ARTIST TALK
Panel Conversation: SEEN
Feb 26 2025 | 6 - 7:30pm

333 E River Road
Minneapolis, MN 55455
United States

SEEN Panel Discussion February 26

Additional Details

This salon-style conversation will explore abolitionist futures rooted in community care, healing, and liberation, examining how art serves as a catalyst for empathy, dialogue, and systemic change. 
 
Featured speakers: Louise Waakaa’igan, Chris Fausto Cabrera and Fong Lee, moderated by Erin Sharkey. 
 
This panel talk is presented in connection with SEEN, an exhibition highlighting the stories and creative expressions of artists within and beyond the carceral system.
 

SEEN is supported in part by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, the Art Dealers Association of America Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. This activity is made possible by the voters of Minnesota through a Minnesota State Arts Board Operating Support grant, thanks to a legislative appropriation from the arts and cultural heritage fund. General operating support is generously provided by Ameriprise Financial and the Art and Martha Kaemmer Fund of HRK Foundation. Special thanks to the KHR McNeely Family Foundation, thanks to Kevin, Rosemary, and Hannah Rose McNeely, for their support of the Weisman’s exhibitions and exhibition-related programming.


Image credit: Sarith Peou and Carl Flink, cage(d) (video still), 2024. Mixed-media installation. Courtesy of the artists and Weisman Art Museum.

Louise Waakaa'igan

A femme-presenting person with dark hair, pulled back in a ponytail hugs a tree and smiles into the camera
About the Artist

Louise K. Waakaa’igan is an enrolled member at Odaawaa-Zaaga’iganiing in northern Wisconsin. Her first chapbook, This Is Where, Aquarius Press, was published in 2020. She is also the first-place winner of the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop’s Broadside Competition (2016). Louise’s work has been previously published in PEN America, 21 Mythologies, The Moon Magazine, Night Colors, 27th Letter, Words in Gray Scale, and Doors Adjacent. She is ready to publish her second collection and recently has moved back to her beloved Minneapolis.

Chris Fausto Cabrera

A bald person in a polo shirt, with a visible tattoo from chest to neck, and head propped in his hand is pictured outside, looking unsmiling into the camera
About the Artist
C Fausto Cabrera is a multi-genre artist, writer & activist recently released from incarceration after 21 years. His work has appeared in: The Colorado Review, The Antioch Review, Puerto del Sol, The Woodward Review, among others. The Parameters of Our Cage, his prose epistle project with photographer Alec Soth is released through MACK books. His latest project is American Precariat: Parables of Exclusion, where he serves as editor for the book, published by Coffee House Press. Cabrera co-founded The Stillwater Writers Collective, partnered with the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop (MPWW). He works closely with Until We Are All Free free & We Are All Criminals to bring attention to the multifaceted ways Justice impacts people. He is a Haymarket Books 2024 Writing Freedom Fellow. 
 

Fong Lee

A man in a white beanie and burgundy turtleneck shirt smiles off to the side
About the Artist

Fong Lee is a Saint-Paul-based artist and We Are All Criminal’s first Storytelling Fellow. Fong spent nearly 18 years inside Minnesota state prisons; he is a celebrated poet, with publications through the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop and Asian American Writers Workshop, a beloved painter, and a published photographer. Fong and his family immigrated to the U.S. as Hmong refugees when Fong was a child, after his family was displaced from their home in Laos.

Erin Sharkey

A femme-presenting person with long hair in twists, wearing a rust-brown button down and denim jacket smiles into the camera
About the Artist

Erin Sharkey is a writer, arts and abolition organizer, cultural worker, and film producer based in Minneapolis. She is the cofounder, with Junauda Petrus, of an experimental arts collective called Free Black Dirt and is the producer of film projects including Sweetness of Wild, an episodic web film project, and Small Business Revolution (Hulu), which explored challenges and opportunities for Black-owned businesses in the Twin Cities in the summer of 2021. Sharkey has received fellowships and residencies from the Loft Mentor Series, VONA/Voices, the Givens Foundation, Coffee House Press, the Bell Museum of Natural History, and the Jerome Foundation. In 2021, Sharkey was awarded the Black Seed Fellowship from Black Visions and the Headwaters Foundation. She has an MFA in creative writing from Hamline University and teaches with the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop.

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SEEN

On View Image
The dimensions of a typical prison cell have been outlined in masking tape on a black cement floor. A person lays on his side in the outline of the bed.
UPCOMING
Exhibition Date
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