Mn Artists (Design & Architecture)

Textile designer, public artist, and field botanist Sarah Nassif traverses the overlap between her work in urban forestry and socially engaged art, facilitating transformative encounters with plants and inspiring the public to notice nature everywhere.

Guest editor Regan Golden interviews Lisa Philander, the Director and Curator of the University of Minnesota College of Biological Sciences Conservatory, about the intersection of curatorial practice and biology, the shifting cultural awareness of plants, and the strategies she uses for boosting the visibility of plants and educating the public to inspire conservation efforts.

Visual artist and writer Regan Golden, the incoming guest editor of Mn Artists, introduces Seeing Plants, a series of writings by artists, designers and botanists questioning the role that plants play in our everyday lives: as material for our artwork, as inspiration, as medicine, as a reminder of our own mortality.

Artist, poet, and scholar Simi Kang reframes the notion of expertise, examining which stories we are allowed to retain from our ancestors, what qualifies as a “valid” story, how institutions tell stories for us, and how we tell stories about and for ourselves.

PhD candidate in geography and writer Aaron Mallory explores the space between injury and death to discuss the afterlife of triage.

Mn Artists guest editor, poet and sound artist Chaun Webster, critically engages Douglas Kearney's conceptualization of mess as a way to think about the plasticity of blackness within its spatial temporal continuum.

Rebekah Crisanta de Ybarra, an interdisciplinary artist, musician, and co-founder of Electric Machete Studios, explores how pathways of migration and displacement in rural towns and urban neighborhoods affect local culture, and the potential of folk art to create belonging across difference.