What Does a Black Liberation Future Look Like?
by Erin Sharkey & Junauda Petrus
To catalyze their editorial work with Mn Artists, Free Black Dirt hosted a dinner and curated conversation on the topics of Afrofuturism, healing, prison abolition and transformation. A video by Adja Gildersleve captures the highlights.
When we first visited the James J. Hill House on Summit Hill in St. Paul, it was the leather wallpaper in the dining room that stopped us. The walls were covered with the rippled skin of an animal—no, dozens of animals. The tour guide said that Hill had imported the hide from the U.S.…
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Imagination Blueprint, Liberation Technologies: A Conversation with Free Black Dirt
by Erin Sharkey & Junauda Petrus
Mn Artists welcomes Free Black Dirt as the guest editors of our editorial platform.
Free Black Dirt was born serendipitously in a community college LGBTQ literature class in 2001, when two nerdy Black girls connected for the first time.…
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Free Black Dirt. Photo: Sarah White/Fotos for Barcelona Photography.
A body / a sign : On Black subjectivity / interiority / finding tenderness: beyond political meaningfulness
by Mara Duvra
Through voice and matter, artist-writer Mara Duvra considers possibilities for black subjectivity beyond the representation of otherness, making manifest calm, interiority, and gestures of tenderness.
In order to speak a truer word concerning myself, I must strip down through layers of attenuated meanings made an excess … over time, assigned by a particular historical order, and there await…
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Feminizing the Axe
by Jess Hirsch
Jess Hirsch, founder of Women's Woodshop in Minneapolis, calls for a reworking of craft practices and the gendering of tools.
Photo credit: Studio Zu.…
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This Thing This Home: Stevie Ada Klaark In Conversation with Tia-Simone Gardner
by Stevie Ada Klaark
Stevie Ada Klaark talks with visual artist, educator, and Black feminist scholar Tia-Simone Gardner about her tiny home turned mobile residency, The Inhabitation Project, and the balance between stability, mobility, and intimacy in artists' connections to place.
Tia-Simone Gardner and I met on a Wednesday morning at a local café in Northeast Minneapolis.…
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The Inhabitation Project, photo courtesy of Tia-Simone Gardner.
A Memeorial: To Lay a Hate Symbol to Rest
by Jordan Thomas
Responding to Mn Artists Presents: Eric Larson’s Meme Town, Jordan K. Thomas considers the corruption of memes, anonymity and racism in digital space, and what it means to lay a hate symbol to rest.
Photo by Emmet Kowler, courtesy of Walker Art Center. Meme by Chris Cloud.…
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The Weather Diaries
by Camille LeFevre
Mixing Icelandic fashion, arresting photography, video, and lush installation, a new exhibit at the American Swedish Institute challenges viewers to rethink fashion as an art form and the relevance of designers geographically isolated from Western couture.
Look at her. Return her gaze. It’s difficult, in fact, to look away, so intriguing are the possibilities for narrative and discourse layered into her image.…
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The Fifth Daughters, 2014, designer: Bibi Chemnitz, © Cooper & Gorfer. On view at the American Swedish Institute through July 2, 2017.
