Experience Is Expertise
by Simi Kang
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.
When Saymoukda asked me to write for this incredible series, I struggled to find a center for the piece. While I make visual art and poetry, my primary art these days is writing in service to my Ph.D.…
More
Out of Place: Black Triage and its Afterlife
by Aaron Mallory
PhD candidate in geography and writer Aaron Mallory explores the space between injury and death to discuss the afterlife of triage.
To be black is to be injured. An injury is a status, a commonly held social belief that one is not in good health. What it means to be to healthy depends on your place. We only speak of health when things aren’t well. …
More
Image credit: Aaron Mallory
Blackness and the Not-Yet-Finished
by Chaun Webster
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.
[[{"fid":"148042","view_mode":"default","fields":{"format":"default"},"type":"media","attributes":{"class":"image-style-large media-element file-default"}}]]…
More
Notebook: Locating the Folk
by Rebekah Crisanta de Ybarra a.k.a. Lady Xok
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.
Lady Xok at MN Original video shoot. Photo: Tania Galaviz.…
More
We Are All We Have: The Practice of Neighboring
by Ashley Hanson and Mary Welcome
Ashley Hanson and Mary Welcome—both traveling artists working in rural places—team up to articulate their work as a practice of neighboring, in order to show how mutual exchange, compassion, and care can shift the narrative of artistic success.
Some questions without answers, conversational flashcards by Nicole Lavelle. Photo: Mary Welcome, 2018.…
More
Getting to the Golden Hour
by Michele Anderson
Michele Anderson, the Rural Program Director at Springboard for the Arts in Fergus Falls, explores how insider/outsider narratives shape perceptions about rural places, and how the complex ways we relate to a place can give rise to our responsibilities within community.
Image of flooded access road from "13 Roads in Otter Tail County," a short film by Nik Nerburn.…
More
Notebook: Now, Here
by Shanai Matteson
Writer, public artist, and cultural organizer Shanai Matteson ponders the slow work of relationships, the language of social practice, the threat of extraction, and the consequences of drawing boundaries, in the first of two dispatches from the pathway of the Enbridge Line 3 oil pipeline.
My uncle and my kids exploring an old gravel pit near Palisade. …
More
