My 2024 Prairie Lakes/McKnight Foundation Artist Grant.
In 2024 I received a grant from the Prairie Lakes Regional Arts Council, with funds from the McKnight Foundations. With these funds I was able to devote creative time, purchase a video projector for making templates, as well as a videographer for two important projects: A site-specific recycled-object collage with the second graders of Northside Elementary (and a video document of it created by Nahom Atnafu), and a series of date-based recycled-object collages (made possible by a new portable video projector!).
I spent the winter of 2023 designing a pattern of squares the second graders at Northside Elementary wpoild evemtually use to create a floor-based, recycled object collage. The students spent the early spring of 2024 collecting objects for the group collage.
The students worked in groups of 3-5 to create the the individual cells. 4 second-grade classes participated in the project, which was executed in 4 half-hour periods on May 13th 2024. The piece was designed so that it could be adapted to outdoor execution, using masking and social-distancing so that the work could be safely executed under possible future pandemic conditions. This version, however, was made in groups of students working together. Once the project was complete, the common space at Northside Elementary was open to the public, I gave a short talk about the things I had done and would be doing for the grant I received, and the many people who came to the event—mostly the friends and relatives of the second graders and the faculty and staff of the school—joined the students in walking around the installation to enjoy all its details.
The second phase of the grant involved creating a series of depictions of dates using recycled materials. Originally these were also going to be executed within a patterned grid. Due to a serious injury I sustained in January—resulting in the need for a total reconstruction of my shoulder bones and months of rehabilitation, this project was altered to be incorporated into my Stuart Artist Residency at South Dakota State University in September.
For this Residency, I had proposed spending several days in which I would conserve the detritus from my purchases, collect found man-made and natural objects, and also collect post-consumer and natural objects from the students, faculty and staff of South Dakota State’s School of Art and Design, and use those objects to create a daily collage depicting the date, and a small daily sculpture. This process began by hanging empty shelves throughout the gallery, which would be filled daily, the date collage hung just to the left of them. I then used the digital projector I was able to purchase through to the grant to create templates for the daily depiction of the date.
The grant period ended with a pubic reception of the finished installation, as well as a public talk on my residency project. My accident in January had resulted in s serious curtailing of the original grant project: I had thought I would do this date project for 9 months! This would have proved too ambitious regardless of the accident. I am grateful that Prairie Lakes was willing to work with me to reach this compromise. The residency at SDSU would not have been possible without this grant assistance, and I was still able to share the entire process with Minnesotans through daily Instagram and Facebook posts of the date collages and sculptures, and through this blog post.
