Sub-Rural #63, Art Lit Lab Community Curation ’26

This is the second summer where the Art Lit Lab (ALL)  fielded a local curatorial team to investigate an informal rapport between local artists of assorted backgrounds, practices, and discourses. ALL’s Community Curation Project, LAB^4 . provided a multiple studio exhibition that includes a women’s’ Palestinian embroidery collective, a group homage to cartoonist Lynda Barry, solo shows of Ho Chunk portraiture, a mixed media Ho Chunk weaver, and a free-expressionist abstract painter. The result is a sprawling range of contemporary art methods and projects loosely centered on themes of ‘community and creative belonging’.

The exhibitions provide work charged with relaxing one’s biases and theories. This feels much different than curatorial projects that claim to discover commonalities among diverse visual tropes and cultural touchstones. Yet, the notion of belonging is designed to represent creative arenas as independent but not antithetical. And it’s not a curatorial method that just re-establishes polite equality of subject and skill while critiquing official culture. But, it doesn’t necessarily provide alternatives to more familiar art models deemed contentious and ambitious. Such heterogeneity ought not be a reconfiguration of 1970’s pluralism or a channeling of neo-vernacularism but a critique of commodity and cultural authority.

There’s still space for responses to theories of modernisat the shape styles and subjects as if art was logically critical and conversational. A functioning neo-pluralism fights the vestiges of production linked to ‘abstraction vs. representation,’ which once reduced all art discourse to sterile quantitative research.

Objectively, art has always existed in various guises and voices. Prior to the 70’s the artworld was pluralistic and various but more underground and barely acknowledged by big art media. That work was also expressionist, abstract, surrealist, and contained narratives that were dormant in Modernism, embedded in its critique of the classical order. However, capitalism is nothing if not proud and markets preferred the convenient narrative foregrounded in American art as a successor to not only European culture but to world culture and economies. Today, as shown at the AAL, artists with media and cultural flexibility have a toehold in independent galleries and project spaces with activists working to serve more diverse audiences.

But does the ALL’s multiple-choice strategy tiptoe around an equality of content and skill? Or does it manage to slyly critique the more common smorgasbord gallery menu where selections look different, but taste the same? With regard to contradictory artworks and mediums, uncovering and  celebrating commonality is not the only tried and true justification and objective. Bracketing visual language with its dramatic nuances and revelations assists in rethinking the foundations of gallery curation and questioning of community where it originates.

The “Threading Solidarity” component of the show displayed remarkably beautiful and complex textiles as did Jenifer White Eagle’s stunning yarn belt weaving. However, It was difficult to expand a discussion on the nature of their work in relation to the theme of “Creative Belonging“ or on the extended issues of installation and curation. Traditional craft-focused work has more autonomy and inhabits a more classic arena of production and display. All the other work had energetic, critical, and aesthetic overlaps that generated the kind of community I understood the curators intended to describe and celebrate.

The range of artists still provided an extraordinary experience of considering informed relationships regarding found objects, texts, white walls, installation, and collaboration that are mutually self-embracing. In “You are Sitting,” the group of former Lynda Barry students massaged the subjects of narrative, juvenescent self-absorption, fearless graphics, and craft – features of comics as evidence-collectors with attributes from the breadth of culture, untypical in other visual art mediums but nascent in Barry’s remarkable oeuvre. Artists’ comics can cover much formal and intellectual ground because text and pictures can be designed to be critical, radical, public and intimate and the best of its practitioners are all over the above with humor, gravity, and irony.

The richest experience embraces “craftology,” or ”craftishness,” rather than craft, because you don’t need a formal recipe to consume content. The best pictorial language and forms are those you can trace with your own hand, providing physical as well as psychological harmonics and vantage points. Hand-drawn narratives stem from our original instinct to make marks, to become something, mark one’s spot. It’s fluid, like handwriting. Drawings are about object expansion/interpretation. They suspend resolution, a condition that only exists around the corner, that would terminate creativity so comics aren’t conclusive. Their value is that  they are unrelenting. There will always be more.

Vincent Mollica engages those creative instincts with a video constructed of numerous animated drawings from individual cels and adds a suite of drawings that exemplify his completely frenzied, character and map-driven gift of fan-atical improvisation.

Katrina Koppa’s ink drawings are more formal, even elegant – images that are unsolved samples of childlike allegory. Few artists spend as much time invested in both crafting enigma and leaving the viewer suspended in imaginary theater. Lke Mollica’s construction of allusions and secrecy, she avoids the voyeuristic and fetishistic tropes that  overwhelm some examples of vernacularism and DIY.

 

Liubóv Szwako is an emerging painter who has crafted a method of post-abstract expressionist compositions that revisit some tried and true outgrowths of mid-century picture-making with feelings of European “Art Informel” and “Nouveau Realism.” His aggressively textured, boldly colored, surfaces are as much performed by assemblage and décollage and alternatively patterned and gesticulated. His dense, textured compositions blendt a kind of wildlife/architectural scaffold. Their critical vistas about painting history loaded with information about the assertion of window and frame and establishing the key position to look at real paintings about painting.

 The notable inclusion of Tom Jones’ solo portrait photography is unique in this line up of more modestly acclaimed company. His formally and conceptually remarkable work exposes the degree to which the perception of Indigenous Americans throughout history is ideologically determined by persistent meta-narratives of race and geography. His portraits not only re-frame contemporary representations of the Indian body, they destabilize classic examples of mainstream taste and power.

There are few examples of rarity and/or explorations of myth within his citation of indigenous people. He trains his formidable craft and personal experience against the privileged history of photographic texts to acknowledge a critical part of America distant to most mainstream viewers –  even distant to preeminent artworld models rooted in alterity and conceived in radicalism.

Jones emblazes his photographs with hand-beaded Ho-Chunk floral designs, reflecting the memory and continued influence of his ancestors. Because of the portrait’s informal poses and attire, they compete with popular culture and youthful notions of beauty and vitality. Even in portraits of older tribe members they’re contemporaneous and slightly subversive. They represent,  the unceasing presence of his subjects. In 20 years people of color will be the majority population.

Tom Jones photographs are published with permission from Blockley Gallery, Minneapolis