Katrina Andry (United States, b. 1981), The Promise of the Rainbow Never Came #6, 2018, Color reduction woodcut, woodcut, and mylar, 60 × 44 in. (153.4 × 11.76 cm), Courtesy of the artist.
A Nation Takes Place
A Meal & A Meetup - Upper Mississippi Convening
Minnesota Marine Art Museum, Winona Minnesota
Friday, August 23, 2024 | 12p - 2p | $15 (includes lunch)
*registration for in-person attendance closes Thursday, August 22 at 10am CST
Over lunch, we’ll meet the organizers behind the exhibition, A Nation Takes Place project, co-curators Tia-Simone Gardiner (St. Paul, MN) Shana M. griffin (New Orleans, LA) and MMAM executive director, Scott Pollock (Winona, MN). Guest panelists will also include catalog contributors, Mai’a Williams (Winona, MN), Elana Mann (Los Angeles, CA), and Dameun Strange (Minneapolis, MN).
Together, we’ll hear about the origins of the exhibition, how the themes of the exhibition came together, and why select artists, writers, and project partners were selected for this exhibition, and related 152 page publication, that asks us where does the historical representation of the sea intersect with the canon of “American Art”? Why does neither maritime art or American Art, viz-viz modernism, have strong references to the trade of goods, of unheroic men, to the blood and unfreedoms that were accumulated and carried over oceans to make “a new world”? How does water, and the artists who are engaging with it in this exhibition, become the material and the place of resistance, to hear, feel, and sing new narratives. And given the symbolic power of the ocean, a place of many endings but also infinite beginnings, how are artists, historians, cultural bearers, ecologists and writers activating the past into new forms of cultural power.
Our convening will also take us through the exhibition, stopping to reflect on the large scale installations by Renee Royale (New York, NY) and kai lumumba barrow (Chicago, IL) before moving out to the Upper Mississippi River shoreline, where we’ll meet Seitu Jones and encounter Art Ark, his latest fully functioning floating art project that channels the spirit of radical social movements, born on the water, into experiences that foster critical conversations and nurture more just and vibrant communities.
*registration for in-person attendance closes Thursday, August 22 at 10am CST
Featured Panelists and Participating Artists
Tia-Simone Gardner
Tia-Simone Gardner is an interdisciplinary artist, educator, and undisciplined Black feminist geographer, committed to understanding relationships between Blackness and landscape. She is a 2023–24 McKnight Visual Artist Fellow. Her work has shown both nationally and internationally, and her writing has appeared in Georgia, an independently published arts writing journal, and New Suns, a journal published by USA Artists. Gardner is an assistant professor of media and cultural studies at Macalester College in St. Paul, MN.
Shana M. griffin
Shana M. griffin is a Black feminist activist, researcher, geographer, sociologist, abolitionist, and artist. Her practice is interdisciplinary, research-based, and decolonial, existing across the fields of sociology, geography, Black feminist thought, and land-use planning and within movements challenging displace- ment, carcerality, reproductive control, climate impacts, and gender-based violence. She is the recipient of several awards, including a 2025 Loeb/ArtLab Fellow at Harvard University Graduate School of Design, 2022 Andy Warhol Curatorial Research Fellow, and 2021 Creative Capital Awardee.
Seitu Ken Jones
Seitu Ken Jones is a multidisciplinary artist, advocate and maker based in St. Paul, Minnesota. Working between the arts and public spheres, Jones channels the spirit of radical social movements into experiences that foster critical conversations and nurture more just and vibrant communities from the soil up. He is recognized as a dynamic collaborator and a creative force for civic engagement.
Li(sa E.) Harris
Li(sa E.) Harris (b. 1981, Houston, TX) is an interdisciplinary artist, musician, and researcher who uses voice, theremin, electronics, movement, improvisation, meditation, and new media to explore healing in performance and living. She is the founder/creative director of the multidisciplinary creative arts studio Studio Enertia. Her awards include a 2022 Guggenheim Fellowship in Fine Arts and the 2021 Dorothea Tanning Award in Music/Sound from the Foundation for Contemporary Art. Her recent solo exhibitions include Unlit: Sof Landin (Ballroom Marfa, 2023), D.R.E.A.M.= A Way to Afram (Diverse Works, 2023), and This is the Day (Lawndale Art Center, 2024).
kai lumumba barrow
kai lumumba barrow (b. 1959, Chicago, IL) is a visual and performance artist based in New Orleans. Barrow is interested in the praxis of radical imagination. Together with her four muses, Absurdity, Sarcasm, Myth, and Merriment, she experiments with abolition as an artistic vernacular. Her sprawling paintings, environmental installations, found object assemblages, and social practice performances are created in traditional and nontraditional spaces to transgress ideological, geographic, and carceral borders. The work performs queer Black feminist theory as an aesthetic genre. Barrow is a self-taught artist and member of the Antenna Collective and the Gallery of the Streets artists and activist network.
Elana Mann
Elana Mann (b. 1980, Newton, MA) is an artist and activist who explores the power of the collective voice and the embodiment of language. Mann is Hard of Hearing and for twenty years she has researched the act of listening through sculpture, sound, works on paper, and public performances. Her rattles, trumpets, and other instruments are tools that galvanize the sonic energy of her work; together, they make a synergistic roar that embodies the voices of those who strive for social and environmental justice. She has participated in exhibitions and screenings at the Museum of Contemporary Art, La Jolla, the Orange County Museum of Art, the Hirshhorn Museum, and the Museum of Art and History, Lancaster, among many others. She lives in Los Angeles where she is raising her two young kids.
Dameun Strange
Dameun Strange (b. 1973, Washington, D.C.) is a sound explorer, multi-instrumentalist, composer, and sound designer whose conceptual electronic and improvised electro-acoustic works focus on stories and themes of the African diaspora, often using surrealist and afro-futurist aesthetics. Dameun has composed music with such artists as Leslie Parker, Ananya Chatterjea, Joanna Lees, and Pramila Vasudevan and has been a featured performer in concerts celebrating the work of George Lewis, Thurston Moore, and Henry Threadgill. He is a 2018 recipient of the ACF | Create Award and 2019 Jerome Hill Fellowship. Most recently, he was the recipient of a 2022 BMI Foundation Carlos Surinach Fund Commission for renowned flutist Adam Sadberry, not running, (The Life of L. Alex Wilson) for flute and electronics, which premiered at Merkin Hall, Kaufman Music Center in March 2023.
Mai’a Williams
Mai’a Williams (b. 1979, Washington, DC) is a writer and interdisciplinary installation/performance artist, and community organizer residing in rural Minnesota and Minneapolis. Their creative practice is primarily as a storyteller via: books, poems, essays, collaborative installations/performances, workshops, and public interventions and is inspired by the resistancecommunities with which they have worked and lived. They are the author of the books: Apocalypse Here, The Future of Love, and This is How We Survive: Revolutionary Mothering, War, and Exile in the 21st Century.
Renee Royale
Renee Royale (b. 1990, New York, NY) is an artist, writer, and independent curator. Her art practice is rooted in visual explorations of humans and the environments that we inhabit. Her recent work centers on studies of belonging, call-and-response from an ecological perspective, time-based explorations, and trauma responses. She employs the use of medium-format and Polaroid films, natural materials, mixed media, performance art, and video in her visual storytelling. Both a process and conceptual artist, she interweaves disciplines at whim to add layers and context to what is being conveyed. She is currently pursuing anMFA in art, theory, and practice at Northwestern University.
About ArtARK
About ArtARK Harriet S. the artARK is an electric powered 20-foot-long wooden pontoon boat, based at Watergate Marina in St. Paul, Minnesota. The Harriet S. the artARK is a collaboration between Seitu Jones Studio, Public Art Saint PauI, Urban Boatbuilders and St. Paul Shipwrights. The artARK provides an artistic and physical connection to the Mississippi River. The broader intention of the artARK is to use art and ecology to foster a greater understanding of the Mississippi River watershed and our role as river stewards. The artARK is outfitted with an advanced outboard electric drive unit. It will be a simple laboratory which will provide observational and media equipment, art supplies and a live streaming with a broadband connection. The travelers on the vessel will be artist naturalists who will act as interpreters of the state of the Mississippi River by leading tours and making their artistic observations available to the world in real time. The artARK will interpret and present the scientific data collected through writing, visual art, and performance.
Support for this exhibition comes from:
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 & cultural heritage fund.