Midway Contemporary Art is pleased to announce the six grant recipients for the 2022 Visual Arts Fund. Established as part of The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts’ Regional Regranting Program, the VAF is aimed at supporting the development of artist organized projects and initiatives that engage the public with visual art happening outside of established arts programming in the Twin Cities metro region.
- 2023 Waiting Room Exhibition Season
Since 2014, Waiting Room has operated as an arts platform promoting Minneapolis’ growing reputation as a creative center for contemporary arts. Waiting Room presents a ninth season showcasing innovative exhibitions, experiences and collaborations across many genres and artistic disciplines within a non- traditional gallery space. - Dream Chambers Public Access TV
Dream Chambers TV is a monthly artist-run television series that reimagines public access programming within a new generation of artists. Centered around exploring Post-Blackness through experiments in live Video Art and Film, it will be a dedicated space for all the news and updates on all the happenings on moving image and cinema here in the Twin Cities, with an emphasis on connecting artists to their immediate communities and encouraging them to make work that explores the nuance of black consciousness in an alternative way. - Revived Treasures, Living Memories
Revived Treasures, Living Memories will engage black and brown residents of North Minneapolis in sharing culture and heritage by reviving cherished heirlooms while learning basic wirework jewelry- making skills and sharing their creations and experiences in an exhibit and artist talk. - Semillas
Semillas (Seeds) is a Latina artist-run nonconventional space offering screenings, art exhibitions, and related public programming for Latine artists working in Minnesota, the greater United States, and Latin America. Our mission is to support the creative and professional development of BIPOC artists of Latin American descent across the state by showing their work in conversation with nationally and internally based Latine artists. While a majority of Latine artists shown in Minnesota are predominantly Mexican, Semillas brings together a greater representation of the Latine cultures, languages, LGBTQIA+, and perspectives found across the state and puts them into context with the greater contemporary Latine art community. - Story Seedlings
With support from established filmmakers, two emerging BIPOC creatives will each produce and present their first narrative short film. This project will provide guidance and resources for storytellers to imagine, write, direct, and distribute a film in hopes to amplify their voices, visibility, and long term creative practice. Tahiel Jimenez Medina, a Colombian immigrant director, will collaborate with the storytellers and provide access to professional equipment, mentorship sessions with other established filmmakers, connections to a community of experienced film crew, and a co-created roadmap to the completion and distribution of the films. Films will screen for local community to engage and rejoice with the storytellers. - Translation is a Mode
The Translator’s Task is a multi-media exhibit that will occur after a series of cross-genre translation workshops. The exhibit will highlight translation as an act of resistance that allows those on the margins to speak back to and confront the systems of power in which language is siloed. The exhibit will interrogate how English functions as an abstraction that demarcates, (dis)empowers, organizes, authorizes, and ultimately makes a world through a totalizing violence. Through translation, both artist and audience, will discover what new worlds can be wrought from this wreckage, what must be reclaimed and reconstituted in one’s own words.
2022 Visual Arts Fund Jury Panel
Cameron Patricia Downey is an anti-disciplinary artist born and raised in North Minneapolis, MN. Their work oscillates between photography, film, body, sculpture, curation and otherwise in mediation of the concepts and bounds of world-building and survival technology through and by Black, fantastical and precarious spaces and forms. Downey graduated from Columbia University in 2021 with a double concentration in visual art and environmental science. Downey’s work has been included in multiple exhibitions at HAIR+NAILS, Minneapolis (2019-21), and in 2020, Downey guest curated HOLDING SPACE, an exhibition of video, image, light and sound, in the H+N front yard. Downey’s recent exhibitions and screenings have included those at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (2022); Wild Frictions at Kunstraum Kreuzberg/Bethanien, Berlin (2021); Intersections at Engage Projects, Chicago (2021-22); and In The River as part of Midway Contemporary Art’s Off-Site program (2022). Downey is currently artist in residence at the Walker Art Center’s mediatheque and at Second Shift Studio Space in St. Paul, MN.
Sidney Mori Garrett is a Houston, TX born, Chicago, IL based curator, arts administrator, and artist. She received her Bachelor of Fine Arts in Photography and Digital Media from University of Houston in 2016. Her practice is rooted in community through a Black Feminist’s lens of intersectionality, mindfulness, and care. She is currently Curatorial Assistant and Art Coordinator at Project Row Houses in Houston, TX and a MA graduate candidate of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago’s Arts Administration and Policy program.
Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer is an art writer and curator based in Los Angeles. She is the author of Lee Lozano: Dropout Piece (Afterall Books, 2014) and contributes essays to institutional exhibition catalogues, most recently on Jay Heikes, Rosemarie Castoro, Stephen Kaltenbach, and Luchita Hurtado. She is publisher and editor of Pep Talk press and co-runs The Finley Gallery, a non-commercial art space in Los Angeles since 2011. Her writing has also appeared in Artforum and other periodicals.
