MAKING IT: Drawing Club with Andy Sturdevant, Todd Balthazor, and Margaret Pezalla-Granlund

As you all have hopefully learned by now, Drawing Club is about the social experience of art making, collaboration and play. Brought to you by mnartists.org, local artists and the public are invited to come add your creative touch from 4-8pm every Thursday in the summer on Walker Open Field. You can add on to one of the many works in progress that have been started this summer – or – start your own new drawing and leave it behind for others to finish. The only rule: What’s made a Drawing Club, Stays at Drawing Club. Finished drawings may be viewed on our Open Field Drawing Club tumblr.

This week’s special guest local artists hosts are Andy Sturdevant, Todd Balthazor and Margaret Pezalla-Granlund. Take a moment to read a little more about them below and we’ll see you at the picnic tables on Thursday!

Andy Sturdevant is an artist, writer and arts administrator living in South Minneapolis. He has written about art, history and culture for a variety of Twin Cities-based publications and websites, including mnartists.org, Rain Taxi, Art Review and Preview!, Mpls. St. Paul, and heavytable.com. His collaborative and individual art-making practice is generally site-based, interactive, and dealing with relationships between place, history and personal experience. The results of these explorations and conversations often take physical forms, in pamphlets, printed matter, books, and drawings. He is also Artists Resources Manager at Springboard for the Arts in Lowertown St. Paul. Andy was born in Ohio, raised in Kentucky and has lived in Minneapolis since 2005.

Todd Balthazor is a satirical, often anthropomorphic illustrator, fine artist, muralist and children’s art instructor from St. Paul, MN, with a BFA from CVA.  His work is displayed both locally and abroad. Todd also works as a guard at the Walker Art Center, and draws on his experiences behind the scenes at the museum in his weekly comic strip for mnartists.org, It Is What It Is.

Margaret Pezalla-Granlund received her MFA from the California Institute of the Arts. She was awarded a McKnight Fellowship and a Jerome Travel Grant to the archives of the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, AZ and the Velaslevansky Panorama and the Museum of Jurassic Technology in Los Angeles, CA. She has exhibited both locally and nationally, at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, the Santa Monica Museum, and at Burnett Gallery in the Minneapolis. In her current work, she is fascinated by meteors, the barely visible, and the canals on Mars. In the studio, she finds it very difficult to draw; at Drawing Club, however, all things are possible.