Carleton Voice wins a CASE silver award

June marked my second anniversary at Carleton College, and my first time entering the CASE Awards, the global nonprofit association promoting higher ed. I’m pleased to note that the Carleton College Voice took home a silver Circle of Excellence award from the Council for Advancement and Support of Education for our three 2024 issues.

From the judges:

Carleton College Voice was one of our favorites. The design was excellent and the graphic elements stood out. We felt these pieces 'really broke away from the public relations machine' and told stories that were bold, fun, and in some cases truly brave, and even sometimes risky—but oh so important. The writing was sharp, excellent, and often laugh-out-loud funny. A good read rendered beautifully.

Seven higher-ed institutions received awards in the category for colleges and universities publishing three or more times a year, with Holy Cross taking gold, Wake Forest also taking silver, and bronzes going to Boston University, the University of Pittsburgh, Bowdoin, and Kenyon.

From West to East: New rural series launches at the National Gallery of Art

As guest editor of the Midwest region of the just-published National Gallery of Art series “West to East,” I invited three rural writers to share their perspectives on how place shapes creativity—and contributed a writing of my own.

Called Back: On George Morrison, Land Acknowledgement, and Returning Home
Artist Andrea Carlson writes about the art of George Morrison and her return to Gichi Bitobig (Grand Marais), a landscape that influenced Morrison deeply. A member of the Grand Portage Band of Lake Superior Chippewa, she parses what’s left out when we see didactic labels for Morrison’s art that leave out so much of the story.

An aerial view of Francis Xavier Church, the Chippewa City church George Morrison and his family attended. Photo: Jenn Ackerman and Tim Gruber

Modernist Barns and Modern Farmers

Owner of Pied Beauty Farm and associate professor of English at the University of Wisconsin – Whitewater, Joshua Mabie looks at the ways artists like Grant Wood leveraged agrarian symbolism, unwittingly obscuring the reality of life for rural people. Fun fact: while the house in Wood’s American Gothic remains a tourist destination in Iowa, the red barn over the couple’s shoulder never existed: “[It] is a figment of Wood’s imagination, added to confirm the painting’s rural setting.”

A drone shot of Mabie’s Pied Beauty Farm in Stoughton, Wisconsin. Photo: Jenn Ackermann and Tim Gruber

Iowa Artists Craft Complex Visions of the Rural

Matthew Fluharty, executive director of Art of the Rural, focuses on Grant Wood’s immersive Corn Room murals as a way to “understand how land, tradition, and personal experience have motivated rural, regional artists,” from Grant Wood to Timothy Wehrle, Laurel Nakadate, and Duane Slick.

Grant Wood’s immersive Corn Room Mural at the Sioux City Art Center. Photo: Jenn Ackermann and Tim Gruber

For the fourth piece in the series, I contributed my own writing:

Potter Richard Bresnahan Navigates an “Eco-mutual” Future
For my profile, I visited the resident potter at my alma mater, St. John’s University, to hear about how his experience apprenticing with the Nakazato family’s master potters in Kyushu, Japan, in the 1970s influenced his hyperlocal, eco-friendly, and distinctly Minnesotan practice in Collegeville.

Richard Bresnahan in the St. John’s Abbey Arboretum, Collegeville, Minnesota. Photo: Jenn Ackermann and Tim Gruber.

The series is visually unified by the photography of Minneapolis-based studio Ackermann + Gruber, whose imagery grounds each story in the unique sense of place of these four rural environments. After hiring them for a Carleton College shoot and imagery for a Land O’Lakes project on rural vitality, this is my third time working with this husband and wife duo.

Interview: Dyani White Hawk on her Whitney Biennial Artwork

With Wopila | Lineage (2022)—her 14-by-8-foot contribution to the 2022 Whitney Biennial—Dyani White Hawk wanted to make a statement: “I wanted to position Lakota aesthetics in the Whitney Biennial. Native people have not been able to walk into public spaces and see our lives validated, reflected, honored, and uplifted in the way that other folks have. So they’re the first audience I want to address.”

Beyond that, though, she wanted to use beauty—through the meticulous application of more than a half million shimmering glass beads—to open up a conversation with visitors. “‘Wopila’ expresses deep gratitude,” she tells me in a just-published interview.” And "‘Lineage,’ like much of my work recently, is meant to honor and show gratitude for the lineage of Lakota women and their contributions to abstraction, for Indigenous women at large and their contributions to art on this continent, for the generations of practiced abstraction that helped nurture and guide the work of the Western artists that were inspired by their work and brought that back into their studios with them as they created easel paintings. In these pieces I’m pulling from those histories—from my own very specific history of Lakota abstraction, from Indigenous abstract practices at large, from abstract easel painting practices—and hoping to create opportunities for conversation around how connected those histories are and the fact that one doesn’t happen without the other.”

She acknowledges there’s a critique embedded in the work:

It’s recognizing the bullshit that it has been, and the way that it’s been taught so far is extremely racist and sexist and ageist. Without a doubt, it’s a critique of how it has been presented to us and taught to us so far. But I don’t want to just sit in a place of anger. I want to sit in a place of: this is the BS that has existed; now how do we move towards a healthier future?

Read “Beauty Is Medicinal: Dyani White Hawk on her Whitney Biennial Artwork”

Announcing the 2022 Rabkin Prize Winners

Between stints as an art writer/editor at the Walker Art Center, I was editor at the Minnesota Independent and also the site’s media critic. I spent four or five years documenting media consolidation, newsrooms contracting, and arts and culture writers falling to budget cuts at legacy dailies and altweeklies alike (culture writers were almost always the first let go). Shortly after returning to the Walker to launch its online publishing portal in 2011, I organized an international conference, Superscript: Arts Journalism and Criticism in a Digital Age, as a way to ponder art journalism’s “possible futures” in this climate.

The future was, and continues to be, pretty grim.

So when I was asked to be on the jury for the Rabkin Foundation’s annual prize for arts writers, of course I was thrilled. Help pick eight arts writers to each get $50,000… just for being great, smart, community-connected writers? I’m in.

Over the past six years, the foundation—named after artist Leo and his wife Dorothea Rabkin—has given $2,775,000 to arts writers all across the US. Astounding, really.

For the 2022 Rabkin Prize, I was part of a small but sharp jury—with Sasha Anawalt, founding director of the USC Getty Arts Journalism Program, and Wall Street Journal arts editor Eric Gibson—that deliberated on the work of 16 writers, all nominated by peers who consider them the “essential visual art journalist[s] working in [their] part of the country.” I’m truly excited to help the foundation support these thinkers:

Shana Nys Dambrot
Los Angeles)
LA Weekly arts editor

Bryn Evans
Decatur, Georgia
Poet, frequent contributor to Burnaway

Joe Fyfe
New York City
Painter, writer

Peter L’Official
Harlem & Annandale-on-Hudson, NY
Poet, educator

Stacy Pratt
Tulsa
Writer, musician, poet

Darryl F. Ratcliff, II
Dallas
Artist, poet, arts writer

Jeanne Claire van Ryzin
Austin
Sightlines editor

Margo Vansynghel
Seattle
Crosscut arts reporter

Congratulations to all! And thanks to Rabkin executive director Susan Larsen for including me, and to fellow jurors, Eric and Sasha!

Naming GroundBreak: Transforming the Epicenter of Racial Reckoning to the Epicenter of Racial Opportunity

The police murder of George Floyd sent millions into the streets around the world to protest police brutality against Black people and call for equity and opportunity. Like so many places, the uprisings responding to such injustice coincided with damage that leveled commercial and cultural corridors across the Twin Cities. We need to rebuild: physically and spiritually—not to mention equitably.

But how? In February, I was invited to be a small part of an ambitious initiative being spearheaded by the McKnight Foundation that aimed to corral resources—and will—to invest $2 billion over 10 years to help rebuild neighborhoods impacted by this destruction and, more importantly, create opportunities for BIPOC community members—and do so while addressing climate change. A group of more than 25 corporate, civic, and philanthropic leaders joined forces, emboldened by a mission: “We have a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to define a new paradigm for community development finance that finally addresses systemic racism; rights historical wrongs; closes racial gaps in income and wealth; and boldly meets the climate moment.”

Its goals:

• Create 45,000 new BIPOC homeowners
• Stabilize families in 23,500 affordable rental units
• Complete 30 commuity-led, climate-ready, transformational commercial developments
• Launch more than 11,000 BIPOC-owned businesses with at least 20 percent employing 5+ people

In February, I was the sole writer on a four-person team at Zeus Jones charged with naming this vitally important endeavor. It was an urgent project—three weeks start to finish—so we quickly zeroed in on a range of rich territories to explore, from the audacity of the initiative’s scope to the geographic specificity of this moment: this movement started here in Minneapolis, at 38th and Chicago. In the end, the final name was suggestive of building, of the anchoring earth, of a break from old paradigms, of a new day rising.

On May 12, the initiative was formally launched with this name: The GroundBreak Coalition. Its ambitious—and achievable, I believe—goal: “to transform the epicenter of racial reckoning into the epicenter for racial opportunity.”

Learn more about the GroundBreak Coalition here.