May Target Free Thursday Nights feature the Architects behind the Sculpture Garden, McKnight Artist Fellows Panel, and MN Artists Discussions and Performances
Target Free Thursday Nights in May feature a reflection of works from the 2017 McKnight Media Artist Fellows, an Mn Artists multidisciplinary presentation, and a chance to meet the architects behind the scenes of the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden 2017 reconstruction.
Target Free Thursday Nights
Get inspired. Get in free.
May 3, 10, 17, 24, 31
Galleries open 5–9 pm; special events follow.
Mn Artists Presents Jovan C. Speller:
Choosing Home: A Right, A Privilege or an Act of Trespass
Thursday, May 3, 5pm
Walker Art Center, Free
Mn Artists, the Walker’s platform for local artists, brings its online network live and into the museum. Connect with local artists of all disciplines, and engage with the questions driving the Minnesota arts community.
Choosing Home: A Right, A Privilege or an Act of Trespass, is a one-night “visual inquiry” in which guest curator/collaborator Jovan C. Speller activates the Walker Art Center’s public spaces. In this multidisciplinary presentation, artists/collaborators Dyani White Hawk Polk, Alanna Morris-Van Tassel and Rosy Simas assess the current state of the North American landscape and one’s ability to claim it as home.
Schedule of events:
- Short film by Dyani White Hawk: on view 5-9 pm
- Performances by Alanna Morris-Van Tassel: 5:30, 6:15, and 7 pm
- Performance by Rosy Simas: 6-7 pm
- Performance by Dyani White Hawk: 6:30 pm
- Panel discussion: 7:30 pm
Mn Artists is made possible by generous support from the McKnight Foundation.
About the artists
Speller has held an extensive career as a curator, artist, entrepreneur, advocate for emerging artists, and arts consultant for the past 10 years. She is currently an independent curator and creative consultant based in Minneapolis. She has curated contemporary art exhibitions in DC, Chicago, Memphis, NY, Minneapolis, Winona and Rochester, MN. Her work has been influenced by women, childhood, history and the land. Speller was a 2016-17 Jerome Emerging Artist Fellow, a partner recipient of a 2014-15 Minnesota State Arts Board Cultural Community Partnership grant, with work published in INTO: Minneapolis (2016). She holds a BFA in Photography from Columbia College Chicago.
About Alanna Morris-Van Tassel
Professional contemporary dancer, teaching artist, choreographer, and artist organizer, Alanna Morris-Van Tassel is one of Dance Magazine’s “25 to Watch!” for 2018. Currently a freelance artist, she spent 10 seasons as a featured dancer with Minnesota-based company TU Dance (Toni Pierce-Sands and Uri Sands, Co-Artistic Directors). Morris-Van Tassel is a recipient of a McKnight Dance Fellowship and a Minnesota SAGE Award for Outstanding Performer for her solo, Dreams: A SOLO and the TU Dance Spring season. Alanna is a graduate of Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts and holds a BFA in Dance from The Juilliard School.
Rosy Simas
A Haudenosaunee (Seneca, Heron Clan) artist based in Minneapolis, Simas has been honored by the Native community with a Native Arts and Cultures Foundation Fellowship (2013), a First Peoples Fund Fellowship (2016), and residencies at the Banff Centre Indigenous Arts Program, All My Relations Arts, Full Circle’s Talking Stick Festival, and Institute of American Indian Arts’ Museum of Contemporary Native Arts. Simas is a Guggenheim (2015) and McKnight (2016) Choreography Fellow. Her work is supported nationally by the Knight Foundation’s Knight Arts Challenge; New England Foundation for the Arts National Dance Project, MAP Fund, and National Performance Network Creation Fund.
About Dyani White Hawk
Dyani White Hawk is a painter, mixed-media artist and independent curator based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. She is Sičangu Lakota, a member of the Rosebud Sioux Tribe. White Hawk earned a MFA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison (2011) and BFA from the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico (2008). She served as Gallery Director and Curator for the All My Relations Gallery in Minneapolis, Minnesota from 2011-2015. In 2015, White Hawk transitioned into full-time studio practice. She has participated in cross-cultural residencies in South Africa, Botswana, Australia and Russia. Her work has been acquisitioned into the collections of the Minneapolis Institute of Art, Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian, IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts, Akta Lakota Museum among other public and private collections.
Meet the Architects: Julie Snow and Tadd Kreun
Thursday, May 17, 7pm
Walker Cinema, Free
Thirty years after the initial opening in 1988, the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden continues to be a landmark in the city and an inspiration for sculpture gardens all over the world. Former Minneapolis Mayor R. T. Rybak will facilitate a conversation between landscape architect Tadd Kreun (Oslund & Associates) and architect Julie Snow (Snow Kreilich Architects), who worked to complete the herculean task of the reconstruction of the Garden last summer.
Free tickets available at the Bazinet Main Lobby desk from 6 pm.
Presented in partnership with Architecture MN magazine and its publisher, AIA Minnesota.
(Due to a scheduling conflict, Tadd Kreun has replaced Tom Oslund, who helped lead the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden project for Oslund & Associates.)
McKnight Media Artist Fellowships
Thursday, May 31, 6:30pm
Walker Cinema, Free
Hosted by FilmNorth’s Eric Mueller, the panel features the 2017 McKnight Media Artist Fellows Rini Yun Keagy, Naomi Ko, Keri Pickett, and Brennan Vance, who share their work and reflect upon the past year as recipients of this prestigious award. Includes a screening of short films made by FilmNorth students and a Q&A.
About the panelists
About Eric Mueller
A Minneapolis-based artist, photographer, and teacher, Mueller’s style has been recognized with awards by La Grande Photo, the Minnesota State Fair, Dave Bown Productions, Instagram, the iPhone Photography Awards, and the Mobile Photography Awards. His freelance clients include Architecture Minnesota, Explore Minnesota, Blu Dot, the Yarnery, Budweiser, Metro Transit, Zagat Guides, Minnesota Historical Society, and WCCO TV.
About Rini Yun Keagy
Keagy is a Minneapolis–St.Paul based moving image artist. Her practice in video explores race and labor, disease, and sites of historical and psycho-social trauma. She has taught film studies and production courses at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, University of California at Santa Cruz and Carleton College in Minnesota.
About Naomi Ko
Naomi Ko is an award-winning writer, actor, and filmmaker. Naomi’s independent pilot, Nice, is an official selection for the 2018 Tribeca Film Festival in the Indie Episodic Category. Naomi created and stars in this half-hour series pilot about Teddy Park, a 20-something Korean American living in Minnesota, who must deal with the consequences of keeping her breast cancer a secret from her friends and family. It will premiere in New York City on April 23, 2018.
About Keri Pickett
Keri Pickett is award-winning artist. She produced and directed the documentary feature First Daughter and the Black Snake, a documentary feature film following environmental activist Winona LaDuke and her family and communities efforts to keep big oil out of her tribe’s sacred wild rice territory. The film won Best MN Made Documentary Feature at the Minneapolis St. Paul International Film Festival and Best Feature Film from the Portland EcoFilm Fest.
About Brennan Vance
Vance is s a Minneapolis-based filmmaker. His work as a Director of Photography for Twin Cities PBS has earned him three Emmy Awards. Vance’s feature directorial debut The Missing Sun received a Jerome Foundation fellowship, was selected as part of the 2016 IFP Filmmaker Narrative Labs and recently premiered at the Wisconsin Film Festival and Ashland Independent Film Festival.