NOW SHOWING

FIBER JUNGLE | A COmmon Thread Collective

Showing June 2019 |  MacRostie Gallery |  Sponsored by Paul Bunyan Communications

“A Common Thread” is an Itasca area fiber art collective of accomplished artists who gather together to represent the diverse scope of form and techniques that fiber art encompasses. Their newest exhibition, Fiber Jungle, reflects each artist’s newest creative explorations related to the theme including a co-created work by the group. As the featured artist of the collective, Diane Rutherford will present her latest batik works referencing lunar cycles. Over 20 artists’ work will be featured. Several of the artists will host fiber workshops throughout the month; their names are included below.

Featured Artist Diane Rutherford will be exhibiting with participating artists:

Beth Kubrick

Cathryn Peters

Susan Vann

John Zasada

Dave Browne

Chris Friedlieb

Mary Reichert

Kayla Aubid

Waase Aubid

M’lou Brubaker

Featured artist Diane Rutherford will be presenting “The Moon Project” in this exhibit. Rutherford explains her highlighted works in her own words below.

The Moon Project is a study of full, super, and blue moons. Every moon is accompanied by a haiku [in this series]…the poems came first and were written “in the moment” of the moonrise. 

I began to study the moon and the native American names for the moon. I used these moon names to describe my moon experiences in short poems with a 5-7-5 syllable count.

The project launched with a bang when I discovered that the January, February, and March moons would be super moons.

 Each moon batik is embroidered with its haiku lovingly by my friend and collaborator Chris Friedlieb. The poem often weaves in and out of images. This project is ongoing.

Mapping Labor | TRACY KRUMM

Showing June 2019 |  Minnesota Gallery |  Sponsored by Paul Bunyan Communications

Tracy Krumm (St. Paul, MN) is a studio artist working in metal textiles, forged steel, found materials, pigments, fiber, resin. She is a McKnight Visual Arts fellow, and art educator. Her work integrates hand-constructed textile processes with found materials and forged steel to comment on labor, identity, human connectivity, and cultural production. Her current work investigates the intersection of creative experience, simultaneous occurrence, and transformation. The manipulation of form through low tech and high tech processes, along with explorations in material studies, are at the core of her research.

Krumm has exhibited internationally in over 175 gallery and museum exhibitions during the past 25 years including the Cheongju Biennial, South Korea; the Triennial of Textiles, Central Museum, Lodz, Poland; the 4th Betonac Prize, Sint Truiden, Belgium; the New Mexico Museum of Art; the Denver Art Museum; the Kohler Art Center, Sheboygan, WI; and the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, DC, where she was named a Woman to Watch in 2012. 

She received her BFA with High Distinction from the California College of Arts and Crafts in 1987 and her MFA in visual art from Vermont College in 1995. She has been a visiting artist and lecturer at numerous institutions since 1990 including Virginia Commonwealth University's Craft and Material Studies Program, the Witt Visiting Artist Program at the University of Michigan, Cranbrook, the Memphis College of Art, UC Santa Cruz, the University of Montana, Anderson Ranch, Arrowmont, Haystack, and Penland. She was a Visiting Assistant Professor and Associate Member of the Graduate Faculty in Art + Design from 2006-2008 at North Carolina State University in Raleigh; an Assistant Professor in the Fiber Department and Community Arts and Service Learning Program at the Kansas City Art Institute from 2008-2012 (Lecturer 2003 – 2006); and an Associate Lecturer in the Art Department at the University of Wisconsin- River Falls from 2015 – 2016.

Grants and awards include a 2015/16 McKnight Visual Artist Fellowship, a 2017 MN State Arts Board Artist Initiative Grant, and residencies at Pyramid Atlantic in Silver Spring, MD and THREAD, a creative content studio in Minneapolis, MN. Two residency grants from the International Folk Art Foundation in 2007 and 2008 allowed her to collaborate with nearly 1,000 community participants to complete Big Fiber: Human Tools, a series of four site-specific installations on Museum Hill in Santa Fe, NM.

“The handmade is at the heart of my studio practice. In my undertaking to conceive and execute work that reflects and transcends the values of labor, tradition, and beauty, I challenge the ordinary to become extraordinary. Through intensive construction processes, the familiar, and the unknown unite to honor the universal and intuitive presences of the subconscious, chance, and creativity. Material and structure, merged through color and pattern, become a synthesis that is all at once promising, complex, and mesmerizing.

 As each work progresses, formal and psychological considerations inform aesthetic decisions. Thinking-through-making sensibilities and attention to detail come together to reference the possibility of function and to stand as evidence of how ideas, process, and material resolve to join and grow in countless new ways. This is an expression of my politics; the results reflect my personal sense of wonder, darkness, and intrigue that make up my world.”