“Carrying Each Other” Gallery Opening and Artist Reception

Lanesboro arts is excited to work in collaboration with Minnesotan Artists in various stages of their career to create this summer’s Gallery Exhibition, “Carrying Each Other,” a group exhibition celebrating creative labor and the many ways artists hold their communities together.

Artists were asked to submit work exploring these visible and invisible forms of support, exchange, and mutual care that shape community life and why it matters to them. The work in this show ranges from quilted textiles and leatherwork, to paintings and photo collages, to interactive work and audio recordings, and much more.

This exhibition features work from Shug Munic, Beth Stahn, Clara Wodny, Marge Buckley, Melissa Wray, Andy Kranz, Julia Meles, Lizzie Christian, Olliver Schminkey, Annabel Higgin-Houser, Isabella Dawis, Mary Bruno, Peter Haakon Thompson, and Kordula Coleman.

What does it mean to Carry Each Other? As we have seen in our state, community care and support can be an active, artful, and defiant connector. Holding space, sharing burdens, bearing witness are all forms of deep care particularly held by artists and culture bearers as carriers of stories, traditions, imagination and memory. The loads carried by artists are shaped by experience: this show seeks to shine a light on the unequal loads and historic inequities placed upon marginalized communities as it celebrates community care. This show also holds space for carrying each other into a shared future.

“Carrying Each Other” prioritizes artists who identify as LGBTQIA +, Two-Spirit, BIPOC, disabled, and/or rurally located artists (including those in southeast Minnesota).

This exhibition is made possible by the voters of Minnesota through a Minnesota State Arts Board Operating Support grant, thanks to a legislative appropriation from the arts and cultural heritage fund.