an interview on mnartists.walkerart.org

So my family and I bought a house, moved and are trying to sell our old house. Needless to say it has been a little nuts. Somehow I forgot to post a link to an interview I did with arts writer Sheila Regan on mnartists.org. You can see the interview here. The site as a whole is amazing, and if you don’t know about it, I would spend some time. It is a platform of the Walker Art Center that has a 20 year history of supporting Minnesota artists. It relaunched in 2021 featuring more arts writing and maintains a comprehensive list of both Minnesota and national artist opportunities. If I didn’t live in MN, this is still a site I would check regularly. Thank you Walker Art Center and the McKnight Foundation for supporting artists!

My favorite thought that speaks directly to the making of this work “to understand that your body is yours, but it’s also something else, took me a long time to come to.”

Thank you Sheila for the great conversation!

Vimeo and talking houses by Chris Rackley....

I am so excited to share that my art friend Chris Rackley spent a good portion of the pandemic creating the brilliant piece Haiku House with a grant from Springboard for the Arts. He invited the homeowners in his neighborhood to create house puppets based on his pattern and write a Haiku for the puppets to perform while filming it. He then took all the videos and seamlessly created an animated neighborhood where every house shared its poem! Please take a look at Haiku House Project on Vimeo and share your favorite parts! My favorites are the clouds and clogged toilet haiku. You can see all about his process on instagram…he is a magician with the digital!

Large sculpture process images...

So now that Chthonic is installed, I have a little room to share what the making of this work was like. It really was the best year of my life, all the way around. I feel so lucky to have had it. All I did was make work, assemble food for my family, sleep with a cat under the covers, and start again. I was fortunate that I could take a semester off of teaching to make it happen. And that my family is not bothered by the filth we clearly live in. Anyway, here are some images of the sculpture Lumber in process in my studio over a period of months.

I worked with another artist friend to build the skeletons. We started with 1” conduit pipe that I bent into the gesture. The pipe then actually goes into an electrical box and is set with a screw. At the ground, the conduit comes into a drilled 2x4” that has been secured to plywood. Then we set screws through the 2x4” to the pipe. It worked pretty slick! She took up nearly the width of my studio. I did not plan well.

And getting her through the door was a whole other thing! Luckily I had handy, thoughtful helpers who kept me from freaking out. We removed the horizontal floor braces, turned her on her side so she was a U, and then threaded her through the door! Now she is hanging at Mia!

Upcoming exhibition at the Phipps Center for the Arts...

I am excited to share that I have an upcoming solo exhibition in Gallery 2 at the Phipps Center for the Arts in Hudson, Wisconsin, opening February 26. Artists Susan Gangsei, Fawzia Khan, Susan Solomon and Christopher Palbicki will also be exhibiting in the Center’s other galleries. I hope you will have a chance to attend!

I created a new series of drawings for “Den Mother” this last fall on the most beautiful gesso you can spread on a board. It is like butter. I will never go back to anything else. The boards are 10x10” and the drawings made in ball point pen. I love me a ball point pen. I think I am ready to explore this series in graphite with powdered graphite so I can get larger, softer areas of tone.

These images will soon be available as prints in the shop!

"Chthonic" at the Minneapolis Institute of Art

So it has been over a year since my last blog post…and a pandemic, online teaching, an election and two exhibitions. The last post the acceptance or my (how many?) proposal for the Minnesota Artist Exhibition Program at the Minneapolis Institute of Art. There was so much in between, but that is where I am starting now. From that day on I put my head down and got to work. It was the most fulfilling creative endeavor of my career. I am just so thankful for all of it. By the end, I could hardly get around my own studio, and I had moved two figures into another friends studio when I ran out of room. We needed a 26’ truck to deliver the work and it had to spend a week in the deep freeze after arriving at Mia; felt can have larvae and it had to be frozen before going into the museum proper. Then I had the best help for two weeks of install. We got it finished right as Governor Walz shut down entertainment and hospitality venues for Covid. But it opened this last Thursday, and I am thrilled that people are getting a chance to see it! I will post more about the making, installation and exhibition in the coming weeks!

Title text and door way into second gallery space…

Supine, Sway and Lumber

Twine, Sway, Supine, Lumber and Settle

Trunk and Nourish