Due to a little rain/wind/storm-warning last Thursday, we were forced to cancel official Drawing Club and instead move inside for an mnartists.marketplace Coloring Book party, a lovely alternative. Hopefully all of last week’s local artist hosts will find another Thursday this summer to come back and draw with us.
As for this week, we’ve got quite the line-up as the ladies of ART SQUAD come host Drawing Club on Thursday June 21, from 4 – 8 pm. We will also be working with the new Teen Art Lounge, which welcomes teens to come join Drawing Club and ART SQUAD in making collaborative works, so there’s bound to be something for eveyone!
In case you’re new to this whole Drawing Club thing, here’s the gist: every Thursday in the summer, as a part of Walker Open Field and presented by mnartists.org, Drawing Club welcomes artists and the public alike to come draw, collaborate, chat, and basically hang out at the picnic tables on the Open Field Grove. The only rule: what’s made at Drawing Club, stays at Drawing Club. We make collaborative pieces, so you can start something for someone else to finish or choose from our selection of started pieces and add on! Stay connected with Drawing Club on Facebook and check out the finished works as they are posted on our Open Field Drawing Club tumblr.
So take a moment to get familiar with ART SQUAD, a group of local painters including Michon Weeks, Carolyn Swiszcz, Elaine Rutherford, Laura Stack, Patricia Scott, Mary Bergs, and Monica Reede, this week’s special host artists and come on down on Thursday for some collaborative creative play. I hear these artists are planning for an exciting collaborative tape mural project for those Drawing Club attendees that are interested!
Michon Weeks is a visual artist living in Watertown, MN. She received her Master of Fine Arts Degree in Drawing and Painting from the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis and her Bachelor of Arts Degree from Iowa State University, Ames. Michon mixes cultural influences in her drawings and paintings by combining imagery from popular culture with words and symbols from biblical narratives. She transforms the hybrid images with abstracting systems from traditional crafts. In 2011 Michon was awarded a Minnesota Art Legacy Grant to create 20 etched glass drawings for the windows of the Marshall-Lyon County Library in Marshall, MN. Michon will teach in the Art and Art History Department at St. Olaf College in 2012-13.
Carolyn Swiszcz was born and raised in New Bedford, MA. She earned her BFA from MCAD and has lived in the Twin Cities for most of the past two decades. She became interested in architecture during a fellowship in Miami Beach in the late 90’s. Her work has been exhibited locally and nationally. You will probably not be surprised ot learn that she enjoys the ind of melancholy, verging on dread, that one might encounter on a Sunday afternoon in the deserted parking lot of a failed strip mall. She lives in West St. Paul with her husband and daughter.
As an immigrant from Scotland, Elaine Rutherford creates work that reflects a longing for home and feelings of displacement, creating a nostalgic, memorialized ideal version of what it means to be “home.” She plays with the idea of what we choose to make precious. Rutherford currently teaches art at the College of St. Benedict/Saint John’s University, and Saint Joseph in Minnesota.
Organic abstractions, an amalgam of the natural and the synthetic, best describes Laura Stack’s recent mixed media work. Borrowing structures from nature and technology, her drawn, painted, and poured images morph into odd, though vaguely familiar forms that float, hover, and drip. The poured ink meanders and settles into shapes and veils of color and pattern. Into these fields of floating, spongy nebulae, she superimposes precisely painted organic or geometric forms. Using both improvised and calculated methods, Stack creates a space that suggests our contradictory experiences with biology and technology, the familiar and the otherworldly, analytical distance and emotional surrender, reserve and abandon, beauty and the grotesque.
Patricia, or Patty Scott makes prints, everything from monotypes and monoprints to linocuts and lithography and intaglio. She has a degree in printmaking from the University of Minnesota. When she was a small child, she did potato prints and rubbings of coins; she says it seemed a kind of magic to her. Scott lives in Northeast Minneapolis, and shares a studio in the Northrup King Building. The industrial surroundings of her studio have strongly formed her work.
Mary Bergs is a visual artist who lives and works in Minneapolis, MN. Bergs works in a variety of 2D and 3D media. She uses materials from nature and culture to create work that cultivates careful examination and appreciation of beauty found in everyday experience. Bergs completed her Bachelor of Fine Art degree at the University of Minnesota. She also has degrees in psychology and a Masters Degree in social work from the University of Louisville. Bergs has shown her work in solo and group exhibitions throughout the Midwest. Her work is included in the juried on-line artist registry of the Drawing Center in New York. Bergs public art projects include storefront exhibitions, traveling, impermanent installations and text walls.
Monica Reede creates mixed media paintings and drawings using Plexiglas on wood panel. Images are scratched, painted and/or drawn on both the front and back surfaces of the translucent material as well as the wood background, thereby creating overlapping layers of imagery. Figures blend with objects and abstract washes of color to evoke a merging of our internal and external realities. She has worked as a professional artist for 20 years. She exhibits regionally and nationally and is represented in numerous corporate and private collections. Monica lives and works in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
Get Walker Reader in your inbox. Sign up to receive first word about our original videos, commissioned essays, curatorial perspectives, and artist interviews.