Minnesota Marine Art Museum, Winona Minnesota

$15 (includes lunch)

Over lunch, we’ll meet the organizers behind the exhibition, A Nation Takes Place project, co-curators Tia-Simone Gardiner (St. Paul, MN) Shana M. griffin (New Orleans, LA) and MMAM executive director, Scott Pollock (Winona, MN).  Guest panelists will also include catalog contributors, Mai’a Williams (Winona, MN), Elana Mann (Los Angeles, CA), and Dameun Strange (Minneapolis, MN). 

Together, we’ll hear about the origins of the exhibition, how the themes of the exhibition came together, and why select artists, writers, and project partners were selected for this exhibition, and related 152 page publication, that asks us where does the historical representation of the sea intersect with the canon of “American Art”? Why does neither maritime art or American Art, viz-viz modernism, have strong references to the trade of goods, of unheroic men, to the blood and unfreedoms that were accumulated and carried over oceans to make “a new world”? How does water, and the artists who are engaging with it in this exhibition, become the material and the place of resistance, to hear, feel, and sing new narratives. And given the symbolic power of the ocean, a place of many endings but also infinite beginnings, how are artists, historians, cultural bearers, ecologists and writers activating the past into new forms of cultural power. 

Our convening will also take us through the exhibition, stopping to reflect on the large scale installation by Renee Royale (New York, NY) and kai lumumba barrow (Chicago, IL) before moving out to the Upper Mississippi River shoreline, where we’ll meet Seitu Jones and encounter Art Ark, his latest fully functioning floating art project that channels the spirit of radical social movements, born on the water, into experiences that foster critical conversations and nurture more just and vibrant communities.  

Register here