Artist Initiatives
PAST ARTIST INITIATIVES
Fall 2022 Artist-in-Residence: Rosy Simas Danse
Installation view she who lives on the road to war, 2022. Photo: Rosy Simas, courtesy of Rosy Simas Danse.
SHE WHO LIVES ON THE ROAD TO WAR BY ROSY SIMAS DANSE will be in the Weisman’s Target Studio gallery, SEPTEMBER 10, 2022 – FEBRUARY 5, 2023. The project includes a new installation and in-gallery performances throughout the fall of 2022.
she who lives on the road to war is an immersive installation and dance performance created by Rosy Simas in response to global loss and the collective need to come together in peace and reconciliation. It is both a physical space for rest and refuge, and a performative work of Native futurities that imagines a world of relational balance with nature and with each other.
she who lives on the road to war will have a dual premiere at WAM and in the heart of the Twin Cities’ Native community, at All My Relations Arts. After its performance run in Minneapolis, the work will tour to Gibney in New York City, Maui Arts & Cultural Center, and other cities.
Initial research for she who lives on the road to war was supported by the Weisman Art Museum’s Target Studio for Creative Collaboration and the Pamela Beatty Mitchell Residency in Contemporary Dance at Colorado College Department of Theater and Dance. This presentation of she who lives on the road to war is made possible by a Native Arts and Cultures Foundation SHIFT award, The MAP Fund, and the New England Foundation for the Arts’ National Dance Project, with lead funding from the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation and the Mellon Foundation.
Read more about the new installation and performance run >>
Spring 2022 Artist-in-Residence: Gudrun Lock
Artist-in-residence Gudrun Lock is collaborating with a team of artists, scientists, makers, and naturalists to create an installation featuring the interdisciplinary cohort’s ongoing research and creative explorations into 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.
Fall 2021 Artist-in-Residence: Xochi de la Luna
Artist-in-residence Xochi de la Luna will continue the event programming work they did with Lake Street Truth Collective, on their own with support from Weisman Art Museum, by programming events of joy, community unity, and cross-pollination throughout fall 2021. To engage the Lake Street community, they will activate the old Robert Shoes lot on Lake Street and Chicago Ave. to facilitate concerts, makers’ markets, and multidisciplinary shows.
Learn more about the fall 2021 artist-in-residence >>
The Big River Continuum >>
The Itasca Biological Station. Image: Jonathan Schilling
It is one thing to know about a river, and yet another altogether to consider the river itself as a way of knowing. By linking communities at the headwaters and delta of the Mississippi River, the Big River Continuum cultivates dynamic exchanges and connections for artists from both regions to create and define in collaborative residency programs that ignite inquiry into the interconnectedness of cultures, research and river/land environments. This project is a creative exchange with University of Minnesota’s Itasca Biological Station at the Mississippi headwaters, the Weisman Art Museum and the Curator for Creative Collaboration and Tulane University’s A Studio in the Woods in the Mississippi Delta.
Read more about the project >>
Summer 2021 Residency: Lake Street Truth Collective
Lake Street Truth Collective and the transformed old Roberts Shoe Store lot at Chicago and Lake Street. Photo courtesy of the artists
Lake Street Truth Collective
The summer artists-in-residence in the Weisman’s Target Studio for Creative Collaboration, the Lake Street Truth Collective, comprise a newly-formed group of artists and cultural organizers who love Lake Street and the people who call that neighborhood home. After a year of injustice, burning and protests, economic instability and pandemic, the Lake Street Truth Collective is coming together with community members in the neighborhood to foster opportunities to feel seen and heard after this traumatic year, to engage in difficult conversations about the truth of our circumstances, and to rebuild a sense of belonging and connectedness to this land and one other. Throughout July on the Roberts Shoe Store Lot at Chicago and Lake Street, the Collective is organizing eight community dinners as part of a grassroots “Truth and Repair” process. Facilitated dinners create structure for participants of different backgrounds to discuss themes such as homelessness, immigration, community violence, and environmental threats. Free food, child care, and interpretation into Spanish, Somali and ASL, allow people from different backgrounds to participate and communicate more freely. Multi-lingual flyers spread the word in the surrounding neighborhoods, and passers-by who walk through the Lot on their daily path are actively welcomed to join in.
This residency is made possible with the generous support of the Graves Foundation. The Graves Foundation works to realize a future in which all youth in Minneapolis can achieve thriving adult lives.
Spring 2021 Organizational Residency: We Are All Criminals
We Are All Criminals: SEEN Project
We Are All Criminals, former organization-in-residence at the Target Studio for Creative Collaboration, working with the Weisman to develop an exhibition and program series with incarcerated artists. Our collaboration builds on the SEEN: a poetry and portrait project that challenges and disrupts mass incarceration by clearing the pathways for people behind bars to have their voices heard, faces seen, and humanity recognized. We are partnering with seven artists at the Stillwater and Moose Lake Correctional Facilities, who are themselves collaborating with artists in the wider community, to develop personal, new works that include multiple disciplines, from poetry to podcast.
Learn more about the SEEN project and We Are All Criminals residency at WAM >>
Spring 2021 Residency: Candice Davis
Candice Davis. Photo: Blkk Hand
Candice Davis: Where’s Mammy?
What are effective ways to have meaningful conversations with children about race? How do we acknowledge the positives in difference so that marginality is not “othered”? Artist Candice Davis is in residence in WAM’s Target Studio to work on her children’s book-in-progress, Where’s Mammy?, addressing just these questions.
Read more about Davis’s residency and book project, Where’s Mammy? >>
The Habitability Project >>
Launched in Fall 2020 – Habitability.art
For many of us, this time of “social isolation” is challenging. Habitability.art is a collectively created social network for the pandemic. We hope that by sharing pictures and poetic reflections, what we see and how we feel, we will all learn about things we care about in places we live: things to be gained in this new world and things we stand to lose.
Read more about the project >>
Brooks Turner: The Legends and Myths of Ancient Minnesota >>
On Oct. 25, 2020, 36,000 Twin Cities subscribers of the Star Tribune newspaper received the “Legends and Myths of Ancient Minnesota” an exhibition-in-print by Brooks Turner. The 32-page publication combines reproductions of original artworks with archival materials related to the Nazi following in Minnesota in the 1930s.
Read more about the project >>
States of Control >>
Khalid Albaih, “Dictator’s Bitches,” cartoon, 2017.
An ongoing curatorial project into media technologies used to manipulate publics, presented at WAM by the curators collective TOK (St Petersburg, Russia).
Read more >>
More Artist Initiatives at the Target Studio:
Gudrun Lock: Greening the Margins >>
Form Feed >>
Wafaa Bilal: The Library as Social Sculpture >>
Rebecca Merblum: Conversations for Duet with Cello >>
Shanai Matteson: Ways of Knowing Water >>
Rosy Simas: she who lives on the road to war >>
Art and Health >>
The Collaboration Incubator
Artists in the Collaboration Incubator program commit to short-term projects intended to lay the foundation for a longer term relationship of the artist with academic collaborators. Artists are given a stipend and a project budget to spend time in the University, establish networks, use the Target Studio to advance the project, and prepare project proposals to seek future funding. The ultimate goal of the program is to establish a collaboration that will evolve into a long-term relationship.