Walk With Us

Image: Meta Mapa, 2007 by Yumi Roth (in collaboration with Andrew Blackstock and Casey McGuire), Pilsen, Czech Republic

Walk With Us

May 14, 2022 - March 19, 2023

Curators: John Schuerman and Zoe Cinel

Walk With Us is an international, walking-based art exhibition in which fifteen artists share their discoveries and artistic extrapolations from the social, physical, and psychic landscapes they explored while walking. This exhibition is presented in the non-gallery spaces (hallways, elevators, alcoves, etc.) of the Art Center to reflect both the wandering, wayfinding, and exploratory nature of walking-based art, and the shifting terrain covered by the artists.

Artists: Abbey Paccia, Alonso Sierralta, Anastasia Polychronidou, Ben Moren, Ellen Mueller, Jess Witte, Martin Presley, Meagan Marsh Pine, Mode Lab (collective), Nicholas Bauch, Olle Helin, Sage Dawson, Sarah Nassif, Yiannis Pappas, Yumi Roth

RELATED PROGRAMMING

Virtual Panel Discussion Recording: Click Here

Walk With An Artist: The Heron’s Hunt by Jessalyn Finch

Meeting at Mayo Park East by the playground. This is an outdoor program and masks are preferred. Thursday, August 25th, 7:00 – 8:30 PM | No registration needed.

Walk with Jessalyn Finch to follow the great blue heron as it stalks the river’s fish and the fish dance to evade the heron. These living sculptures will roam the park along Bear Creek as the artist takes you through the creative process and story behind this immersive performance.About the artist:Jessalyn Finch has been a visual artist off and on starting in 2009. She received a B.S. in Fine Art and Eastern Philosophy from the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse focused on Printmaking and Figure Drawing. After graduation in 2012, she decided not to pursue art professionally until 2018, when she was awarded a SEMAC Emerging Artist grant for her collection “Shadow Form: The Human Body’s Secret Life.”She is currently an Artist Member at Threshold arts where she sells prints, woodcuts, and postcards. She continues her multi-disciplinary approach to explore crossing mediums, performance, surrealism, fashion, and the human condition, at her home studio in Rochester, MN.

Tour with Artist Martin Presley

Sunday, June 26 at 11:30 AM | Free | Meet by the entry mural inside

Join us for a tour with artist Presley Martin, one of the 15 artists selected through an international call by Art Center’s curator Zoe Cinel and Guest Curator John Schuerman for the group exhibition Walk With Us.

The artist is also part of the 4Ground: Midwest Land Art Biennial, with a public art sculpture. 4Ground serves as a fundamental and radical interrogation of place through a rural perspective and an experimental, collaborative approach to art-making and curating through co-creation and authorship. More about 4Ground: https://4groundbiennial.org/About the artist: Martin Presley’s practice involves walking along the banks of the Mississippi River picking up plastic that has floated down the river where he sees objects that could be either a rock or a piece of weathered plastic. After picking them up for confirmations, he assembles these rock-like pieces of plastic into cairn trail markers. These trail markers are both the result of his walking/collecting practice and markers to remind us to question what we think we are witnessing in the world.Image: Cairn 1, 5”x8”x18” Found Plastic Foam

Virtual Book Club

Sunday, May 22, 11:00 AM – 12:15 PM

This will be a virtual event. Have coffee and chat with us! This will be a conversation, not a presentation.Unstillness is a book by artist John Schuerman of quiet walks through the chaotic year from spring of 2020 to spring of 2021. As we were changing for better and worse, Schuerman walked, observed, and reported back. Unstillness is a reflective chronicle of self in society and nature, through drawings, photos, and text. The book documents 22 walks that examine the social upheavals in Minneapolis (and beyond), the loss of socialization caused by the pandemic, the effects of experiencing nature from within the grid of the Twin Cities, and the author’s individual life in relation to these vast domains. These are walks of reckoning and as such provide few answers, but rather bring us face to face with the possibilities for progress, stasis, or collective failure on deep issues such as climate change, racism, the pandemic, and fascism on the rise.Books will be available through the Rochester Art Center gallery shop (CLICK HERE) or from the author. John can be reached through his website, www.schuermanfineart.comRead the reviews here:Verve Place-makers Review and Interview by Tracy NordstromMplsart.com Book Review by Camille LeFevreStay connected by joining the Facebook Event Page: Click Here

John Schuerman is an environmental artist and independent curator. His artwork reflects his deep interest in nature both human and nonhuman. His aesthetic style and social consciousness formed as he grew up on a dairy farm in southern Wisconsin. His primary art practices are Walking and Drawing, which he uses to examine his community’s physical and psychic landscapes. As a curator he’s produced over 30 exhibitions across the Midwest on topics that address current concerns in our collective psyche.