The Nature of Shoreham Yards is an installation envisioned by artist Gudrun Lock featuring the in-process work, research, and explorations of a motley collective of thinkers and makers. The focus of these efforts are the buffers of an active 230-acre train and trucking facility in Northeast Minneapolis, called Shoreham Yards. Both polluted and full of life, the buffers interface in dynamic ways with the neighborhoods surrounding them, and are potent sites of potential transformation.
Mundane, all but invisible territories of the city, the areas are central to the Mississippi Watershed and rich for re-imagining our relationship to colonialist expansion, historical pollution, contemporary consumption, and wildness. The installation in the Target Studio for Creative Collaboration will share in-process research in the form of objects, documents, data sets, visualizations, maps, illustrations and photographs, including several objects on loan from the University of Minnesota's Bell Museum.
Current collaborators include bird specialist Dave Zumeta, arborist Chad Giblin, professor of Anthropology at U of M Stuart McLean, multimedia artist Jeffrey Skemp, artist/designer Janet Lobberecht, musician Stefon Alexander, writer Miranda Trimmier, community activist Jewell Arcoren, artist Hallie Bahn, Naturalist Greg Feinberg, artist/educator Leslie Grant, multimedia and performance artist Maxwell Collyard, and others. Students from the Arts Entrepreneurship Department at MCAD, including Justin Lees, Zamira Mendoza, Lux Fabre, and Annalise Corcoran, helped to produce content for this installation. Students from the WAM Collective will be involved during the spring semester.
Target Studio artist-in-residence Gudrun Lock has worked with sculpture, video, performance, painting, and collaborative public engaged art. In 2019 and 2020 she received grants from the University of Minnesota’s Institute on the Environment and in 2021 from their Institute for Advanced Study in order to engage human and other-than-human partners in a long-term project focused on revitalizing the buffers of active rail land. She has shown in galleries in the US and Canada, and has installed projects in foreclosed homes, empty storefronts, the Atlantic Ocean, and a hole in her backyard.
This work has been supported by the Weisman Art Museum, U-Spatial, the Minneapolis College of Art and Design and grants from the University of Minnesota’s Institute on the Environment and Institute for Advanced Study.
Learn more about the artists, activists, makers, and scientists collaborating on this project
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Gudrun Lock
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.
