Bio: I’ve assembled pictures in various ways for many years. I structure meaning, visual rhythms and rhymes in simple compositions. My artistic process is a wandering scavenging improvisation. I draw, paint and copy images using a variety of tools and materials. I often use photography, digital editing and other means to make art. I’ve made artist books, mail art zines and images to share online. I hope my work is evidence of a focused artistic practice.

Anissa Cavazos

Bio: Anissa Cavazos is a multidisciplinary artist from Sebastian, Texas located in the Rio Grande Valley. She earned her BFA from Texas State University in San Marcos, TX and is an MFA candidate at the University of Minnesota. Her own work reflects on the culture and experience of growing up in the RGV, examining cultural resilience, practices, and preservation. Utilizing natural materials such as, nopales, hojas, mesquite, and cotton, Cavazos reprocesses them to create paper, sculptures, and books. With this intentionality she aspires to root her work back home while inviting non-valley natives to share in these experiences. Her creative process stems from Mexican and Tejano folklore, family history, and the layered intersectionality within nepantla.

Statement: This work is the first I've created since returning to Minneapolis after my dad's passing. The background is made up of sewn hojas that reflect a portal. Central within are two transparent photos bridging time, life, and death. The largest of the two shows my tio, my dad's caretaker, standing over my father's casket. The smaller image is myself as a child in my grandmother's backyard with my father. This piece is meant to fade overtime, gradually losing its visualization and returning back into memories.

Autumn Cavender-Wilson

Bio: Wicanhpi Iyotan Win Autumn Cavender is a midwife and multidisciplinary artist based out of Pezutazizi K’api (Upper Sioux Reservation). Their work predominantly focuses on the intersections of Dakota cultural revitalization, parenthood, and contemporary technologies. Seeking to interrogate what dynamic culture means for Dakota people, Cavender explores the evolution of Dakota aesthetics and mediums, and how those changes tell the story of colonization, genocide, diaspora, and survival. She lives, works, and plays at her home reservation with her partner, two kids, a German Shepherd, and the occasional chicken.

Statement: Generated from sound files harvested during the winter of 2025-2026, “ICE Breaker” is a meditation on community resilience, Dakota conceptions of hibernal incubation, and the inevitability of change. Completed in Cavender’s distinctive style of “digital quillwork,” the patterns seen here are born from the sounds of ice cracking during the deep winter cold of northern MniSota, during a time of federal occupation and political violence. Take a deep breath, and hear the ice break.

Awanigiizhik Bruce

Bio: Awanigiizhik Bruce (Mikinaakowajiwininiw) is a Two-Spirit diverse-media artist, community organizer, language/culture teacher, and independent researcher based on the Turtle Mountain Chippewa Reservation. Through the preservation and revitalization of material culture and creating across numerous artistic modalities, Awanigiizhik Bruce pushes boundaries by exploring Indigenous contemporisms and futurisms. Their artistic practices are informed by their Nehiyaw-Pwat (Ojibwe, Cree, Metis, and Assiniboine) heritage, personal identity, and nomadic lifestyle. They spend much of the year completing site-specific and collaborative projects around the country, like murals in Minneapolis, St. Paul, and Duluth, MN, Des Moines, IA, and Belcourt, ND.

Statement: Taga ambe giiwe’odaa! Come on, let's go home (by canoe) highlights a familiar experience. Indigenous peoples from this region utilized these great highways (the rivers, lakes, and portaging) to travel. Awanigiizhik made ledger drawings of the birchbark canoe and birchbark wigwam. They fused both of those ledger drawings within a digital art program to depict a larger, cohesive design. Waterfaring gives us time to reflect on our relationships, to our family systems, to our environment, to our sovereignty, and how our ancestors lived and how we learn from them.

Chotsani Elaine Dean

Bio: Chotsani Elaine Dean is an artist and educator, born in Hartford, Ct.

Statement: This poster is a pause for Phillis Wheatley and Scipio Moorhead, both of whom lived in Boston. In 1775, Scipio was sold at an estate auction and was never heard from again. Phillis Wheatley wrote a poem for Scipio, “To S. M., a young African Painter, on seeing his Works.” He was an artist; she praised his work. She, too, was enslaved and an artist. His owners and oppressors, Sarah Moorhead, an art teacher, and Reverend John Moorhead, her husband, kept Scipio in bondage. He was lost to us in 1775, but his name was remembered and spoken during this Wakpa Triennial for a time. Everything is always for a time.

Christopher E. Harrison

Bio: Christopher E. Harrison is an Ohio native who received his BFA from Columbus College of Art and Design (OH) and an MFA from the Art Academy Univ. (CA). Harrison currently lives and has maintained his studio practice in Minneapolis as a visual artist, illustrator and graphic designer for over 30 years aand serves as an adjunct lecturer at the University of MN/Twin Cities. He has exhibited his work in solo and group exhibitions including The Weisman Museum (MN), Nemeth Art Center (MN), MIAD (WI) and Smack Mellon in New York. He has also shown internationally as well, with group shows in Senegal, Ecuador and the United Kingdom.

Statement: In Afroglyph:Tranquil, the dominant lines in my forms represent the African continent and its people, while the various surface textures, patterns, and vibrant colors reflect my culture's diversity. It’s an expression that uplifts and validates my ancestral history. As such my work is a celebration of Black cultural aesthetics within a simplified graphic language of my own invention.

Christopheraaron Deanes

Bio: Christopheraaron Deanes is a Minneapolis-based visual artist working primarily in vitreous enamel on steel — glass fused to metal at over 1,350°F — and oil painting. Known as "The Enamelist," he creates large-scale public commissions grounded in shared humanity, memory, place, and the resilience of communities of color, often drawing on the Mississippi River's cycles of disruption and return. A graduate of the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, he trained in enamel fabrication at the Chicago Fire Arts Center. An educator of more than thirty years and director of the Roho Collective, his recent work appears in "Navigating the Shift" at Plot Gallery.

Statement: A young Black woman crosses the canvas mid-stride, bent into the strain, hands gripping a picket sign cutting through like a live wire. The placard is blank — wordless not for lack of grievance but its surplus, more causes than any board could hold. Around her the world dissolves into warm ochre washes, charcoal underdrawings breathing through the paint. She turns back, tired, unwilling to set it down. Wheat-pasted near the Mississippi, the image draws meaning from the water: disrupted yet returning to stillness — as people of color build resilience, knowing the weight is a wait, that we pick the picket.

Cole Redhorse Taylor

Bio: Cole Redhorse Taylor is a multidisciplinary visual artist. He is Mdewakanton Dakota, enrolled with the Prairie Island Indian Community in southeastern Minnesota. Cole works in multiple different mediums, both in customary Dakota art forms such as beadwork, quillwork and textile work; he also works in drawing, painting, collage work and digital illustration. His work is informed by his people’s proximity to their homelands of Minnesota and the relationship they hold with the cosmos above. By implementing these epistemologies in his practice, he is able to navigate from a traditional Dakota worldview, but as an artist in the contemporary.

Statement: I’m honored to have been asked to be included in this year’s Wakpa Triennial. The theme was, “a moment to pause”. And I thought about the day I was driving through our buffalo slough here on Prairie Island, and I stopped what i was doing to take a picture of this Red Cardinal Flower. And then I thought about all the Hummingbirds around as they’re preparing to head south. When you approach these gifts from Unci Maka, you must be still in order to appreciate them

Dougie Padilla

Bio: Dougie Padilla is a self-taught artist/poet/activist/visionary and life-long Minnesotan of Norwegian/Mexican/cowboy roots. He has lived thru a sub-zero winter in an army tent, fought against the war in Vietnam and for civil rights, created thousands of drawings and paintings and poems, farmed with horses, lived in an ashram in India. Among occupations he has counted artist, poet, farmer, single father, soccer coach, psychic, sportswear designer, jade cutter, activist, and hospital orderly. He has studied with swamis and zen masters and dancing rabbis, shamans and sufis and bards, psychics and yogis and archetypal psychologists. His work has been shown and collected nationally and internationally. He has won awards and founded arts organizations and businesses. Married for 39 years he is forever surrounded by a delightful host of family, friends and critters.

Statement: The notion of Evil has played a large role in my ruminations for many years. I am convinced of its existence, though I hesitate to describe its exact boundaries. And it appears to be thriving these days. In Latino culture, the devil (el diablo), that very personification of Evil, is common. And, thus, it’s been common in my art for quite a while. This time it shows up glaring through a window, easily a nightmare come to life. We can only hope to wake up soon.

Emma Beatrez

Bio: Emma Beatrez (b. 1995, New Prague, MN) is an interdisciplinary artist based in Minneapolis. They graduated from Minneapolis College of Art and Design in 2020 with a MFA in Interdisciplinary Visual Studies and received their BFA with an emphasis in painting at North Dakota State University in 2018. Beatrez is the co-founder/curator at Night Club gallery in St. Paul alongside artist Lee Noble. Represented by Hair + Nails gallery in Minneapolis, MN

Statement: In this recent piece, Emma Beatrez renews her visual exploration of small town pep-rally bonfires and the cheerleaders that conduct these wild spectacles. This customary occurrence, when rendered in frozen moments lifted from home video screengrabs or sewn together from open-source imagery by the artist’s blurred strokes, takes on a haunted, apocalyptic impression as its mistresses-of-ceremony — the prototypical Cheerleaders — leap and chant, enwreathed by tongues of orange flame. Clad in polyester vestments, extremely flammable, Beatrez’s priestesses speed through their sportive uniforms in ecstatic trance, a choreography of escalating risk, summoning danger, the adrenaline surging, melding individuals into group, their eyes glinting in the camera flash or the fire, and a fairly ordinary secular tradition transmogrifies into an otherworldly ritual emblematic of America’s conflicted priorities.

Drawing on influences including the occult, her midwestern upbringing, and the hidden and overt symbolism and rituals inherent in our everyday lives, Beatrez’s work encompasses sculpture, painting, video and installation. Her recent paintings explore core psychoanalytic notions of the symbolic and the real as well as the emergence of new meanings through distortion and recontextualization of established iconography. Images flicker between personal and public open source, taking shape in a constant state of flux. Like a game of telephone, everything comes full circle in the end, altered through the degradation of transference.

Harriet Bart

Bio: Harriet Bart is a conceptual artist working across disciplines in a variety of media including bronze and stone, canvas and paper, found objects, books and words. Her large gallery installations, objects, and artist’s books are embedded in cultural narratives that speak to the power of memory to inform and transform our lives. Bart's retrospective: ABRACADABRA and Other Forms of Protection, was presented at the Weisman Art Museum in 2020. The University of Minnesota Andersen Archives and Special Collections Library holds her books and papers in their collections. Bart's exhibition Echoes and Equations is on view there through September 18, 2026.

Statement: ABRACADABRA is an ancient word, said to be of Hebrew or Aramaic origin. It is generally understood to mean, “I create as I speak” or "I create as I write". I am drawn to the word for the suggestion that language itself can be an act of creation. In ancient times ABRACADABRA was often worn as a protective amulet to ward off evil and sickness. It appears in my work in different forms—sometimes written on a wall, sometimes inscribed in stone as an object. I intend it as a protective incantation.

Hend Al Mansour

Bio: Hend Al Mansour is an Arab Minnesotan artist whose immersive installations, screen-printing, and animations merge Islamic art with feminist storytelling. Her work highlights Arab and Muslim women’s power and cultural agency. Al-Mansour's murals appear throughout the Twin Cities, including Merhaba at the intersection of Cedar and Franklin Avenues.

Al-Mansour’s honors include the Alumni Achievement Award from Minneapolis College of Art & Design (MCAD), multiple Minnesota State Arts Board grants, and McKnight and Jerome Fellowships.

She holds an MFA from MCAD and an MA in Art History from the University of St. Thomas. She is a member of Rosalux Gallery.

Statement: Yara, Yara Omer inspired this portrait. A Palestinian American novelist and poet, Yara teaches hard-of-hearing children using ASL. Here, her hands are caught mid-sign, forming the word "freedom" — held in the instant before the gesture completes.

The piece centers Palestinian women's power. The Arabic calligraphy and embroidered dress surrounding Yara affirm her identity and heritage. The poem inscribed above translates: "When the people will to live, fate must obey."

My moment of pause is here, in the gap between the hand's motion and its meaning — a pause to consider what Palestinian women carry, and what they refuse to set down.

Jenny Schmid

Statement: Giantess emerges from the frustration of our current moment, as we have more access to information than any time with history, but our leaders do little about various crises as the wealthy steal our natural resources, further catapulting us into environmental disaster. Giantess is cathartic, eating the selfish money makers, eco-destructors, data center creators- and leaving a wake of natural beauty and rebirth behind her.

Jesse Ferdinand

Bio: Jesse Ferdinand’s ambient dreamscapes and allegorical visions explore the psychological grey areas that exist on the edges of human perception. “In drawing classes, they say, don’t draw what you think you’re seeing, draw what you’re actually seeing,” he says. “I feel like the world has these utility corridors where you’re off script. It’s almost like I’m populating the places people aren’t.” Ferdinand describes his process as an intuitive synthesis of his longheld interests in art and visual culture. Video game scores, horror films, surrealist painting, fairy tales, and prehistoric art are some of the influences in his work. He also cites pareidolia, the perception of profound meaning in random visual cues, as an influence. “It all goes into my head and ferments in a big pile,” he says. “The art is the mushrooms that comes out of it. My brain is one giant compost pile.”

Ferdinand has practiced at Interact since 2022. He has always been an artist, but his latest body of work began in 2015. He has presented work at HGA Architects & Engineers, Interact Gallery, and the Minnesota Landscape Arboretum in Chaska, MN. In 2025, his work was included in In a dark time the eye begins to see, an exhibition at Andrew Edlin Gallery in New York. In 2026, he presented work in Interact’s booth at the Outsider Art Fair in New York.

Julie Buffalohead

Bio: Julie Buffalohead (b. 1972, enrolled Ponca Tribe of Oklahoma) is a visual artist living and working in St. Paul, Minnesota. She received her BFA from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design in 1995 and her MFA from Cornell University in 2001. Buffalohead recently held a solo exhibition at the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, in Kansas City. Her most recent group exhibition was at the Portland Museum of Art. Julie Buffalohead creates visual narratives told by animal characters that have personhood, agency, and individuality. She connects the mythical with the ordinary and the imaginary with the real, offering a space to which views can bring their own experiences.

Statement: In End the Silence (2026) Julie Buffalohead has created a drama of native Minnesotan animals that expresses solidarity with Twin Cities’ communities in making their voices heard in opposition to the killings and kidnappings of civilians. Using the state bird as a symbol of unity, this work represents the networks of people who are working together to use whistles to alert, and the folks that are calling out the wrong-doings and formulating a resistance to the occupation of our state by federally enlisted goons. Repeating history, the US government has again deployed military forces in Minnesota to harass and detain vulnerable peoples. Yet, through the neighborisms of the regular citizens of Minneapolis, the voices of protest are heard.

Kim Benson

Bio: Kim Benson (b. 1986, Denver, CO) received her MFA from University of Wisconsin, Madison, and her BFA from the College of Visual Arts in St. Paul, MN. Her work is featured in numerous public collections, including Walker Art Center (Minneapolis), Plains Art Museum (Fargo), Minnesota Museum of American Art (St. Paul) and North Dakota Museum of Art (Grand Forks). Benson maintains a studio in south Minneapolis and works as an adjunct lecturer at UMN-Twin Cities. She will debut new paintings at TOA Presents this October in Northeast Minneapolis.

Statement: Wayfinder (2026), I wanted to expand the visual language within my paintings, experiment with scale shifts, and ideas about reflection, cyclical rhythms, and the passage of time. Imagery of hands are collaged between layers of paint, metallic leaf, shellac, each layer distressed, sanded back, and re-painted to generate a weathered surface. Circles become portals and lenses. Nothing is static, change is constant.

Lamar Peterson

Bio: Lamar Peterson received his MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2001. Peterson has shown in numerous group and solo exhibitions, including The Studio Museum of Harlem, New York; Rochester Arts Center, Minnesota; Orlando Museum of Art, Florida; University Art Museum at SUNY, Albany; and the Fifth International SITE Santa Fe Biennial, Santa Fe, NM.

He is a recipient of a 2013 Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters & Sculptors Grant, a 2022 Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Grant, a 2022 McKnight Artist Fellowship for Visual Artists, and a 2024 Guggenheim Fellowship. He is an Associate Professor in the Department of Art at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. Lamar Peterson’s work is represented by Fredericks & Freiser Gallery in New York City.

Statement: I draw inspiration from the quiet rituals of care that often go unnoticed. In this painting, gardening serves as a metaphor for reflection, renewal, and personal growth.

Lela Pierce

Statement: elevate speaks to a communal conjuring of energetic wisdom grounded in interconnected relationships with human and non-human kin, deep listening and co-inspired postural adaptation.

Leslie Barlow

Bio: Leslie Barlow is a visual artist, educator, and cultural worker from Minneapolis, MN. Barlow believes art and art making is both healing and liberatory, through the power of representation, witnessing and storytelling. Her life-sized oil paintings are inspired by community and personal experiences, and often serve as monuments to community members and explorations into how race entangles the intimate sphere of love, family, and friendship. Barlow is a 2025 McKnight Visual Artist Fellow and represented by Bockley Gallery.

Statement: This portrait of my grandmother, Ellen, comes from an old family photograph and invites a moment of quiet reflection on memory, inheritance, and the futures we imagine together. Surrounding her is Toni Morrison’s call to resist the pressure to accept difficult conditions as inevitable—to be “unreasonable” enough to challenge the status quo, refuse the limits placed upon us, and move beyond individual survival toward the open spaces of “we.” In bringing my grandmother's image into public space, I think about how the wisdom, resilience, and refusal carried through generations can become a way of imagining—and making—another future.

Luis Fitch

Bio: José Luis Fitch Jiménez (Luis Fitch) is a Mexican artist and cultural change-maker based in Minneapolis. His work combines graphic design, Mexican visual culture, typography, and social commentary to explore identity, migration, community, and belonging. Working across public art, painting, and cultural collaborations, Fitch has developed a distinctive visual language rooted in his Mexican heritage and lived experience in the United States. His work has been exhibited and collected nationally and has appeared in museums, public spaces, and major cultural initiatives.

Statement: A dove standing atop a skull symbolizes the tension between peace and tragic loss. Dedicated to Minneapolis residents Renée Nicole Good and Alex Jeffrey Pretti, who lost their lives during federal immigration enforcement operations in January 2026, this artwork reflects a community’s grief and call for accountability. The piece invites viewers to pause and reflect on the value of human life, the impact of violence, and our shared responsibility to pursue dignity, justice, and a more compassionate, peaceful future.

Mai Tran

Bio: Born and raised in Vietnam, Mai Tran (she/her) is a Minnesota-based printmaker and photographer whose practice explores migration, cultural memory, mythology, and human and non-human relationships. Rooted in Vietnamese cultural traditions and shaped by her experiences in the American Midwest, her work considers how identities, environments, and ecosystems are continually reshaped through movement, adaptation, and loss. She is an active printmaker whose work has been exhibited nationally and internationally. She was recently awarded the 2026-2027 Jerome Residency at Highpoint Center for Printmaking.

Mai is currently a printmaking lecturer at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities. She holds an MFA in Printmaking from the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities, as well as an MA and BFA in Printmaking and Photography from Minnesota State University-Mankato.

Statement: This woodcut print depicts a paddlefish, an ancient species native to the Mississippi River, imitating human activities in the water by wearing sunglasses, floating on an inflatable donut pool float, and contributing to surrounding waste. In the background, an active dam disrupts the water and the habitat essential for the paddlefish’s movement, feeding, and reproduction. Human activity, habitat alteration, and exploitation have led to the species’ decline.

Rather than depicting the paddlefish solely as a victim, I position it within the contradictions of human behavior. The donut float is shaped as a lotus, a Buddhist symbol of awakening that emerges from muddy water. In this context, the lotus is playful yet unstable, carrying a vulnerable species through a changing environment. In response to WAKPA’s theme, “A Moment to Pause,” I invite the audience to reflect on our relationship with water and its inhabitants.

Maiya Lea Hartman

Bio: Maiya Lea Hartman is a self-taught artist born and raised in Minneapolis, MN. Hartman’s work has been exhibited nationally at The Minnesota Museum of American Art, Minnesota African American Heritage Museum, The Kennedy Center in DC, Bishop Gallery in New York, and FELIX art fair Los Angeles. Hartman’s work lives in collections at the Minnesota Museum of American Art and Saint Catherine’s University as well as in private collections. Maiya was a 2020 Next Step Fund grant recipient and 2021 Emerging Young Artist Awardee at the Kennedy Center. Hartman’s work has been featured in Hyperallergic, and in print in New American Paintings issue #167. Maiya is the current Director of PF Studios in Northeast, Minneapolis.

Artist Statement: My work examines personal and collective archival imagery to depict Black American leisure, domesticity, and relationships. Photography has always interested me as a medium because of the way that photographs truly do capture a moment of pause. Whether that halt is enacted by the subjects pausing to pose for the photo, or it is a moment in motion that is forever commemorated as a still, photographs are an archival tool that constantly contends with the tensions between stillness and motion, curation and candid, “truth” and fabulation. These are the same juxtapositions that we may find amidst our daily endeavors. When being invited to pause, we are being asked to find or create stillness amidst the ever motion-filled elements around us, and to exist in harmony with their rhythms. Time Changes derives its title from the Adinkra symbol, Mmere Dane, which can be seen as the amulet around the neck of the young girl on the right. While the figures all sit still, in moments of rest or contemplation, the symbol reminds of the passage of time.

Melissa Cooke Benson

Bio: Melissa Cooke Benson is an artist, educator, mom of two, and a student of curiosity. She received her MFA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her drawings are in the collections of the Arkansas Art Center, The Museum of Wisconsin Art, the Minnesota Museum of American Art, and the Minnesota Vikings U.S. Bank Stadium Art Collection, and private collections across the country. She has been featured in New American Painting, Fine Art Connoisseur, Hi-Fructose, Drawing Magazine, and The Huffington Post. She teaches drawing at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities. She lives and works in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

Statement: An illusion requires a moment to reveal itself- a pause. For my drawing, I created a self portrait with a concentric ring illusion superimposed on my face. Concentric circles give the illusion of spinning, like a loading program, a progress ring, a symbol of waiting. The figure gazes at the viewer, a moment to connect. The figure is flanked above and below by the Cafe Wall illusion- staggered rows of white and black squares that appear slanted and unstable, despite being straight vertical lines.

I use optical illusions to challenge the reliability of human perception. Our vision is shaped by memory and experience; optical illusions highlight those cognitive biases. Drawing illusions pushes them to their limit: when will they break, revealing their trickery? How long will the viewer “play along”? And when the illusion is revealed, how does that affect our outlook on reality and our vision? Since our perception can be manipulated, rigid opinions can be dangerous and problematic. This becomes a larger metaphor for the political and cultural divides in the age of fragmented truth and shattered attention.

Michael Engebretson

Bio: Michael Engebretson’s kaleidoscopic drawings and paintings imagine a future beyond Earth, a utopian civilization that he refers to as a “Class Seven.” “Class Seven inhabitants are transdimensional, multiversal, nonlinear space-time continuum thinkers,” he says. “They are more free-thinking than we are. They are open to any possibility, any idea, any conversation, any scenario. They have better health care and economics and special support systems that can help them out. They can help human/alien hybrids and cyborgs and robots with disabilities with specialized psychological and biological care that is designed for them.”

Engebretson (b. 1994) has practiced at Interact since 2016. He was the inaugural artist in residence at Interact Gallery in 2022. He has been featured in MPR News , The Star Tribune, and White Bear Press. Engebretson was named a Guest Artist by the Creative Enterprise Zone in the 2023 Mural & Art Festival and collaborated with Los Angeles-based coffeeware company notNeutral later that year. Bespoke letterpress company Studio On Fire published an edition of prints by Engebretson in 2023. He has shown work at New Studio Gallery, HGA Architects & Engineers, and Minneapolis Central Library’s Cargill Gallery, among others. In 2025 and 2026, Engebretson featured in Interact’s booths at the Creativity Explored x Open Invitational art fair and the Outsider Art Fair in New York, respectively.

Statement: Class 7 Alien Cyborg Deer Variants, 2026, acrylic on paper, 24 x 18 inches, Michael Engebretson describes a Cosmic Class 7 Civilization as a future where hybrid beings coexist. It embraces the diversity of its various human, cyborg, and extraterrestrial entities. “A Cosmic Class 7 Higher Class Hyper Dimensional civilization might be trans dimensional, multiversal, nonlinear, in cosmic space time hyper increments, ” Engebretson explains. Describing this piece, he says: “The circle on the left side of the artwork represents a possible infinite dimensional wormhole leading to an infinite dimensional tesseract [diamond shape in center] with infinite dimensional walls, ceilings and floors. The shape on the right side represents a possible infinite dimensional hypersphere with infinite dimensional walls, ceilings and floors as well as space and time and hyper dimensional realms which might exist within the cosmic hyperdimensional structure. In the bottom half of the artwork are three Cosmic Class 7 alien cyborg deer variants. The cosmic alien cyborg deer may be able to form nonlinear generational hyper branch lines within their cosmic nonlinear lineage.

Michelle Defoe

Bio: Michelle Defoe is an artist enrolled in the Red Cliff Band of Lake Superior Anishinaabe Nation. She is working towards revitalizing Anishinaabe cultural arts including moccasin making and beadwork. She teaches community classes to pass this knowledge on to future generations. Michelle is a painter. Her paintings are inspired by her dreams and by her cultural background. Most of her work is acrylic on canvas. She does public art in collaboration with other artists creating murals. She teaches college courses at Fond du Lac Tribal and Community College for their fine arts program. One of her goals as an artist is to use her art to create social change and have a positive impact on the community. She also uses her art as a form of self expression.

Statement: There is a woman sitting on a turtle which represents turtle Island, North America. There is a storm surrounding her with waves threatening to engulf her. She may not be able to control what is going on around her, but she can always come back to herself. She is sitting grounded on the Earth, the turtle. This represents her connection to the land. She’s also connected to the ancestors in the sky world. When we take a moment to pause, we can access our inner wisdom. From there, we can lead our lives through the chaos with intention and strength. And we are never alone. We are always surrounded by spirits and ancestors.

Namir Fearce

Bio: Namir Fearce is a North Minneapolis-born interdisciplinary artist and cultural worker. His studio practice engages experimental film, sculpture, assemblage, performance, and music under the moniker Blu Bone. Fearce is informed by a constellation of Blu Black sites of memory that weave complex emo-political worldscapes in which futurity and freedom are conjured. Utilizing the language, fashioning, and tradition of the trickster deity, and a blues/hip hop sensibility of resampling, looping, and mirroring in his work to create sites of ceremony visually, sonically, and somatically. The loop/reverberation that produces cultural language, and renders a collective counter imagination possible.

Statement: This work was produced on the Black Rock shores of Lake Gitchigami (Superior). Fearce lays undressed under a hand woven net atop the rocks with the vast body of water in the horizon. The image is then mirrored to create a portal in its middle. This image is a video still and otherwise exist as a moving image- the audio of the video is a glitching, and looping Sonia Sanchez reading the poem written by Tupac Shakur ‘When your heart turns cold’.

Pamela Gaard

Bio: Pamela Gaard is a Minneapolis-based artist working in acrylic collage with paint, found paper and repurposed textiles. Her practice centers on portraiture and abstraction — layering memory, material and lived experience — exploring identity and resilience, what endures and what is mended.

Drawn to materials that carry history — discarded textiles, and everyday ephemera—she builds figures that are both tender and tenacious. Each work becomes an act of mending, honoring personal histories and the quiet strength found in imperfection.

Through painting and collage, Gaard considers how we assemble ourselves from fragments, and how care and attention can transform what is overlooked into something whole.

Statement: Shelter in Place visualizes confinement as both prison and protection. Created during Covid, it echoes my experience during Operation Metro Surge in early 2026, when street violence and limited mobility following spine surgery left me afraid to leave home.

The painting began with the fiery background, followed by the house and the figure. In this self portrait I pause to reflect on both my vulnerability and my privilege in having a home.

I use the leopard motif frequently. Inspired by the Benin Aquamanile at Mia, it holds life-giving water and offers a fierce protective barrier.

Peng Wu

Bio: Peng Wu 吴朋 is a social practice artist and educator who combines both ancient and emerging technologies to create large-scale public art installations, participatory performances, and rituals. Through a queer lens, Wu explores the marginalized histories and contemporary practices of colonialism that displace human labor and material resources. Drawing emotional and spiritual influences from ancestral knowledge and the lived experiences of the queer diaspora community, Wu's work tells different stories that disrupt the oppressive narratives of colonialism and imperialism. These stories seek to understand the relationship of people and places beyond the boundaries of nation-states and the confines of gender binaries.

Statement: For 15 years I have crossed the U.S. border as a "temporary foreign worker." I thought I knew how to navigate the visa system — the lines, the interviews, the underfunded and glitching websites. This year I was proven wrong. Trying to schedule a visa interview to return to my job in the U.S., I was met with a webpage and one giant red cross: you have been blocked. No reason given. I tried again and again over two months. Always the same red cross. Being blocked online is such an ordinary, insignificant modern experience. But that red cross in the center of the screen spoke to me. It held every small rejection I have lived through in 15 years - all the minor, seemingly insignificant feelings, accumulated again and again. It is baked deep into my mind.

Piotr Szyhalski

Bio: Piotr Szyhalski is a Polish-born and trained multimedia artist working in the United States since 1990. The Minneapolis-based artist’s wide-ranging practice encompasses an array of media and genres, including poster designs, drawings, mail art, photographs, painted murals, prints, web-based digital art, sound art, large-scale installations, and public performances. In 1998, he established his ongoing project Labor Camp. Szyhalski’s work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, and is in the collections of KADIST (Paris/San Francisco), Minneapolis Institute of Art, Museum of Fine Arts Houston, Walker Art Center, and Weisman Art Museum, among others. Recent monographs include COVID-19 Labor Camp Report (2021) and Piotr Szyhalski: We Are Working All the Time (2020, Weisman Art Museum), which accompanied his 2022 survey exhibition. The recipient of multiple commissions and awards, Szyhalski is the 2021–22 contributing artist to the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, New York, and a professor of media arts at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. @laborcamp, laborcamp.org

Statement: Unable to tell the difference between reality and artifice, we are swimming in a grotesque variation of what our world might have been. Nothing makes sense, and we no longer understand the truth to be the ethical foundation it used to be. A landscape hallucinating itself further out of existence, with each viewing.

Ricardo Levins Morales

Bio: Ricardo Levins Morales is an artist, organizer, and author. He has been creating art in the service of social justice movements since arriving in the US from Puerto Rico. His activism has included supporting the Young Lords and Black Panthers in 1970s Chicago, to labor, farmer, and racial justice movements. He considers his art to be a medicinal practice, supporting people's individual and collective immune systems in the face of oppression. He works out of a collectively managed union shop in S. Minneapolis.

Statement: Objects in Mirror represents the unity of past and present in the repeated cycles of repression, racist violence, resistance, and solidarity. In the street scene ICE agents assault community resisters with spray chemicals in 2026 Minneapolis while the reflection in the car mirror shows police using dogs against Black freedom marchers in 1963 Birmingham. The continuity of oppressive power collides with the inextinguishable spirit of resistance. To move toward a better future, we must see clearly into our past.

Rotem Tamir

Bio: Rotem Tamir is an artist whose practice spans sculpture, sound, and installation. Drawing from her Sephardic Jewish heritage, her work engages themes of migration, transcultural identity, and belonging through material investigations rooted in traditional craft practices. Tamir's work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, including at the Ras Al Khaimah Contemporary Art Biennale, Haifa City Museum, Locust Projects, and the Minnesota Museum of American Art, among others. She is a 2021 McKnight Visual Artist Fellow. Tamir is an Associate Professor of Sculpture at the University of Minnesota and lives in Minneapolis.

Statement: A scan of my grandmother’s white-on-white embroidery, made for her dowry, is reproduced through a Xerox collage and painted with pigments made from spices and plants such as henna, sumac, and pomegranate. With the triennial theme in mind, I think of the kitchen in my family as a place of hustle and bustle, where the woman of the house was queen. Beauty, disappointment, hope, frustration, maternal concern, care, and anger all emerged from this space through the daily act of preparing the family meal.

Ruthann Godollei

Bio: Ruthann Godollei incorporates social commentary in her work, often including satiric text. Her artwork is in many collections, including KUMU National Art Museum, Estonia; Minneapolis Institute of Arts; Brandenburgische Landesmuseum für moderne Kunst, Germany; the Polish National Museum of Art, Poznañ; the Minnesota Museum of American Art, etc.. She was a 2022-'23 McKnight Visual Artist Fellow. A Professor at Macalester College, she was a 2019 Fulbright Canada Research Chair at the University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada. She currently has work in Unreadable, Word-Images from the BLMK Museum, at the Rathaushalle, Frankfurt (Oder), Germany and a solo exhibit, Hindsight, at NE Sculpture |Gallery Factory, Mpls..

Statement: This image is directed at brutal misinformation campaigns and their destructive outcomes. This monoprint depicts a contemporary feather-flag outdoor advertising banner shredded by brutal Minnesota winters as a pathetic sign of declining empire. It reads “We Sell Big Lies.” Those in power are spreading falsehoods about everything from the environment, to geography, to immigrants, to elections, to medical information. Arrogance, exploitation and racism underlie the inequitable dispersal of our resources, hypercharged by billionaire corporate collusion. Sited by the river, I offer this image as an elegy, a pause to mourn over the potential of shared knowledge distribution made unintelligible via human folly.

Steven Premo

Bio: Steven Premo is a proud enrolled Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe member who is nationally known for his paintings, murals, illustrations, and graphic design. Steve’s concepts are prominently featured in educational materials utilized throughout public elementary, secondary schools, and private institutions. More than 500 of his illustrations and graphics have been published by the Minnesota Historical Society Press, Minneapolis Public Schools, Hazelden Treatment Center, Grand Casino Inc., and the Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe. He has designed logos for individuals, professional organizations and special events. His formal art training includes time at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, the University of Minnesota-Minneapolis, and the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe (attended with recommendation by then Governor of Minnesota.) Steve has also provided art direction and instruction for the Minnesota State Department of Education, the Minneapolis Public Schools, Heart of the Earth Survival School, LCO Tribal School, and various art organizations. Steve’s passion for art and for his people are reflected in all that he creates.”

Ojibwe people have always been incredible craftsmen and artists, something I learned as a child at my mother’s side. My own art is a reminder of our history and the continuation of our existence, and expresses our cultural influence across the community and beyond. Native peoples and our cultures are very much alive today, and we are not just historical figures. If we cease our traditions, we cease to be Native people. My work combines traditional and contemporary art forms—painting, illustrations, textile design, and ceremonial blankets. Ojibwe art forms are both old and new, and are not limited to birch bark and the materials our ancestors used (though I also love those mediums), but rather have evolved, rather than being lost, just as we have evolved in the modern day. So, I see the design of my fabric on jingle dress dancers and in our ceremonial hall benches where we practice the Big Drum, both traditions that evolved at Mille Lacs and regional Ojibwe communities. Still, the dances, songs, and the dress have all evolved over the years, but they remain just as important today as they were a hundred years ago. People associate my paintings, posters or even the Premo Woodland fabric with me, but more importantly, with their Ojibwe community. Ojibwe art is just as relevant to the community today as ever, and our traditional arts are being passed on in thoroughly contemporary ways.

Tamara Aupaumut

Bio: Tamara Aupaumut is a self-taught multidisciplinary artist and independent curator living on Mni Sota Makoce, also known as Minneapolis, MN. She descends from the Stockbridge-Munsee Band of Mohican Indians, the Oneida Nation, and the Montaukett, Nehantic, and Pequot through the Brothertown Indian Nation. Tamara is mainly a painter and sculptor working in mixed-media, printmaking, photography, papier-mâché, and fiber, as well as traditional Native disciplines of beadwork, porcupine quillwork, and birchbark. Aupaumut’s work has been exhibited at All My Relations Arts and the American Swedish Institute in Minneapolis, regionally in the Midwest at the Watermark Art Center and Plains Art Museum, and in New York at the Albany Institute of History and Art and the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center. Tamara was honored as the recipient of the 2025 Jim Denomie Memorial Scholarship, awarded to a Native artist who best exemplifies the values Jim demonstrated in his own career: commitment to excellence; generosity of spirit; and engagement in community.

Statement: This image is based on a photograph from 2018. It is of one of my relatives that passed away last year. Maxkweenno loved his people, the Mohican people, and made enormous efforts to help revitalize our language. He had a larger than life personality and was welcoming to all. As we sat around talking at our annual powwow, a Monarch landed on his hand–it was a moment to pause–a moment to appreciate this beautiful life–and the connection we have with all our relations. The background is the river that the Mohican people come from, we are the People of the Waters That Are Never Still, reflecting the river that flows in two directions, the river that flows through us. While we exist with constant movement, may we pause for a moment to remember all that is good. May we continue to show up for one another, for our community, and honor those that shared this beautiful life with us

Tia Keobounpheng

Bio: Tia Keobounpheng is a Minneapolis-based artist drawing from historic, ancestral, and epigenetic influences. Through abstract geometries, her art reflects a journey of personal reconciliation with her Finnish and Sámi heritage. Keobounpheng holds a BA in Architecture from the University of Minnesota. Her work has been widely exhibited nationally including at The Armory Show 2025, Scandinavia House (Manhattan, NY), the Minneapolis Institute of Art (Minneapolis, MN), Apple Park (Cupertino, CA), and a permanent commission at the University of St Thomas (St Paul, MN). Keobounpheng is a 2026 MacDowell Fellow and is represented by Weinstein Hammons Gallery.

Statement: INGRAIN no8 is part of a larger series of physical works that bring the woodgrain of the art-panel forward into the threads. In my work, geometry has always represented the natural order of the earth. That abstract symbolism changes when the actual voice of nature, the woodgrain, joins the conversation. For me, the two elements hold the space between a good idea and our ability to change ingrained behaviors to align with that ideal. Inspired by a Sámi cultural teaching, the INGRAIN series hears the messages and spirits of the living earth and practices acting accordingly.

Tina Tavera

Bio: Minneapolis-based, Maria Cristina (Tina) Tavera is a multidisciplinary artist examining cultural signifiers determined by how people define themselves and their everyday life. The visual vocabulary layers together clever bilingual plays on meaning to analyze society’s underlying expectations related to race, gender, ethnicity, culture and nationality. She communicates via numerous mediums including printmaking, installation, and public art. In support of her artwork, she has received numerous awards: ‘23 U.S. Latinx Artist Fellow, ‘20 McKnight Visual Artist Fellow, Bush Leadership Fellow, Shannon Leadership Institute, and Smithsonian Latino Museum Studies program. Tavera has exhibited nationally and internationally, and her artwork is in the collections of: City of Minneapolis Public Art, National Museum of Mexican Art, Museum of Fine Arts-Boston, Oglethorpe Museum, Fargo Plains Museum, Tweed Museum of Art, Minnesota History Center, Weisman Art Museum, Zuckerman Museum of Art, and the Biblioteca Central de Cantabria, Santander, Spain. Tavera is also founder and Director of Serpentina Arts.

Statement: A Moment to Pause: Waiting for Justice

Thomasina Topbear

Bio: Top Bear is a self taught artist, muralist, published illustrator and organizer from the Oglala Lakota & Santee Dakota Nations. She is a board member of the international all female paint crew Few & Far Women and co-founder of City Mischief Murals, an artist collective centered on healing through art. Specializing in large-scale murals her work can be seen on the sides of buildings throughout the country. Thomasina has organized a number of events focusing on empowering and creating safe spaces for youth and fellow artists to practice their crafts. Often using Dakota language to normalize the use of Native culture as a form of honoring her Ancestors along with the land we all now share. She draws influences from her Oceti Sakowin culture while using art to express thoughts on community, social justice, spirituality and togetherness.

Thomasina has worked with numerous institutes and organizations including, Indigenous Roots Cultural Arts Center, Phipps Center for the Arts, Hennepin Theatre Trust, Minnesota Public Radio, Minneapolis College of Arts and Design, University of MN and Saint Paul College. She is a grant recipient of Forecast Public Art, Knight Foundation, Saint Paul & Minnesota Foundation and the Minnesota State Arts Board.

Statement: A reminder to take the time to honor the knowledge we carry and appreciate the world around us. A moment to remember we are the stewards for the land and our relatives.

Victor Van

Bio: Victor Van’s paintings and artist books translate content that he finds on the internet and radio, situating visions of American triumph and tribulation alongside the intimate and mundane. In the studio and in his work, Van is interested in observing and gathering. For his paintings, he sifts through images on the internet, saving screenshots of movies, food, art history, mass produced images, and current events. High-key emotional intensity, snapshots of American culture and Hollywood, the domestication of the wild, horror, cloying sweetness, and visions of home and belonging are of special interest. He begins drawings with a grid in graphite, which he then uses as a framework for resizing and translating digital images into acrylic paintings. He works quickly, using loose strokes to approximate the details of the original source. Music is an important part of Van’s process – he often sings or listens to the radio as he works. In a series of infinitesimally detailed artist books, Van transcribes the audio of a commercial radio station, populating the margins with drawings of liquor, snacks, and cars.

Van (b.1993) has practiced at Interact Center for Visual & Performing Arts since 2016. He has presented work in exhibitions throughout Minnesota and beyond, including at the Minnesota Museum of American Art, The White Page, Make Studio, the Cargill Gallery at Minneapolis Central Library, and the Institute on Community Integration at the University of Minnesota. Van was featured in Interact’s booth at Open Invitational Miami in 2025 and at the Outsider Art Fair in 2026. His first solo exhibition in New York, Great Expectations, is on view at Open Studio Gallery in Chinatown through April 24, 2026.

Statement: Wat Kentucky Bodhivanaram, Frankfort, Franklin County, 2026, acrylic on paper, 19 x 13.25 inches. Victor Van’s painting of Wat Kentucky Bodhivanaram portrays a Buddhist temple in Frankfort, Kentucky. Van visited the temple in Summer 2026 with his family and a friend. Meditation is an important part of Van’s life; he meditates at home almost every night after chanting with his family. They also go to a Thai Buddhist temple in the Twin Cities every Saturday. Van says meditation brings quiet, and that it makes him feel “fantastic.”

Wing Young Huie

Bio: Wing Young Huie has photographically captured the complex cultural realities of American society for 50 years. His photographs have been exhibited in museums and galleries locally, nationally and internationally, but his best-known works, “Frogtown” (1995), “Lake Street USA” (2000), and the “University Avenue Project” (2010), were epic public art projects that transformed Minneapolis and Saint Paul thoroughfares into community galleries, reflecting the everyday lives of thousands of its citizens.

Statement: I was meandering through the Cedar-Riverside neighborhood in South Minneapolis when I saw someone calmly surrounded by hundreds of birds. As I’ve done with thousands of strangers, to better understand the world around me and myself, I simply walked up and asked if I could take some pictures. The pigeon feeder obliged and said that he grew up in Kenya where feeding wild birds is part of their culture.

Wóokiye Wíŋ

Bio: Wóokiye Wíŋ is a practicing multidisciplinary artist, watercolor illustrator,culture bearer, teacher and language revitalizer. She is from Dakota from Sisíthuŋwaŋ Waȟpéthuŋwaŋ of the seven council fires and currently resides in Cambridge, MA with her family as her and her spouse attend school. She mixes her Dakota and Ojibway culture into her designs and content which focuses on the natural elements of landscapes, plants, and animals. She makes her own earth pigment watercolor paints and plant dyes while carrying an ecological mindset as part of her practice. She has several illustrated books and public art throughout the state of Minnesota at places such as Public Art Saint Paul Sidewalk Poetry, Wakan Tipi, University of Minnesota Child development lab school, Itasca state park and other parks in MN. Find her books at dakhota.org Follow her Instagram at wookiye_win and facebook: Wookiye Wíŋ Artist. Her website is www.wookiyewin.com

Statement: Thuŋȟmáǧa was inspired by layering foraged hand crafted nettle ink onto cold pressed paper with soft pastels. Foraging and creating my own art materials are some ways that I connect with nature and for me it creates “A moment to pause.” I enjoy watching the bees as they harvest pollen in my pollinator garden and I take “A moment to pause” everyday in the summer to acknowledge them.