mnartists.org and Minnesota Stories (mnstories.com) have collaborated on a video series profiling Minnesota artists in all disciplines.
Minnesota Stories Presents: mnartists
premieres simultaneously on mnartists.org and mnstories.com on Friday, November 3, and continues every month through April 2007 with illuminating video profiles of artists around the state. The series offers a glimpse of how the artists work with and are supported by various arts organizations related to their work.
Chuck Olsen is the founder of Minnesota Stories, hailed as one of the best videoblogs by the New York Times. He is also the acclaimed producer and director of Blogumentary, the first documentary film chronicling the rise of political and personal blogs. Formerly a Senior Web Producer at Twin Cities Public Television, Olsen now serves as the Minneapolis correspondent for the famed Internet newscast Rocketboom. As an up-and-comer whose work has garnered attention across the country, Olsen’s films have screened at the Walker Art Center, Harvard University, and on renegade laptops all around the world.
mnartists.org, a project of the McKnight Foundation and the Walker Art Center, is a free online resource of and for Minnesota artists working in all disciplines—visual arts, literary arts, performing arts, new media, and design. To date over 8,500 artists and arts enthusiasts have joined mnartists.org and the site receives over 120,000 site visits each month. Visitors can read reviews and articles, join an online book club, collect MP3s, listen to artists interviews, watch videos, and talk back in the community forums.
Minnesota Stories presents: mnartists will feature compelling interviews with these and other Minnesota artists to be announced:
Jonathan Nelson
Jonathan Nelson, a member of Rosalux Gallery, is an artist, curator, and producer who focuses almost exclusively on collage, with forays into radio, visual art, theater, writing, and installation. His nationally syndicated radio program (Some Assembly Required) is a weekly arts show featuring the talents of audio artists who appropriate sounds from their media environments.
Scott Stulen
Scott Stulen is the Curator of Education at the Rochester Art Center and a multimedia artist whose work explores personal and collective memory, pop culture, and the “cabin culture” aesthetic of the Midwest through installation, drawing, painting, field recording, and video. Stulen exhibits throughout the country, including recent exhibitions at Franklin Art Works, Minneapolis; Western Washington University, Bellingham, Washington; Melanee Cooper Gallery, Chicago, Illinois; and the national publication New American Paintings. Stulen lectures monthly as part of the Contemporary Art 101 series and curates the Headphone and Artrock! festivals at the Rochester Art Center.
Asia Ward
Asia Ward makes kinetic toy sculptures from used stuffed animals, music boxes, and electronic gadgets. Her most recent shows include the Kiehle Gallery, St. Cloud State University, the SOO Visual Arts Center, and the Andenken Gallery, Denver, Colorado. Last fall she installed one of her large-scale outdoor sculptures for permanent display at Western Sculpture Park in downtown St. Paul. Ward was an Artist-in-Residence at the Science Museum of MInnesota and the Kulture Klub Collaborative in Minneapolis as a workshop artist teaching and assisting adults and kids how to make kinetic sculptures.
Toni Pierce-Sands and Uri Sands
Toni Pierce-Sands and Uri Sands are co-founders of TU Dance, an extraordinary troupe of ten dancers. They have won significant critical acclaim with TU Dance, including “Artists of the Year” by the Star Tribune and “Best Performance” at the inaugural Sage Awards. Uri Sands also received the prestigious Princess Grae Award in choreography and was named City Pages’ “Best Choreographer” for 2006.
Alex Lemon
Poet Alex Lemon is a visiting instructor at the College of Visual Arts in St. Paul. His first collection of poems, Mosquito, was published by Tin House Books this year. His poetry has appeared in numerous literary journals, including Tin House, Denver Quarterly, AGNI, Pleiades, Post Road, and Swink. His translations (with Wang Ping) of a number of contemporary Chinese poets are forthcoming in Tin House, New American Writing, and other journals.
