In Tension

Working with textiles from each of their own distinct perspectives, the intersections of each artist’s work explores aspects of material meaning, belonging and obligation, solidarity and collective power, and the reordering of systems. 

Mending Workshop
 Saturday, December 7, 2024, noon – 2pm
 Free and open to the public

Do your part to cut down on overconsumption – learn how to repair your own clothes! Join us whether you have never sewn or are an experienced sewist! We will provide needles and thread, patches, embroidery floss, buttons, and scissors. We’ll share guidance on everything from threading a needle to more complicated stitches for visible mending. Please bring a garment that needs mending and if you have none, we’ll provide fabric scraps you can practice with.

Provided:
Instruction on how to mend
Basic threading and needle use tutorials
All necessary materials to practice or work on your own repair
Workshop leaders: Rachel Breen, Kehayr Brown-Ransaw and Laura Wennstrom. 

About the Artists:

Rachel Breen’s work has been shown widely across the country and internationally, including a solo exhibition at the Minneapolis Institute of Art. Rachel is the recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship to India in 2022 and has been awarded artist residencies at MacDowell, Willapa Bay AiR and the Virginia Center for Creative Arts. Rachel is a recipient of a McKnight Fellowship for Visual Artists, an inaugural recipient of the Jerome Hill Artist Fellowship, has received four Minnesota State Arts Board grants and a fellowship from the Walker Art Center Open Field. Her solo exhibition, The Price of Our Clothes,” was Included in the top 20, best of 2018, exhibitions in the US by Hyperallergic (December 20, 2018). Rachel holds an MFA from the University of Minnesota and a BA from The Evergreen State College. She lives in Minneapolis, MN, maintains an active studio practice and is a professor of art at Anoka Ramsey Community College.
https://rachelbreenart.com/

Kehayr Brown-Ransaw is an interdisciplinary artist, educator, and curator based in Bde Óta Othúŋwe/Mnísota (Minneapolis/Minnesota). His current practice engages in conversations of familial histories, gendered work, self/government documentation, and Black identity through quilting and printmaking—his curatorial and teaching practices center on access, representation, and the presentation of marginalized communities.
Brown-Ransaw uses an archive of family photographs, legal ledgers, and intimate family conversations to challenge the white-driven ancestral paradigm of the individual and conceptualize the communal experiences of the family instead as the central narrative. He designs and makes large-scale quilts, rich in color and pattern, integrating into each design transfers or color blocked forms of family photographs.  These textiles are a tactile link between current diasporic experiences and those of his ancestors. The narrative is, in a sense, the life cycle of a quilt as a meditation on its historical context, both from its use as currency by enslaved women to gain access to white society and as a utilitarian comfort object.
Through this work, he explores how anthropological and ethnographic systems of enumeration through the census and colonialist perspectives have made it so that minority communities are non-existent on paper. And the ways that non-western communities have kept traditional ways of self-documentation alive throughout history. This current body of work explores more intimately relationships of belonging, and
familial obligation. The work ruminates on several questions: What was lost in the move/migration? What does it mean to love when outward affections are dangerous due to a history of state violence? and To whom do we belong?
https://www.kehayr.com/

Laura Wennstrom is a multimedia artist, working in two and three-dimensional formats using color, found materials, quilting, and installation techniques. Her work has been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions across the country.
Laura holds an MFA in New Media from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a BA in Art from North Park University in Chicago. Laura has a robust teaching practice, making art with people of all ages through the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, Bethel University, Dunwoody Technical College, and the Minnesota Textile Center. Laura lives and works in Minneapolis with her family.
https://www.laurawennstrom.com

Michelle Westmark Wingard is an installation-based photographer, curator, and arts educator. In May of 2024 she became a member of Form + Content Gallery in Minneapolis, MN. She is Professor of Art and Gallery Director of Bethel University’s two exhibition spaces. In her seventeen years of programming exhibitions, Wingard has worked with 100+ artists in a diverse range of media. In the 2019-20 and 2020-21 program cycles, Wingard was honored to serve as a Curatorial Mentor for the Emerging Curators Institute (ECI). Her photographic and curatorial projects often seek to create experiential and participatory opportunities exploring themes of memory, grief, memorial, perception, and interconnection. Wingard thinks about all aspects of her work as gestures of care. She has curated several exhibitions and has also exhibited her own photographic work locally and nationally. She is the recipient of the Jerome Travel Grant (2015) and the Minnesota State Arts Board Artist Initiative Grant (2017 and 2019). Wingard holds an MFA in photography from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York (2006). She lives and works in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
https://www.michellewingard.com 

Gallery Hours:
Thursday, Friday, Saturday, 12:00 – 6:00 pm and by appointment 

Image: Laura Wennstrom, Support System, bra pads/inserts, thread 120” x 70”