Harriet Bart creates evocative content through the narrative power of objects, the theater of installation, and the intimacy of artists books. She has a deep and abiding interest in the personal and cultural expression of memory; it is at the core of her work. Using bronze and stone, wood and paper, books and words, everyday and found objects, Bart’s work signifies a site, marks an event, and draws attention to imprints of the past as they live in the present.

Bart’s work has been exhibited extensively throughout the United States and Germany, and she has completed more than a dozen public art commissions in the United States, Japan, and Israel.  She has been the recipient of fellowships from the Bush Foundation, McKnight Foundation, MacDowell Colony, Virginia Center for Creative Arts, NEA Arts Midwest, and the Minnesota State Arts Board. Since 2000, Bart has published numerous fine-press books and mixed media bookworks. She has won three Minnesota Book Awards, most recently in 2015 for Ghost Maps. Her work is included in many museum, university, and private collections, including: Metropolitan Museum of Art, National Gallery of Art, Library of Congress, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis Institute of Arts, Weisman Art Museum, Jewish Museum, National Museum of Women in the Arts, and Sackner Archive of Visual and Concrete Poetry. She is a guest lecturer, curator, and founding member W.A.R.M. and the Traffic Zone Center for Visual Art in Minneapolis, MN. Bart is represented by Driscoll Babcock, New York NY and Booklyn, Brooklyn NY. 

HARRIETBART.COM

Carl Bretzke is a representational oil painter who specializes in urban scenes and plein air landscapes.

Carl's work has been described in the Washington Post as "simultaneously intimate and detached…The artist's unadorned style recalls Edward Hopper and The Ashcan school."

Carl holds an MD degree from the University of Minnesota Medical School. His undergraduate degree is from the University of Colorado, where he also received a minor in Fine Art. Carl has also trained extensively under Plein Air Painters of America signature artist Joseph Paquet.

My new body of work, Together/Alone, is more narrative than my previous work. Diptychs and triptychs present images gathered from everyday life. These images are commonplace; an unmade bed, an elevator door opening or closing, an ordinary sink bathed in fluorescent light. Some depict real experiences. Some are inventions. LJ Arhart DDS is based directly on memories of my father. Whereas, Pi is a juxtaposition of seemingly random images that work together; they just “feel right” to me. I hope the viewer will find common ground with these everyday images and dream up their own story.

KRISTIEBRETZKE.COM

I create large-scale anthropomorphic sculptures that appear to defy gravity, imply motion and allude to states of expansion, reconciliation or equilibrium. Working with ordinary industrial materials I cut apart, rearrange or fabricate extruded sheets of steel into visual poems for the 21st century. These inventive arrangements often depict a human form by virtue of a schematic void, cut-out positive or the placement of totemic likeness. Inspired by elemental structures, crazy puzzles and kinetic toys these sculptures engage the viewer through the energy of movement and play inviting a deeper meditation on the precarious stasis and dynamism of our contemporary world.

PERCICHESTER.COM

These paintings are about gentrification, growth and the resulting construction sites that I witness daily from walks through my home neighborhood of Nicollet Island East Bank and my studio neighborhood of the North Loop. I see these images of construction from up close and from afar. I see them in the bright mid-day sun and at night when the construction sites are illuminated by bright security spotlights. This change in light alters the landscape’s forms, and distorts the perspective of the city silhouetted against the night sky.

This work is created in my studio from a culmination of construction images excavated from my memory as well as my sixty years of experience as a visual artist.

Art is about connecting. It connects us to our past and future, to our families and community, and opens us up to possibility and opportunity.

Jim Dryden is a Minneapolis painter, printmaker and sculptor. His work frequently deals with themes of relationship, connection and intimacy. 

Jim is a graduate of the Minneapolis College of Art and Design and a founding member of Form+Content Gallery. His work is represented in the collections of the Carleton College Library, the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, the Minnesota History Center, the Ramsey County Library, the University of Minnesota - Tretter Collection, Walker Art Center, the Weisman Art Museum and numerous private collections.

JIMDRYDEN.NET

I make abstract paintings originating in observation. I have learned to trust what I find visually riveting in the world has deep connections with questions about how we experience and inhabit the world. I am drawn to the movement of light, reflections on water disordered by what lies underneath, and the premonitions of metamorphosis perceptible in natural structures. In the way that sound, rhythm and breath physically build compression and express feeling in a lyric poem, I use contrasting color, contrasting spatial depths and a wide range of marks, gestures, and the physicality of paint- from sheer washes to thick impasto - to suggest the way intimacy, alienation, struggle and freedom exist in the psyche in a constant state of flux. My interest in the life of gestural line in painting has led me to engage with the complex, exuberant paintings of Italian Baroque painters, Giambattista Tiepolo and Tintoretto in particular, whose Venetian color, animation and high-spirited gestures feel very alive and relevant to me today.  As in their work, my paintings express a profusion of activity, developed with a keen desire for uniting near and far, small and large, the loud and the quiet, the rent with the joined.

JILEVANSSITE.COM

My work revolves around the constant struggle to understand how it is we survive. The growth and re growth of the plants, the organic nature of the fruits of the earth in the still lifes, the spurting of life from mangy brown bulbs in ordinary clay pots, the hopeful, but mysterious windows which often emerge in my work are all obvious symbols of that struggle.  The cakes, which arrived unbidden in the still lifes and began to take on a life of their own, call to mind the celebrations and time markings in all people’s lives—birthdays, anniversaries weddings, confirmation, gatherings after funerals, holidays, every days.  Whether fabulously frosted and tantalizing lush or plain, sturdy and steadfast, these cakes take us through life’s rituals.  Since cake is rarely eaten alone, the community that shares it is a vital piece of that cycle.

The cakes join the plant and vegetable life that is going through its own cycle and are sometimes painted on anthropomorphic surfaces.  Lately, figures have demanded their place and are insisting on their rights to return to the canvas as well.

BONNIEHELLER.COM

My images explore the candid reactions of people to the environment in which I observe them. I generally paint my figures in watercolor because of the spontaneity and the challenge of working in what may seem like a difficult medium. 

I create an honored space for ordinary things.
 My subjects may seem incongruent - people, produce, studies of detritus - but I work to expose the shared experience of sturdiness in the cycle of life. 
Whether animal, mineral, or vegetable,
I strive to do a character study in still life form.  Pock marks, irregular shapes and wrinkles may be evident in some images; a creamy beauty shows in others.

I am a topical artist, exploring diverse themes by blurring the mediums of painting, sculpture, book art, figuration and abstraction.  The diversity of my art and the process is inevitable because I choose to work with materials that are most appropriate to an idea. This fluid approach facilitates my need for examining some critical questions and my mind wondering between past and present and so fleeting linear time. 

VESNAKITTELSON.COM 

Playfulness, experimentation and judgement are the principles behind my art.  I begin all work whimsically not knowing exactly how it will look in the end.  I experiment to make the visual relationships taut and constantly judge if formal artistic elements are resolving themselves into lasting relationships.  It is difficult to make abstract art, because, as I see it, there are no--nor should there be--rules for how to create.  I love to see something I have completed.  But, it is the process in reconciling the relationships between line, mass, color, value and subject that most intrigue me.

JONNEUSEFINEART.COM

There is a difference between land, which is earth, and landscape, which signifies a kind of jurisdiction. It always meant the framing of an image.

                                                   —Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory

My identity was formed at latitude 44.022701, longitude 91.686316. Formative experiences took place here, and the memories I hold of this time in my life are my reason for engagement in art. The variegated bands of color which define this body of work have their origins in the Mississippi River Valley of southern Minnesota. The genesis of my images can be traced to growing up on a horse farm set among the bluffs above Winona. It was on these 360 acres that the life cycles of a farm taught me one of the few things that we as human beings know to be true. Everything comes from the land. Everything returns to the land. With this simple foundation and paint as my medium, I have embraced vertical and horizontal bands of color as a means of constructing a figurative and literal place to pause. There are very few other reasons to paint today, if not to signify a set of circumstances, in a moment that can be revisited over a lifetime.

On a farm, time is measured by the growth of the crops, most visibly through size, but also through the changing colors that mark the progression toward ripeness, and season’s end. Rain turns the tilled soil black in the spring. Divided acres of wheat emerge as shoots of palest sap green. Their time for harvest arrives when stalks rustle in the wind, a dry unbleached titanium. The broad river bisects the valley with sparkling coolness, while the heat of summer turns gravel white hot on the road at noon. By late in the day, the long driveway from the mailbox is a glowing shade of violet that Cezanne would appreciate. Fences made from railroad ties stained in sepia with brushes dipped in coffee cans of oily creosote, rise and fall in lines that separate abundant cornfields from grazing mares, heavy with foals. When the wild sumac blazed alizarin crimson, the mares were brought up to the barn to give birth. Even as children we took turns on the overnight watch, as an expectant mare paced in the box stall, exhaling clouds of gray vapor into the cool night air. Finally, a colt or filly slick with viscous membrane slid onto the golden bed of straw. It was a glorious sight, and brought sighs of relief.

Farms are not idyllic; life and death are experienced viscerally. When death arrived, blue-black flies swarmed unseeing eyes, and precious horses lost to us were brought to a deep mossy ravine where their bones were picked clean by other creatures.  Autumn leaves fell, heavy drifts of snow covered the bones, and after a couple of seasons the land took back even these last remains. Likewise, when a fire took our barns after a heat lamp shorted, the incineration was so complete that only a small cradle of iron remained of my riding saddle, all else was reduced to ash and charcoal. Enough charcoal for many lifetimes of drawing.

I have painted these scenes, events, and memories many times over the past two decades. There are unforgettable combinations and proportions of hue and shade that have the power to evoke the beautiful and difficult rituals of the land. We are hardwired to experience the emotive and spiritual power of color through our culture and earliest existence. So too, it was my experiences of life on a Winona horse farm that provided the path to let go of the figure in my work and concentrate instead on the structural fundamentals of the ground. It was an elegant solution that originated from my earliest memories. I strive to conjure those elemental relationships, without representation or as stand-ins for landscape, but letting bands of color slide, divide, enflame, fade, emerge and embrace. 

NANIVIL.COM

A Natural Measure of Time is an ongoing series of drawings based in equal measure on structure and improvisation. The structure consists of a uniform size sheet of paper measuring 22 x 30 inches, a 4-inch brush, one oil color, and the time it takes to create an image with a single movement of the hand, without editing the image or lifting the brush off the paper. The improvisation consists of a spontaneous unplanned composition, a result of the variations in pressure, speed and direction of the hand, the brush and the paint. When the process works, the image appears to exist as a pictorial fact of its own making. 

When my Japanese and Chinese grandparents left Asia, they saw America as a new start and believed in the necessity of leaving the old ways behind. The result: my generation - sisters, brother and cousin have lost much in the way of culture and language in realizing our elder's assimilation dreams. My work aims at reconciling the tensions between what I feel I've lost versus what I've gained in the attainment of the "American Dream". 

Through this exploration of my heritage and origin, I also seek to reconcile the tension that exists in being both Japanese and Chinese. This tension is born of a history I and my American born sisters, brother, and cousins have no responsibility for and only a vague awareness of, yet it shaped our parents view of the world, and therefore, our foundational understanding as well. My work explores this warring and internment history through images of food and portraiture. 

STEVEOZONE.COM  

Rebecca Pavlenko is a photographer whose art grows out of her love of nature, Zen practice and a joy in exploring photographic materials. She is fascinated by the psychology of the human spirit, the interconnectedness of all things and the symbolic lessons that are nature’s gift.

GALA - a series of acrylic paintings on canvas of colorful shapes, sensuous forms, lines, and grids of squares. The celebratory, fun and humorous works revisit and breath new life into the circular forms and graffiti-like lines that have long dominated his work.

PATRICKPRYOR.COM

CB Sherlock's work originates in themes of community, commonality, nature, and place. She combines her love of nature, wordplay, and unique book structures to create work that reflects the world around her, visually layering art with text and image. The intimate and versatile structures she creates are for the viewers to hold, capturing the nuances of their content with meticulous attention to detail, design, and print. CB works on the printing press, intuitively adding color, shape, and words; each time bringing the components together in new arrangements that create something both unexpected and familiar.

Traveling is part of her practice; discovering new places and environments continually inspires. CB am currently finishing a piece called A Day Elsewhere: Chateau Laréole, inspired by time spent in France a few years ago. For the piece, she wove the imagery with the words of French literary hero Honoré de Balzac, utilizing both chine collé and letterpress techniques to create a piece full of new texture and depth.

I've been intrigued by the idea of using a force of nature, light energy, as a drawing material. These works use no pigments, only focused light reflections and shadows. The close up shots show details of the striped reflections above plastic strips, and striped shadows below.

JANTJEVISSCHER.COM

Bifidus Jones is a collage artist born and based in Minnesota. They began their art career as a member of IUOMA, the International Union of Mail Artists. In addition to participating in mail art exhibits around the world, they have produced five original books through the support of the Brooklyn Art Library including A Record Year for Rainfall: The Private Life of Alphons Trio  (2011), and But the View Is So Lovely (2021). Besides creating collages from paper, Jones also paints collages of images, maps, and text in acrylic on large canvases.

"Why collage? We believe that the soul of every person, plant, bird, and beast is eternal and returns after death in another form. Collage creates something new by uniting fragments of these reincarnations from across time and geography. Every artwork of ours is an homage to, and a celebration of, eternal existence. Every artwork a form of sacred play, a shrine to the richness of what it means to be alive. And because many lives have contributed to our art, our lifework remains that of a collective being and this work bears the name Bifidus Jones." 

Instagram.com/@bifidusjones

bifidusjones@gmail.com