mnartists.marketplace: Spring 2012 Featured Artists

Drawing Club: A Collaborative Coloring Book

The second edition of artist-designed objects for mnartists.marketplace, Drawing Club: A Collaborative Coloring Book, follows in step with the first edition of specialty pint glasses released last fall.  We sent out a call to Minnesota artists for submissions, juried the entries, and are using the selected designs on a limited edition release of a specialty object. This time around, however, instead of printing the selected designs on pint glasses, we’ve taken a page from mnartists.org’s Drawing Club and printed the designs in a high-end coloring book that invites its user to collaborate with the featured artists! Starting Saturday April 28^th, the coloring books will be available in the Walker Shop and online for $10.

For those of you hearing about this for the first time, mnartists.marketplace is a mini-store within the Walker Shop devoted to the presentation and sales of local art, artistic wares, and art inspired objects.  In addition to offering a curated rotating selection of local artist-made wares, mnartists.marketplace invites artists to submit designs for a twice-annual juried call, providing an opportunity for artists of all disciplines to produce a limited edition of designed objects to be sold exclusively at the Walker Shop and promoted through mnaritsts.org and the Walker Art Center.

In an effort to take this season’s mnartists.marketplace limited edition coloring book to the next level, inspiration has been drawn from mnartists.org’s Drawing Club at Walker Open Field. At Drawing Club artists and the public add to the pool of collectively created artworks. Drawing Club: A Collaborative Coloring Book, invites its user to collaborate with the selected artists: rip out a page, color it, hang it on a wall, photograph it and share with the larger community by uploading the image to the Drawing Club facebook page: www.facebook.com/openfielddrawingclub. There you’ll be able to view, contribute, and comment on all the uploaded works and therefore participate in this shared practice and social experience of art-making, collaboration, and play.

After countless long grueling hours sifting through over 200 submissions from over 65 artists, the jury made the difficult decision of selecting the perfect 15 pages for inclusion in the coloring book. In the spirit of sharing and collaboration, take the time to read on and get to know a little more about the featured artists whose work you and/or your children may be defacing enhancing in the near future:

Saman Bemel-Benrud is an artist, designer, and comic maker. He recently had an apocalyptic dream involving earthquakes, tornadoes, and giant panthers. In order to prevent the end of the world, he had to collect all the stars and bring them back to his castle. The dream ended well, with pixel victory fireworks exploding against the night sky.
trashmoon.com

Emily Bennett Beck is a painter who explores themes of celebrity and fantasy. Her work deals with the expressions of (sincere and insincere) sympathy and reverie toward characters and public figures, which she translates in coloring book form for this project. As ‘participants’ color her page, they are able to revel safely in moments of inner turmoil and romantic drama without leaving the safety of their own identities. Emily’s work has been shown nationally and internationally, and she currently teaches at the University of Wisconsin- Stout.
www.emilybennettbeck.com

Cornelius Coons began his career in Los Angeles, graduating from the California Institute of the Arts with a degree in Graphic Design, before finding his way to the Midwest. Most recently, he worked as an Art Director for Schematic (now Possible Worldwide) and Peterson Milla Hooks, where he led multi-platform national campaigns for clients such as Target, Microsoft, Kmart and Gap.
graay.co

Brandon Cramm’s work accepts acute misinterpretations within his research, which he strives to prolong through the production of work. His process allows for one form of understanding to stand in the place of and communicate something about, or supplement the needs of the other. This might be best illustrated by a literal mistranslation where someone confuses something that is not physical for something that is.
mnartists.org/brandon_cramm 
www.cargocollective.com/brandoncramm

Kristina Estell received a B.F.A. in sculpture with distinction from Herron School of Art in Indianapolis, Indiana and received her M.F.A. in sculpture from the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis in 2004. Estell was awarded a full scholarship from the Pilchuck Glass School in Seattle and received McKnight Foundation Grant fellowships in 2007 and 2011. Estell has exhibited her work internationally and has attended artist residencies within and outside of the USA. In 2010, Estell was selected by artist Dan Graham to receive a full fellowship at the Akademie Schloss Solitude in Stuttgart, Germany for a 10-month visual arts residency.
www.kristinaestell.com

Hot Sundae is a Minneapolis-based collective consisting of Amelia Irwin and Nicole Killian. Both have MFA’s from Cranbrook Academy of Art and their work is weird and fun and represents a sad-faced ying-yang.
www.hot-sundae.com

HOT TEA is a Minneapolis-based artist collective. The two words hot and tea or more specifically the phrase “HOT TEA” was chosen to highlight the relationship between the two words. These two words compliment each other both physically and grammatically. Without one or the other you wouldn’t have a phrase that evokes a sense of comfort, warmth and relaxation.  The project is a comment on all relationships good and bad and the things that lie between them. Like the phrase itself Hot and Tea are two totally different words brought together to represent something new, which reflect on the media and surfaces that the project makes use of.

Karen Kvitek is a lover of old books, birds, vegetables, flat rocks, friends, animals, and anything odd. She has a BFA in graphic design and a day job behind a cash register. She’s rarely without pen and paper, especially enjoying a good fine-tipped pen that’s nowhere near running out of ink. Fine-tipped pens and found images are her favorite things to work with and she thinks drawings make great gifts.
www.karenohbuddy.blogspot.com

Max Mose is an independent cartoonist and illustrator based out of St. Paul, Minnesota. In 2011, he received his MFA from the Center for Cartoon Studies, which is located in dreamy, picturesque, slightly dilapidated White River Junction, Vermont. His self-published comics work has often been described as “deliberately weird.”
www.maxmose.wordpress.com
www.secretacres.com/store/

Terrence Payne is a Minneapolis based artist whose work has been shown at museums, galleries and universities throughout the United States. His work is also found in private collections all over the globe.   He has found a really strong and creative community in Minnesota with a supportive audience and ambitious, talented artists. Building upon this community, he has also been the gallery director of the Minneapolis Arts Collective, Rosalux Gallery, since 2002, helping other artists further their own careers.
www.terrencepayne.com

Casey Seijas’s drawing was inspired by his inner 10-year-old, back when he’d spend afternoons witnessing glorious battles between good vs. evil, and wonder from the backseat of car rides, “What do those colorful maze-words say?” that he’d see under bridges and behind shopping centers. He has art crushes on the Dadaists, Andy Warhol, J.C. Leyendecker, Jenny Saville, Neo Rauch, Banksy, CASE2, ELET, Anibal Padrino, Katsuhiro Otomo, Dan Clowes, Chris Ware, Eduardo Risso, Aaron Draplin, Charles Anderson, his uncle Jaff, the crew over at Aesthetic Apparatus, whoever painted the card art on old G.I. Joe action figure packaging, and the dude who did the art for Iron Maiden’s t-shirts. He is also known as FCV*CASE*MCT and Tootsie Cornrolls.
caseyseijas.com

Angela Sprunger was born in India, grew up in New Jersey, and now lives in Minneapolis. She a drawer, painter, printmaker, and sewer. Her recent work is about nostalgia. Her current drawing and print series is about being cautious of the desire to surrender to nostalgia’s persuasion that the past is better than the future. Conversely, she indulges and perpetuates nostalgia through fabric work, creating child-centered sewn objects like totes and stuffed animals.
angelasprunger.com

For Melissa Stang, drawing is the bedrock of her artistic practice.  She’s also very flexible in that she is capable of numerous, vastly different visual styles and generally works on several different projects simultaneously. She’s come to describe herself as a drawing-based, mixed-media object maker who is also a reasonably knowledgeable amateur naturalist.
melissastang.com

Peter Steineck is a maker of things and a current 4th year Graphic Design student at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. Pending a 2012 graduation, Peter hopes to become an attentive, participating member in the conversation of design. He enjoys movies, comics, letters, and subversive comedy. He does not enjoy jellyfish, little sleep, and people like Andy Rooney. RIP old man.
cargocollective.com/petersteineck

Lex Thompson’s work focuses on manifestations of hope and failure in the American landscape.  Photographs I Wish I’d Made, No. 1 (Scarlett Macaw) is from his series Mahalo, exploring the Hawaiian Islands.  The project is primarily composed of photographs, supplemented with images from television and cinema that shaped his expectations of Hawaii.  As a counterweight to these media images, he made the drawings – “Photographs I Wish I’d Made” – as records of photographs he failed to make.  These renderings, filtered through memory and nostalgia, give just as sublimated a vision of the actual scene as the photographs from television.
www.lexthompson.com

We can’t wait to see what you all will do with your artist-designed coloring book pages, so don’t be shy and be sure to share images of your collaborative coloring online at: www.facebook.com/openfielddrawingclub

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mnartists.org is a joint project of the Walker Art Center and McKnight Foundation.