Is it already August?! Well, if you haven’t made it down to Drawing Club with mnartsits.org on Walker Open Field yet this summer don’t fret – there’s still time! We meet every Thursday from 4-8pm at the picnic tables on Open Field Grove to make collaborative drawings! All are welcome and each week we’ve invited special local artist hosts to come hang out too. The only rule: What’s made at Drawing Club, stays at Drawing Club. So come add on to a work-in-progress or start something new for others to finish. You can check out all the “finished” works on our tumblr and keep up to date with drawing club happenings on our facebook page.
This week’s local artist hosts are Alyssa Baguss, Narasha Pestich, and Robyn Awend. Alyssa will be bringing along some blank flip-books and needs your help filling them in. So take a moment to get to know your hosts and we will see you on Thursday!
Alyssa Baguss attended the College of Visual Arts in St. Paul, MN where she received her BFA with a concentration in painting and drawing. Baguss’s work has been exhibited in the Twin Cities and regionally, most recently as a part of the CSA: Community Supported Art project, Intersections exhibition at the MCAD gallery and a participant in Midway Contemporary Art Center’s 2011 Monster Drawing Rally. In addition to her artwork, Alyssa coordinates nature inspired arts programming at Silverwood Park in St Anthony, Mn. Her drawings are a playful exploration of obsolescent remnants of our technological race towards the future: resistors, capacitors, computer hardware and the occasional mouse ball. She considers herself somewhat of a technological archivist of these antiquities from the turn of the millennia. When she isn’t coordinating arts programming for Silverwood Park you might find her in her studio chasing the futurist dreams of her childhood, digging through techno-trinkets and dreaming of thinking machines. Look for Baguss’s work in upcoming shows at Air Sweet Air Gallery in September 2012 and Form+Content in January, 2013.
Natasha Pestich is a printmaker who cultivates both a studio and community arts practice that uses printmaking, design and collective storytelling to influence how visitors engage with a given site. Pestich received a BFA from Concordia University in Montreal in 1998 and an MFA from the Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia in 2000. She has exhibited widely, with recent exhibitions at the MAEP galleries at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts to Trinity College in Chicago. Since 2011, she has been partnering with Pillsbury House + Theatre, leading a design process to engage community members with current and former MCAD students and faculty to redesign the Pillsbury House lobby to reflect its new focus as a “Cultural Community Hub.” She has participated in several artist residency programs in Minneapolis, Seattle, and Chicago, has received a Minnesota State Arts Board grant, A Metropolitan Regional Arts Council grant, an Institute for Community Cultural Leadership fellowship, and most recently a McKnight Arts Fellowship for visual arts. She is an associate professor at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design.
Robyn Stoller Awend’s work includes letterpress prints, artist books, photography and installation art. She is a Minnesota-based artist with a BFA from the University of Arizona and an MFA from the University of Dallas. Her work is exhibited nationally and internationally, and is a part of various collections around the country. Robyn is a founding member of Form+Content Gallery in Minneapolis.