On View in the Target Studio Gallery January 19 – May 15, 2022

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. 

 

Related Event

Conversation: What Does Revitalization Mean?

The answer depends on who you might ask. Join Target Studio artist-in-residence GUDRUN LOCK, Black Table Arts’ executive director BRITTANY DELANEY, poet/scholar KENO EVOL, and artist/activist SHANAI MATTESON in a PechaKucha-style panel to discuss what revitalization means to them within their disciplines and practices. The panel will conclude with an audience Q & A and community conversation moderated by Weisman curator for creative collaboration BORIS OICHERMAN.

Wednesday, APRIL 20, 3 – 5 P.M.
SHEPHERD ROOM, WEISMAN ART MUSEUM
REGISTRATION REQUESTED >>
FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC

Panel Discussion at MCAD: What is Revitalization? 

Join artist/educator BROOKE SINGER, University of Minnesota PhD student in Water Resources Engineering, XIATING CHEN, interdisciplinary artist HALLIE BAHN, and Environmental Stewardship Manager for Wakan Tipi and the Lower Phalen Creek Project, SAM WEGNER, in a community conversation centering revitalization pasts, presents and futures from their respective fields. The panel will be moderated by GUDRUN LOCK. An audience Q and A will follow.  Learn more about the upcoming panel discussion at MCAD.

Friday, April 22, 1 – 3 p.m.
MCAD Auditorium 150 or join via Zoom

About the Collaborators

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. 

 

Stefon Alexander is a musician and sound designer. Lauded and disgraced in equal measure. Born to panic, but well managed. He’s spent his career traveling the world absorbing experience, learning, relearning, and relearning humanity, and doing his best to make it make sense. Usually with sounds. He lives with his young son and pup in Northeast Minneapolis.

 

 

Described as a “Change Agent” and community activist, JEWELL ARCOREN is an enrolled member of the Sisseton Whapeton Nation. She is currently serving as a program director for Wicoie Nandagikendan and is committed to language revitalization and early childhood education. Jewell has a strong interest in behavioral health as it relates to recovering our spirits and transcending intergenerational historical trauma in the American Indian community as well as in the non-Native communities, she is looking more closely at parallel trauma © and manifestations of shame, fear, and guilt.

 

Hallie Bahn is an interdisciplinary artist who works in non-traditional and expanded animation. Her work uses a blend of stop motion, digital 2D animation, and sculpture to reimagine the relationship between the set and the film. Bahn’s work has been exhibited and screened nationally and internationally, including at Public Functionary in Minneapolis, Marinaro Gallery in New York, the 2021 Square Lake Portal ii Program, the 2019 Feminist Border Arts Film Festival in New Mexico, and the 2018 Chaniartoon Festival in Greece. In 2020, she was a grant recipient of the Metropolitan Regional Arts Council’s Next Step Fund.

 

 Maxwell Collyard is a multimedia and performance artist based in the twin cities. They have worked in various capacities across the twin cities including direction, acting, projection, photography, cinematography, live broadcast, and others. They work in the service industry and enjoy independent journalism, making memes, mutual aid, and making short films. They have designed, programmed, and generated content for projections in many twin cities theaters. They are also a cinematographer and have made multiple music videos for local bands as well as short films, solo performance pieces, and a feature length film. They enjoy broadcasting and archiving productions as well. They are pretty jazzed to be working on a project re-examining relationships with/in nature.

 

Greg Feinberg is a naturalist at Westwood Hills Nature Center and 20+ year resident of NE Minneapolis. A long-time bird watcher, mushroom enthusiast, and admirer of the small, drab and overlooked aspects of the natural world. When not outside, Greg is likely to be working on one of several creative projects, including digital illustrations based on his observations of and research into the natural world. 

 

Chad Giblin is owner of Trees & Me, a tree care and consulting firm based in Saint Paul, MN. He is also Director of Operations at City Forester LLC, based in San Jose, CA, and an Adjunct Professor at Hennepin Technical College. Chad’s work is focused on increasing awareness and access to natural resources through memorable, hands-on outdoor experiences, conducting workshops and training, delivering high-quality tree care, and implementing systems of tree preservation. Chad lives in the Midway neighborhood of Saint Paul, MN with his wife and daughter and enjoys spending time with his family, cycling, and ice and rock climbing.

 

Leslie Grant is an artist and educator based in Minneapolis. Through photographic imagery and mixed media, her practice focuses on collaboration and storytelling, and she works with laborers in a range of industries, such as mining, forestry, drilling and refining. Her work has been shown in many alternative spaces, as well as traditional galleries and museums, for example, the basement of a bar in Cuylerville, New York (owned by a former miner), Artist’s Space gallery in New York, the American Labor Museum in Haledon, New Jersey, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Cleveland.

 

Janet Lobberecht is an artist and designer, her work is in response to the tense and complex relationship between the built world and the natural world. In this complexity, she follows threads, untangles small connections to observe and question what is hidden, what is revealed, what is privileged and what is vulnerable. Janet holds an MFA in Trandisciplinary Design from Parsons The New School for Design, where she studied systems and urban ecologies. She has received a Minnesota Artist Initiative Grant, the McKnight Visual Arts Fellowship and the Jerome Emerging Artist Fellowship.

 

University of Minnesota Professor of Anthropology Stuart McLean seeks to learn both from anthropology’s history of engagements with other, non-Western traditions of human world making, in which agency, personhood and sentience, along with distinctions between humans and other beings, may be configured and distributed in radically different ways, and from art and literature as engagements with the materiality of media that always have the capacity to exceed or disrupt the human projects enacted through them. Publications include Fictionalizing Anthropology: Encounters and Fabulations at the Edges of the Human, University of Minnesota Press, 2017. 

 

Jeffrey Skemp is an interdisciplinary multimedia artist. Often, his work, both poetically and visually, focuses on where nature and industry converge.  He lives in South Minneapolis but still makes frequent trips to his family’s farm on the outskirts of La Crosse, Wisconsin where he was raised.   

 

Miranda Trimmier is an essayist who’s made homes in Milwaukee, Minneapolis, New York, and Tucson. Each place shapes her writing, which pays attention to the everyday ways that history lingers in bodies and landscapes. Her work draws on salvaged materials, performance experiments, and an interspecies ethics. She got her MFA from the University of Arizona and has published essays in Places Journal, Terrain, The New Inquiry, Boom California, and other outlets.

 

 

Dave Zumeta has observed birds for the past 63 years in 46 states, including 40 years in Minnesota. After earning a B.A. in Environmental Studies (bird population ecology) at Haverford College in Pennsylvania in 1972, he worked for an ecological consulting firm surveying birds on brownfield sites in New Jersey and Pennsylvania. Upon retiring from a 34 year career in forest policy and planning with the Minnesota DNR and Minnesota Forest Resources Council, he has renewed his interest in studying bird populations on brownfield sites like Shoreham Yards. Dave holds a PhD in Forest Policy from the University of Minnesota.

 

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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.