). This project will bring visibility to plant cycles and growing practices through embodied listening and movement sessions with communities in St. Paul, Minnesota. The commission will unfold across 3 City of St. Paul Parks – Frogtown Farm, Hidden Falls Regional Park and Western Sculpture Park – through one rehearsal, 3 movement workshops, and one event at each site as part of the first Wakpa Triennial Arts Festival.

One Voice Mixed Chorus • ReMembering: Singing Waters

Location: Walker Art Center

Radha Pandey • Paper Is People: Decolonizing Global Paper Cultures

Radha Pandey is a papermaker and letterpress printer. She earned her MFA in Book Arts from the University of Iowa Center for the Book. She specializes in Indo-Islamic Papermaking and teaches book arts classes in India, Europe and the US. Her book, Anatomia Botanica, won the MICA Book Award in 2014 and received an Honorable Mention at the 15th Carl Hertzog Award for Excellence in Book Design. In 2018, her book, Deep Time, won the Joshua Heller Memorial Award. Her books are held in over 80 collections internationally, including the Library of Congress and Yale University. Currently, Radha is working on an artist book inspired by Mughal floral portraiture from the 17th century, for which the paper will be made in the traditional Indo-Islamic style.

Location: Minnesota Center for Book Arts

Project: Paper Is People: Decolonizing Global Paper Cultures, co-curated by Tia Blassingame and Stephanie Sauer, offers a new definition of paper within a global and decolonial framework, opening up a conversation around what paper is across cultures today. In the Indigenous and oral cultures represented here, weavings, tapestries, and other handmade substrates act as vessels and embodiments of collective culture and memory. See paper samples and source materials, watch papermaking processes from source to finish, read interviews and watch videos from traditional practitioners, experience how contemporary artists are finding new applications for ancient technologies, and participate in a variety of workshops and talks. Join us at mnbookarts.org/paper-is-people

Andres Perez, Artist • It’s the People

Andres Perez is a Mexican-American artist exploring identity and culture through photography. Native to Acapulco, Guerrero, he moved to Minnesota at the age of 18 and started working professionally as an artist in 2005. He is a self-taught photographer, beginning his career in graphic design and eventually pivoting into photography. Andres currently works at Pollen Midwest as an Art Director, and is focusing on portrait photography projects that benefit artists and their work.

Location: Hennepin Theatre District

 Project: Hennepin Theatre Trust’s 2023-24 edition of It’s the People features large-scale photo banners along Hennepin Avenue in downtown Minneapolis. This public art initiative is inspired by the exceptional, everyday people whose experiences, contributions and stories create the unique vibrancy of our shared communities.

Junauda Petrus, Artist • Silverwood Poetry Trail

Junauda Petrus is a creative activist, writer, playwright, and multi-dimensional performance artist who is born on Dakota land, West-Indian descended, and African-sourced. Her work centers around Black wildness, futurism, ancestral healing, sweetness, spectacle and shimmer. She is the author of The Stars And The Blackness Between Them, winner of the 2020 Coretta Scott King Honor Book Award. Petrus has written works for the stage, screen and page, employing poetics and experiences re-membered via ancestral dreaming and research of their lost stories. She is inspired by her parents and ancestors who immigrated from the Caribbean bringing their magic and trauma with them, and her art ripples with their legacy. She is influenced by the Middle Passage and diaspora, Black folks in Minneapolis, ancestral magic, and stories of queerness and womanhood within these contexts. Speculative fiction and magical realist elements are central to her work.

Location: Silverwood Park

Project: Silverwood’s Poetry Trail is a self-guided audio tour featuring work by local and regional poets and writers. Six stops are located next to a bench along a paved trail that loops around the park moving from forest to lake to prairie. The 2023 - 24 poets were curated by Su Hwang.

Nikki Praus, Artist • Groundwork

Nikki Praus contorts soil into poetic calls-to-action that leave the viewer with a sense of personal responsibility for their impact on the environment. Praus states, “The work serves as a montage of this grief-ridden, wonderful, decomposing, birthing, ever-loving, ever-hurting, ever-evolving landscape that will hopefully inspire us to heal.” Harnessing the abject as a way to capture attention, Praus’s practice brings dirt into the gallery as a way to critique the human imprint on the environment.

Location: Dreamsong

Project: Groundwork, presented by Dreamsong, is a group exhibition that takes terra firma as both subject and medium. A signifier of place, territory, and identity, a wellspring of life-giving nutrients, and a site of conflict over land-based indigenous rights and environmental protection, soil offers a rich prism through which the present may be both imagined and imaged. Through excavating diverse histories in artworks that take the ground as subject and material, the exhibition aims to encourage discussion about its preservation, its meaning, the claims that are made to it, and the sustenance, both spiritual and physical, that we derive from it.

Mary Anne Quiroz, Artist

Location: Bloomington Civic Plaza Art Center

Steph Rue, Artist • Paper Is People: Decolonizing Global Paper Cultures

Steph Rue is an artist working primarily with handmade paper and books as her medium. She received her MFA degree from the University of Iowa Center for the Book and BA degree from Stanford University. She is a 2015-2016 recipient of a Fulbright Research Grant to South Korea, where she studied traditional Korean bookbinding, papermaking, and printing. Her artist books and paper works are held in a number of public and private collections, including Yale University, The Metropolitan Museum of Art Library, and the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco. Steph is a co-founder of the Korean American Artist Collective and a member of the Book/Print Artist/Scholar of Color Collective. She is also a co-founder of Hanji Edition, a publisher of fine art and print works with/on hanji. Steph teaches workshops and classes on papermaking, bookmaking, and related arts, with an emphasis on East Asian techniques, and has taught at Mills College and the San Francisco Center for the Book. Her current project, supported by an NEA grant through the City of Sacramento, is to collect stories of immigration from Korean communities through the study of papermaking and natural dyes. Steph lives and works out of her home studio in Sacramento, CA.

Location: Minnesota Center for Book Arts

Project: Paper Is People: Decolonizing Global Paper Cultures, co-curated by Tia Blassingame and Stephanie Sauer, offers a new definition of paper within a global and decolonial framework, opening up a conversation around what paper is across cultures today. In the Indigenous and oral cultures represented here, weavings, tapestries, and other handmade substrates act as vessels and embodiments of collective culture and memory. See paper samples and source materials, watch papermaking processes from source to finish, read interviews and watch videos from traditional practitioners, experience how contemporary artists are finding new applications for ancient technologies, and participate in a variety of workshops and talks. Join us at mnbookarts.org/paper-is-people.

SEE MORE PERSPECTIVE • Constellation: Video Storytelling

SEE MORE PERSPECTIVE is a Xicanx hip-hop artist, producer, spoken word poet, & social justice educator. They create work with an unrelenting commitment to craft, innovation, and community and make a life of creating art through the lenses of identity, history, and culture.

Location: Rice Park

Christopher Selleck, Artist • It’s the People

Christopher Selleck was born in Augusta, GA. He has spent the last twenty years working in and around the art scene of the Minneapolis area. He received his BFA in Photography from the University of Minnesota Twin Cities in 2013 and his MFA in Visual Studies and Photography from the Minneapolis College of Art & Design in 2016. Using sports and masculinity as a lens to view identity, his various projects of the last few years have focused on this area of identity construction. His current projects address issues of hyper-masculinity, sexuality and the male body. His work has always had an affinity for traditional forms of photography but with a more conceptual approach. Working with film, instant and digital processes his practice has tended to focus on portrait and self-portrait-based projects. Photographic prints and books have been central in his practice, but his work has also incorporated video, sound, installation, printmaking and sculpture. He has been exhibited and published both Nationally and Regionally.

Location: Minnesota Center for Book Arts

Project: Hennepin Theatre Trust’s 2023-24 edition of It’s the People features large-scale photo banners along Hennepin Avenue in downtown Minneapolis. This public art initiative is inspired by the exceptional, everyday people whose experiences, contributions and stories create the unique vibrancy of our shared communities.

Seringô Collective • Paper Is People: Decolonizing Global Paper Cultures

The artists of the Seringô Collective combine design, comfort, innovation and possibility to transform the lives of communities that keep the Amazon standing. An institution and brand that works with social and environmental initiatives that combine community development, innovation and culture based on the extraction, processing and use of Amazonian natural rubber for crafts and shoes, based in the states of Pará, Acre, Amazonas, Rondônia and Tocantins in North Region of Brazil.

Location: Minnesota Center for Book Arts

Project: Paper Is People: Decolonizing Global Paper Cultures, co-curated by Tia Blassingame and Stephanie Sauer, offers a new definition of paper within a global and decolonial framework, opening up a conversation around what paper is across cultures today. In the Indigenous and oral cultures represented here, weavings, tapestries, and other handmade substrates act as vessels and embodiments of collective culture and memory. See paper samples and source materials, watch papermaking processes from source to finish, read interviews and watch videos from traditional practitioners, experience how contemporary artists are finding new applications for ancient technologies, and participate in a variety of workshops and talks. Join us at mnbookarts.org/paper-is-people

Witt Siasoco, Artist • Constellation: Video Storytelling

Witt Siasoco has been actively engaged at the intersection of the arts & civic process for more than 20years. Siasoco was selected by the City of Minneapolis as a Creative City making Artist, a year-long collaboration between artists and City planners. His studio practice is rooted in creating art in public space that catalyzes civic dialogue and collective action. Siasoco was also a MN State Arts Board recipient for the Richfield Artist Residency Engagement, a residency utilizing art as an invitation to residents to participate in planning Richfield’s future. Witt was part of an artist cohort that created public art for the newly built Minneapolis Services Building in downtown Minneapolis. Siasoco’s public art project, This Home is Not for Sale, was an Americans for the Arts’ Public Art Award recipient, highlighting compelling national public art projects. Recently Siasoco was awarded a Jerome Foundation Artist Fellowship for the Visual Arts.

Location: Rice Park

Miko Simmons, Artist • Constellation: Video Storytelling

Miko Simmons is an international, award-winning multimedia artist, animator, and composer. Educated in physics and art and based in St. Paul, his work blurs the lines between art and technology, theater and cinema, music and visuals, media and medium. He has been innovating in the convergence of Film/3D Animation with Theatrical production and interactive techniques for more than twenty years, providing creative direction/design for motion graphics, animation, and digital media production services. Miko has consistently raised the creative bar for eloquent design and functionality in multiple industries, both corporate and creative. His work has been featured at The MN Opera, The Ordway Center for Performing Arts, The Guthrie Theatre, and Walker Arts Center. He created A Monumental Life Video Projection Design for Martin Luther King Monument unveiling ceremony on National Mall, Washington D.C. He has worked internationally in Korea, Japan, Russia, Spain, Ecuador, and Australia.

Location: Rice Park

Mona Smith, Artist • Maǧážu (Rain)

Mona Smith, Sisseton-Wahpeton Dakota, is a multi-media artist, educator and co-founder of Allies: media/art and the Healing Place Collaborative. Her media work includes art projects for the web – bdemakaska.net, bdotememorymap.org – and multimedia installation work – most notably, Bde Maka Ska public art collaboration and website, 2020, Cloudy Waters: Dakota Reflections on the River (Minnesota History Center, 2005, and permanent audio installation at the Mill City Museum’s Ruins Courtyard at the Minneapolis Riverfront, 2011, and Science Museum of Minnesota, 2015), the Bdote Memory Map (with the Minnesota Humanities Center), and the multi-media Dakota welcome installation to the Hearts of our People: Native Women Artists exhibition at the Minneapolis Institute of Art, 2019. She has served as consultant for the planning for Indian Mounds Park (sic) and provided video work for the site. She has been part of the Dakota Community Council, is a member of the Native Partnership Council of the Friends of the Falls and is currently in pre-production for a commission with the M, the Minnesota Museum of American Art, in St. Paul, MN. She is a member of the PLaCE (Place, Location and Context and Environment) Research Consortium based at the University of West England in Bristol, England, and is a member of the Mapping Spectral Traces International Network. Her artistic and educational work uses image, sound and place to work “between” – the place of healing, of relationship, of meaning where spirit and physical, life and death, fear and strength, night and day intersect.

Location: Minnesota Museum of American Art

Project: Maǧážu (Rain), a video installation commissioned by Public Art Saint Paul for the Wakpa Triennial, will welcome visitors to the M. The purpose of the installation is to introduce visitors to Dakota homeland, to a range of urban Dakota older women and to some Dakota notions of water and relationship to the river.

Moheb Soliman, Artist • Silverwood Poetry Trail

Moheb Soliman is an interdisciplinary poet from Egypt and the Midwest. He has presented writing, performance, installation, and video work at diverse literary, art, and public spaces in the US and Canada with support from the Banff Centre, Pillsbury House, Joyce Foundation, Minnesota State Arts Board, and the Tulsa Artist Fellowship where he was a multi-year resident, among others. He has degrees from The New School for Social Research and the University of Toronto and currently live in Minnesota outside the Twin Cities, coupled with hybrid writer Kathryn Savage, her son, and his dog. Important to highlight, his first poetry book, HOMES (Coffee House Press 2021), dwells in the natural-cultural sprawl of the Great Lakes region as it reckons like much of his work with issues of modernity, identity, place and belonging.

Location: Silverwood Park

Project: Silverwood’s Poetry Trail is a self-guided audio tour featuring work by local and regional poets and writers. Six stops are located next to a bench along a paved trail that loops around the park moving from forest to lake to prairie. The 2023 - 24 poets were curated by Su Hwang.

Mary Austin Speaker, Artist • Silverwood Poetry Trail

Mary Austin Speaker is a poet and book designer. She is currently Creative Director of Milkweed Editions, where she also directs the Milkweed Fellowship program and leads diversity, equity, access and inclusion efforts. Her first full-length collection, Ceremony, was selected by Matthea Harvey as winner of the 2012 Slope Editions book prize and was published in February 2013. Her second book, The Bridge, was published in January 2016 by Shearsman Books.

Location: Silverwood Park

Project: Silverwood’s Poetry Trail is a self-guided audio tour featuring work by local and regional poets and writers. Six stops are located next to a bench along a paved trail that loops around the park moving from forest to lake to prairie. The 2023 - 24 poets were curated by Su Hwang.

Sandy Spieler, Artist • Here, Now - Instructions for ‘Listening’

Sandy Spieler is a sculptor, painter, graphic artist, teacher, activist, collaborator, and perpetual student. Her work includes performances, public installations, and residencies in diverse situations. Led by reverence, awe, outrage, and love, she connects local and intimate experience with global issues, deepening a practice of inter-being. Sandy’s vital education rises from being a mother and an active community participant. She holds an MA of Cultural Performance from Bristol University in England, served as director of In the Heart of the Beast Puppet and Mask Theatre and the Annual Mayday Ceremony for 45 years, and was granted the McKnight Foundation’s 2014 “Distinguished Artist of the Year” award. Sandy is particularly passionate about work for the Water, and the power of Art to waken us to the ‘everyday miracle’.

Location: Bloomington Civic Plaza Art Center

Project: In solidarity with WAKPA Triennial Art Festival: A pop-up activity to encourage deep listening into the present site of the South Loop District; in the Here and Now. This activity is initiated and guided by Tara Tanagidan To Win and Sandy Spieler. Will you come and listen with us? You will be invited to use all your senses... of ears, eyes, feet, mind, and heart. Your detailed observations will be valued toward our on-going research of this place.

Dameun Strange, Artist • Prairie|Concrete

Dameun Strange is a sound explorer, multi-instrumentalist, composer, and sound designer whose conceptual electronic and improvised electro-acoustic works focus on stories and themes of the African diaspora, often exploring surrealist and afro-futurist ideas with unique impressionism. He currently lives in the Frogtown Community of Saint Paul, MN with his wife, Corina, and their inquisitive 5 year-old, Ezra.

Location: Frogtown Farm, Hidden Falls Regional Park, Western Sculpture Park

Project: Prairie|Concrete is an outdoor embodied movement project by lead artist, Pramila Vasudevan and the Aniccha Arts collaborative, commissioned by Public Art St. Paul (PASP). This project will bring visibility to plant cycles and growing practices through embodied listening and movement sessions with communities in St. Paul, Minnesota. The commission will unfold across 3 City of St. Paul Parks – Frogtown Farm, Hidden Falls Regional Park and Western Sculpture Park – through one rehearsal, 3 movement workshops, and one event at each site as part of the first Wakpa Triennial Arts Festival.

Skye Tafoya, Artist • Paper Is People: Decolonizing Global Paper Cultures

Skye Tafoya is an Indigenous artist from the Eastern Band Cherokee and Santa Clara Pueblo tribes. Her tribal heritage and lineage are significant components continuously present within her artwork. Skye comes from a lineage of basket-weavers, both paternal and maternal, and also used to make red willow baskets with her dad. skye continues to use paper-weaving processes to honor her loved ones and ancestors. Her meticulously crafted designs, patterns, prints, and weavings are influenced by basketry and contains themes of cultural teachings, Cherokee language preservation, motherhood and personal & family narratives. Skye creates with the intention of archiving, preserving and sharing stories, language, culture, and experiences. Skye has worked in both two-dimensional and three-dimensional forms ranging in sizes from hand-held to life-size. The methods of her art practice include serigraph (screen-printing), relief and letterpress printmaking, digital design, paper-weaving, and book-making. Skye published her first artist book, Ul’nigid’, in the spring of 2020 and has exhibited work nationally and internationally in Russia. Her work is also housed in many special collections including the U.s. Library of Congress, Kohler Art Library, and the Bainbridge Museum of Art. She received her B.F.A. from the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, NM and her M.F.A. from the Pacific Northwest College of Art in Portland, OR.

Location: Minnesota Center for Book Arts

Project: Paper Is People: Decolonizing Global Paper Cultures, co-curated by Tia Blassingame and Stephanie Sauer, offers a new definition of paper within a global and decolonial framework, opening up a conversation around what paper is across cultures today. In the Indigenous and oral cultures represented here, weavings, tapestries, and other handmade substrates act as vessels and embodiments of collective culture and memory. See paper samples and source materials, watch papermaking processes from source to finish, read interviews and watch videos from traditional practitioners, experience how contemporary artists are finding new applications for ancient technologies, and participate in a variety of workshops and talks. Join us at mnbookarts.org/paper-is-people

Jasmine Kar Tang, Artist • Prairie|Concrete

Jasmine Kar Tang (she/her/hers) has been working with Aniccha Arts since 2010. Jasmine’s role was more consultative in the beginning, involving dramaturgical feedback and research on the conceptual elements of productions. This expanded into dancing and thinking about praxis. The daughter of immigrants from Hong Kong and Thailand, Jasmine is committed to the pursuit of an equitable, liberatory artmaking/rehearsal process. She also brings her experience as an educator to the work, thinking hard about group dynamics and facilitation. Jasmine‘s day job is as Co-Director at the Center for Writing and as Affiliate Graduate Faculty member in Literacy and Rhetorical Studies at the University of Minnesota–Twin Cities.

Location: Frogtown Farm, Hidden Falls Regional Park, Western Sculpture Park

Project: Prairie|Concrete is an outdoor embodied movement project by lead artist, Pramila Vasudevan and the Aniccha Arts collaborative, commissioned by Public Art St. Paul (PASP). This project will bring visibility to plant cycles and growing practices through embodied listening and movement sessions with communities in St. Paul, Minnesota. The commission will unfold across 3 City of St. Paul Parks – Frogtown Farm, Hidden Falls Regional Park and Western Sculpture Park – through one rehearsal, 3 movement workshops, and one event at each site as part of the first Wakpa Triennial Arts Festival.

Xavier Tavera, Artist • Evocation of a Latin Dance Club 

Xavier Tavera is a photographer, filmmaker, sculptor, installation artist, and co-founder of Grupo Soap del Corazon, a Latinx collective based in the Twin Cities. Their 22-year history has been recognized by 2022 exhibitions at Plains Art Museum and the MN Museum of American Art. Tavera has shown his work extensively in the Twin Cities, nationally and internationally including Germany, Scotland, Mexico, Chile, Uruguay and China. He is a recipient of the McKnight Fellowship, Jerome Travel Award, Minnesota State Arts Board grants, and the Bronica Scholarship. He is assistant professor in the Department of Art at Carleton College, Northfield.

Location: 27th and Lake St, Minneapolis, SE Corner

Project: Xavier Tavera has proposed a sound and sculpture installation, Evocation of a Latin Dance Club, that remembers and honors the culture of Nuevo Rodeo, a nightclub on Lake Street in Minneapolis that burned in the uprising following George Floyd’s murder. Xavier attended dances and concerts at Nuevo Rodeo and even played drums in a band that played there. The nightclub often featured Latinx cowboy bands while also serving very diverse communities from Hmong to African Americans. He hopes to install his work at the former site of the nightclub.

Jonathan Thunder, Artist • Constellation: Video Storytelling

Jonathan Thunder is known for surrealistic painting and digitally animated films and installations in which headdresses personal experience, Indigenous perspective, environmental welfare, and humorous social commentary. He has presented outdoor video projections at the Northern Spark Festival. Thunder attended the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA) in Santa Fe, NM and studied Visual Effects and Motion Graphics in Minneapolis, MN at the Art Institute International. He is an enrolled member of the Red Lake Band of Ojibwe and makes his home and studio in Duluth, MN. He recently was awarded the first Jim Denomie Memorial Fellowship, named in honor of a beloved Ojibway artist who passed away in 2022.

Location: Rice Park

Tanaǧidaŋ To Wiŋ (Tara Perron), Artist • Here, Now - Instructions for ‘Listening’

Tanaǧidaŋ To Wiŋ is a Dakota and Ojibwe mother. She grew up in Saint Paul, Minnesota. She studied Dakota language and culture at Metro State University. She is the author of Takoza: Walks With the Blue Moon Girl, Animals of Khéya Wíta, and Animals of Nimaamaa-Aki. Tara is inspired by the loving hearts of her sons: she is a creator, plant medicine enthusiast, and has always loved to write. She believes in the healing power of storytelling.

Location: Bloomington Civic Plaza Art Center

Project: In solidarity with WAKPA Triennial Art Festival: A pop-up activity to encourage deep listening into the present site of the South Loop District; in the Here and Now. This activity is initiated and guided by Tara Tanagidan To Win and Sandy Spieler. Will you come and listen with us? You will be invited to use all your senses... of ears, eyes, feet, mind, and heart. Your detailed observations will be valued toward our on-going research of this place.

Alejandra C. Tobar Alatriz, Artist • Prairie|Concrete

Alejandra C. (she/her) is a queer, immigrant storyteller, healing justice practitioner and entrepreneur. She leads through arts organizing and works towards embodiment of the masses. She descends from people of Chile and Mexico and lives on unceded traditional territories of the Dakota people, also known as Minneapolis, Minnesota with her two senior pups, Oso and Tigre.

Location: Frogtown Farm, Hidden Falls Regional Park, Western Sculpture Park

Project: Prairie|Concrete is an outdoor embodied movement project by lead artist, Pramila Vasudevan and the Aniccha Arts collaborative, commissioned by Public Art St. Paul (PASP). This project will bring visibility to plant cycles and growing practices through embodied listening and movement sessions with communities in St. Paul, Minnesota. The commission will unfold across 3 City of St. Paul Parks – Frogtown Farm, Hidden Falls Regional Park and Western Sculpture Park – through one rehearsal, 3 movement workshops, and one event at each site as part of the first Wakpa Triennial Arts Festival.

Ian Tweedy, Artist • Groundwork

Milan-based American artist Ian Tweedy began his career as a street artist, finding success and inspiration in Germany on the streets of Hamburg, Dusseldorf, Frankfurt, and Weisband. Over time, Tweedy moved his graffiti art techniques indoors, using personal items, historical objects, and documents of the past as the canvas for his bold graphic interventions. Tweedy's immersive installations include works in a variety of media including video, drawing, and painting. A deep concern with history is pervasive throughout Tweedy’s work, much of which is informed by his life of moving from place to place and never really developing deep roots with any one country or city. In his own words, “I always felt I lived on foreign territory . . . As a result, it is difficult for me to take on a particular type of cultural past. I was forced to adapt continually to different cultures, and this lack of roots led me towards the challenge of recreating a personal history." Tweedy's work has been shown at the Prague Biennial, and in group exhibitions at the Museo MAGA and the Museo Cantonale d’Arte Lugano, among many others.

Location: Dreamsong

Project: Groundwork, presented by Dreamsong, is a group exhibition that takes terra firma as both subject and medium. A signifier of place, territory, and identity, a wellspring of life-giving nutrients, and a site of conflict over land-based indigenous rights and environmental protection, soil offers a rich prism through which the present may be both imagined and imaged. Through excavating diverse histories in artworks that take the ground as subject and material, the exhibition aims to encourage discussion about its preservation, its meaning, the claims that are made to it, and the sustenance, both spiritual and physical, that we derive from it.

Angela Two Stars, Artist • Metamorphosis

Angela Two Stars (Dakota, Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate) will present her work Metamorphosis in collaboration with Pangea World Theater, Holy Trinity Lutheran Church, and Longfellow Rising. Metamorphosis acts as phase II of The Transition Stage (2021), a temporary community cocoon installation, which served as a vessel for community laments, hopes, dreams, and mottos of strength as the Longfellow neighborhood and the city of Minneapolis moved towards growth, redevelopment and healing after the 2020 murder of George Floyd and subsequent uprisings that caused destruction and devastation to the Longfellow neighborhood. 

Angela is a public artist, curator, and arts leader. She is executive director of All My Relations Gallery, a project of the Native American Community Development Institute in Minneapolis. Angela’s public art has raised awareness of the Dakota history of the Twin Cities and current Dakota culture and language. She created (with Sandy Spieler and Mona Smith) a public art environment along the shores of Bde Maka Ska that honors the Dakota people of Mni Sota and recognizes the Dakota village that was located at that site before European colonization.  Angela was commissioned by the Walker Art Center's Indigenous Public Art Commission to create a public art project for the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden. Okciyapi (Help Each Other) was installed in fall 2021.

Location: 3017 27th Ave. S., Minneapolis

Project: Metamorphosis is a participatory installation by artist, Angela Two Stars and in collaboration with Pangea World Theater, Holy Trinity Lutheran Church, and Longfellow Rising. Metamorphosis acts as phase II of The Transition Stage (2021), a temporary community cocoon installation, which served as a vessel for community laments, hopes, dreams, and mottos of strength as the Longfellow neighborhood and the city of Minneapolis moved towards growth, redevelopment and healing after the 2020 murder of George Floyd and subsequent uprisings that caused destruction and devastation to the Longfellow neighborhood.

Francis Vang, Artist • The Sounds of Frogtown

Location: Center For Hmong Arts and Talent

Pramila Vasudevan, Artist • Prairie|Concrete

Photo by Elizabeth Flores, Star Tribune

Pramila Vasudevan is the lead artist of Prairie | Concrete. With community engagement starting this fall, the project will come to fruition in public events in summer 2023 that will take place in several City of Saint Paul parks, where plant life will inspire movement among dancers and participants.

Pramila is trained in classical and contemporary Indian dance, electronic media, and political science. In 2004, she founded Aniccha Arts, an experimental collaborative producing site-specific performances. Her work has been presented at Northern Spark and in 2019, she produced Parking Ramp, a performance in a parking garage in Bloomington, MN. She is the recipient of fellowships from the Joyce Foundation, United States Artists, Guggenheim Foundation, and McKnight Foundation.

Location: Frogtown Farm, Hidden Falls Regional Park, Western Sculpture Park

Project: Prairie|Concrete is an outdoor embodied movement project by lead artist, Pramila Vasudevan and the Aniccha Arts collaborative, commissioned by Public Art St. Paul (PASP). This project will bring visibility to plant cycles and growing practices through embodied listening and movement sessions with communities in St. Paul, Minnesota. The commission will unfold across 3 City of St. Paul Parks – Frogtown Farm, Hidden Falls Regional Park and Western Sculpture Park – through one rehearsal, 3 movement workshops, and one event at each site as part of the first Wakpa Triennial Arts Festival.

Moira Villiard, Artist • Constellation: Video Storytelling

Through public art collaborations across Minnesota, Moira Villiard is a multidisciplinary artist with a mixed Indigenous and settler heritage who uses art to uplift underrepresented narratives, explore the nuance of society’s historical community intersections, and promote community healing spaces. Moira (pronounced “Miri”) is a dynamic visual artist, proficient in a variety of artistic genres, including portraiture, illustration, graphic and digital design and as a muralist. She is also a community organizer, curator and passionate arts educator concentrating her efforts around issues of equity and justice including: arts access (creating platforms for underrepresented communities within the arts), creative placemaking, environmental sustainability, youth empowerment, and acknowledgement of Indigenous land, culture, and history. Moira (Miri) grew up on the Fond du Lac Reservation in Cloquet, MN and is a Fond du Lac direct descendent. For three years she worked as the Arts & Cultural Programming Coordinator for the American Indian Community Housing Organization (AICHO), the place where she had her first art exhibition at 18 years old. She currently works as a freelance consultant, designer, speaker, and grant-writer and is the project director and lead artist of the Chief Buffalo Memorial Mural site in Duluth. Her educational, activism-rooted exhibits “Rights of the Child” and “Waiting for Beds” will be on tour in 2022, and most recently she was the featured artist at the 2021 Illuminate the Lock, where she animated and directed a 10 minute, 150’ projection piece titled “Madweyaashkaa: Waves Can Be Heard”. She was broadly recognized in 2019, when she received the 2019 Duluth NAACP “Take a Stand for the Revolution” award, 2019 Emerging City Champions fellowship, Forecast Public Art 2019 Early-Career Project Grant, 2019 YWCA Women of Distinction award, and The Duluth News Tribune 20 under 40 award. Her work has been featured in numerous shows in Duluth and around Minnesota, including her recent solo show, “Rights of the Child” at Zeitgeist, and group shows “Beyond Borders” at Mac Rostie Arts Center and “We the People” at the Minnesota Museum of American Art. She received her Bachelor’s Degree in Communicating Arts (Global Studies Minor) from the University of Wisconsin-Superior in 2016.

Location: Rice Park

Ben Weaver, Artist • Flower Power VII

Location: Mounds Park

Dr. Gwen Westerman, Artist • Silverwood Poetry Trail

Gwen Westerman

Gwen Westerman’s roots are deep in the landscape of the tall grass prairie, and reveal themselves in her art and writing through the languages and traditions of her family. She is an enrolled member of the Sisseton Wahpeton Dakota Oyate, her father’s people, and a citizen of the Cherokee Nation, her mother’s people. She is the co-author of Mni Sota Makoce: The Land of the Dakota which won a 2013 Minnesota Book Award, and a 2014 Hognander Minnesota History Award. A three-time recipient of an Artist Initiative Grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board, Gwen creates incredible textile art influenced by her life and Indigenous cultures. Since 2005, she has been creating quilts that have won awards at the juried shows of the Northern Plains Indian Art Market in Sioux Falls, the Eiteljorg Indian Art Market in Indianapolis, and the Heard Museum Guild Indian Art Fair & Market in Phoenix. Her work is in the permanent collections of the Red Cloud Heritage Center Museum in Pine Ridge, the University Art Galleries at the University of South Dakota, the Great Plains Art Museum in Lincoln, Nebraska, and the Minnesota Historical Society in St. Paul.

Location: Silverwood Park

Project: Silverwood’s Poetry Trail is a self-guided audio tour featuring work by local and regional poets and writers. Six stops are located next to a bench along a paved trail that loops around the park moving from forest to lake to prairie. The 2023 - 24 poets were curated by Su Hwang.

Bobby Wilson, Artist • Mural Installation 

Location: Wakan Tipi Awanyankapi

Nick Wroblewski, Artist • Waking Worlds: Wondrous Reads for Curious Minds

Nick Wroblewski is a Midwest based printmaker of hand cut woodblocks. His interest in art was cultivated young by a strong community of artists in Minneapolis, MN, where he grew up. Early experiences in puppetry, painting, and sculpture led to his work as a printmaker. Nick focuses on large multicolor woodcuts and has developed a distinct aesthetic reminiscent of stylized Japanese masters, yet uniquely his own. His work depicts the reverence he has for conversations of the wild and loyalty to the honesty of handcrafted arts. Nick's work can be seen in private collections and galleries throughout the country, as well as commercial design and illustrations. He lives in Duluth, Minnesota and prints from his studio near Lake Superior. Nick’s woodcut illustrations appear in Mary Casanova’s books Wake Up Island (2016) and Hush Hush, Forest (2018) from the University of Minnesota Press.

Location: MN Marine Art Museum

Project: The exhibition features original illustrations from three book projects; Mary Casanova’s Wake Up Island (University of Minnesota Press) and Hush, Hush, Forest (University of Minnesota Press) as illustrated by printmaker Nick Wroblewski, and World of Wonders: In Praise of Fireflies, Whale Sharks, and Other Astonishments (Milkweed Editions) written by Aimee Nezhukumatathil and illustrated by Fumi Nakamura. Selections from all three books will be accompanied by wood carvings from the Minnesota Marine Art Museum’s collection of Leo and Marilyn Smith folk art - a collection of sculptures informed by the whimsy and wonder of the Mississippi River marine environments - interspersed throughout the gallery.

Azzi Xiong, Artist • Flower Power VII

Location: Mounds Park

Kevin Yang, Artist • Silverwood Poetry Trail

Kevin Yang is a writer, performer, organizer, and has recently delved into filmmaking. At his core, he is a storyteller. His hunger to tell and receive stories sits at the center of each of his disciplines. As a young Hmong American born and raised in the United States, he has a deep conceptual interest for in-between spaces; between ethnicities, between generations, between experiences. Similarly, he finds great influence from artists who approach this subject matter, like Bao Phi, Jhumpa Lahiri, and Kao Kalia Yang. He also finds great influence in the communities generate the conversations that allow this subject matter to exist. He is influenced by his parents and elders, as much as he is by his baby brothers and the youth he works with, not only in what stories they tell, but how they choose to tell them. Accessibility is a value he holds dearly in his art, especially as he attempts to create art that can exist and thrive inside of these in-between spaces. Kevin is always eager to find ways to transcend or even flip barriers, like language or technology, in order to generate thought, conversation, and action between communities. For Kevin, art should always be rooted in the community, and if the community cannot receive or understand his art, then he has to find a way to change it. On the flip side, he hopes his art is not always easily digested; he hopes it encourages growth and discomfort and deep thought as needed, but he needs to know that his community understands that. He also loves to play with his art. Joy, giddyness, and laughter are important parts of his character and are all things he tries to uncover in his stories.

Location: Silverwood Park

Project: Silverwood’s Poetry Trail is a self-guided audio tour featuring work by local and regional poets and writers. Six stops are located next to a bench along a paved trail that loops around the park moving from forest to lake to prairie. The 2023 - 24 poets were curated by Su Hwang.

Keng Yang, Artist • The Sounds of Frogtown

Location: Center For Hmong Arts and Talent

Shen Yong, Artist • It’s the People

Shun Yong is a fine art photographer and multidisciplinary artist. A fear of loss, generational trauma and curiosity motivate him to make photographs. Yong’s Occupation series investigates his identity as a second-generation Chinese immigrant in Malaysia as well as a new immigrant to the U.S. Producing the Occupation series has not only helped him achieve a sense of belonging in both places, but also allows him to connect with family and strangers alike. Yong’s C-H-F investigates what motivates Asian climbers to take part in what is considered a “white” sport. He is also the co-founder of CarryOn Homes, a collaborative dedicated to telling the stories of immigrants and refugees in the U.S. through art. By engaging the public in cross-cultural dialogue, CarryOn Homes creates spaces for immigrants and marginalized communities to feel a sense of belonging and empowerment.

Location: Hennepin Theatre District

Project: Hennepin Theatre Trust’s 2023-24 edition of It’s the People features large-scale photo banners along Hennepin Avenue in downtown Minneapolis. This public art initiative is inspired by the exceptional, everyday people whose experiences, contributions and stories create the unique vibrancy of our shared communities.

Laura Youngbird, Artist 

Laura Youngbird is an artist and art educator. She earned her BS, BFA, and MA from Minnesota State University Moorhead with a minor in American Indian Studies. As an undergraduate, she worked in the Archaeology department as a lab and field assistant. She is an enrolled member of the Minnesota Chippewa, Grand Portage Band. The themes in her work originated from experiences her family—particularly her grandmother—had while at boarding schools and issues that surrounded their assimilation into non-Indian culture. Laura also explores the influences of Christianity on American Indian spirituality and life views.

Laura Youngbird Exhibition Reception

Thursday, July 13, 6 – 8 PM

All My Relations Gallery

1414 E Franklin Ave, Minneapolis 55404

See new works by Laura Youngbird, an enrolled member of the Minnesota Chippewa, Grand Portage Band.  Based in Breckenridge, MN, Laura was the first Director of Native American Art Programs at Plains Art Museum, Fargo, and also taught art at Circle of Nations School in Wahpeton, North Dakota. She has been an Artist-in-Residence for the North Dakota Council on the Arts and Fargo Public Schools. Laura has received several awards including a 2018 First People’s Fund - Artist in Business Fellowship, Artist Initiative Grants in 2009 and 2013 from the Minnesota State Arts Board, and a Jerome Fellowship in 2003 to work and study with master potter, Richard Bresnahan at St. John’s University. She recently received an Artist in Residence Fellowship from the Institute of American Indian Art, Santa Fe. Laura has her Masters in printmaking and is a practicing artist, working in mixed-media drawing, painting, sculpture and ceramics. Her work has been shown in numerous regional and national exhibitions. Her work often addresses issues related to her grandmother’s boarding school experience and issues around the forced assimilation of indigenous children. Laura also is active in the movement to rescue and prevent Missing and Murdered Indigenous Persons (MMIP).

Mathew Zefeldt, Artist • Groundwork

Mathew Zefeldt is an Assistant Professor of Painting and Drawing at the University of Minnesota. He was one of two national recipients of the Dedalus MFA Fellowship in 2011, and was included in New American Paintings Magazine. Zefeldt has had solo shows at The Soap Factory, Minneapolis, USA; Circuit 12, Dallas, USA; The Institute of Art in Minneapolis, USA; the Santa Monica Museum of Art, USA; Good Weather, Little Rock, USA; Hap Gallery, Portland, USA; Michael Rosenthal Gallery, San Francisco, USA, and Swarm Gallery, Oakland, USA. Zefeldt has been part of group exhibitions at Lisa Cooley, New York, USA; Eleanor Harwood, San Francisco, USA; MOHS, Copenhagen, Denmark and Circuit 12, Dallas, USA.

Location: Dreamsong

Project: Groundwork, presented by Dreamsong, is a group exhibition that takes terra firma as both subject and medium. A signifier of place, territory, and identity, a wellspring of life-giving nutrients, and a site of conflict over land-based indigenous rights and environmental protection, soil offers a rich prism through which the present may be both imagined and imaged. Through excavating diverse histories in artworks that take the ground as subject and material, the exhibition aims to encourage discussion about its preservation, its meaning, the claims that are made to it, and the sustenance, both spiritual and physical, that we derive from it.