A Nation Takes Place

Residency 1

Juan Carlos Quintana

A Studio in the Woods, New Orleans, Louisiana

June 2024

Juan Carlos Quintana (b.1964, Lutcher, LA) is a visual artist based in Oakland, CA. His family immigrated from Cuba in the early 60's settling in a region along the Mississippi River known for its antebellum period sugar plantations and petrochemical refineries. Using painting, printmaking, ceramics and mixed media installations, Quintana’s art is imbued with an anti-colonial sensibility. Often satirical in tone, his works oscillate between personal and forgotten histories, current events, speculative time periods, and ideological conundrums. He has exhibited in galleries and museums nationally and internationally as  well as recipient of many awards and residencies, including the Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and Sculpture grant award.

Image credit: Sriba Quintana.

Residency 2

Elana Mann

Minnesota Marine Art Museum, Winona Minnesota

August 17 - 23, 2024

Elana Mann (b. 1980, Newton, MA) is an artist and activist who explores the power of the collective voice and the embodiment of language. Mann is Hard of Hearing and for twenty years she has researched the act of listening through sculpture, sound, works on paper, and public performances. Her rattles, trumpets, and other instruments are tools that galvanize the sonic energy of her work; together, they make a synergistic roar that embodies the voices of those who strive for social and environmental justice. She has participated in exhibitions and screenings at the Museum of Contemporary Art, La Jolla, the Orange County Museum of Art, the Hirshhorn Museum, and the Museum of Art and History, Lancaster, among many others. She lives in Los Angeles where she is raising her two young kids.

Residency Summary

Participating Los Angeles-based artist, Elana Mann will take part in a 7 day residency at the Minnesota Marine Art Museum (Winona, MN), based on her ongoing practice of making ceramic rattles for rituals, protest and performance. The residency program is dedicated to forest preservation, science inspired art education and providing a peaceful retreat for artists and scholars who are interested in tackling the challenging issues of our time with power, resourcefulness, and imagination. With support from the Mellon Foundation, Elana Mann will build on her project, "Let the Mississippi Speak," a continuation of a larger ongoing work titled "Shake, Rattle, Roll" (2019-present) that involves over eighty ceramic rattles. These rattles function like sonic protest signs and she paints words, slogans, and symbols onto their surfaces. Each rattle has a unique message and form; Mann fills the rattles with different materials (glass, wood, metal) to create a distinct array of sounds.  

The project draws from her own culture’s use of rattles in group rituals. Mann activates her rattles in protests and actions to promote immigration rights, Feminism, and environmental justice. For example, in 2023 her rattles were part of a large-scale art happening on International Women’s Day with 50 Feminist organizers from Los Angeles. She also experiments with the rattles at home with her two children to create new paths of communication within the family dynamic. 

Over the past five years, "Shake, Rattle, Roll" has extended to many different locations. Groups around the country have either used the rattles or created original designs within their own communities. The project has been featured in multiple exhibitions, recently “Bellows and Quakes” (2024), a solo show at the Museum of Art and History, Lancaster, CA, as well as national press in Hyperallergic and The Forward. This year she produced rattle-making workshops at various locations, including Crossroads School for the Arts & Sciences, in Santa Monica, CA. She is eager to bring this project to Minnesota, to amplify energy and activism around the Mississippi, one of the most important yet endangered waterways in our county.

Residency 3

Dameun Strange

Minnesota Marine Art Museum, Winona Minnesota

August 17 - 23, 2024

Dameun Strange (b. 1973, Washington, D.C.) is a sound explorer, multi-instrumentalist, composer, and sound designer whose conceptual electronic and improvised electro-acoustic works focus on stories and themes of the African diaspora, often using surrealist and afro-futurist aesthetics. Dameun has composed music with such artists as Leslie Parker, Ananya Chatterjea, Joanna Lees, and Pramila Vasudevan and has been a featured performer in concerts celebrating the work of George Lewis, Thurston Moore, and Henry Threadgill. He is a 2018 recipient of the ACF | Create Award and 2019 Jerome Hill Fellowship. Most recently, he was the recipient of a 2022 BMI Foundation Carlos Surinach Fund Commission for renowned flutist Adam Sadberry, not running, (The Life of L. Alex Wilson) for flute and electronics, which premiered at Merkin Hall, Kaufman Music Center in March 2023.

Residency 4

Monica Moses Haller

A Studio in the Woods, New Orleans, Louisiana

March 2025

Monica Moses Haller (b. 1980, Minneapolis, MN) is an artist whose work spans photography, writing, and sound, and focuses on personal details that explore violence and possibilities within social and environmental systems. Moses Haller has exhibited and lectured at locations including Centre Pompidou, Paris; the Leipziger Baumwollspinnerei, Leipzig; and the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. Her artist books have been collected by intuitions ranging from the Tate Modern, London, to MOMA, New York. She has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, Jerome Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts, among others. Moses Haller is based in Minneapolis, where she is an associate professor of art at the University of Minnesota.

Support Comes From

The publication of A Nation Takes Place and its accompanying exhibition owe their foundation to the Indigenous Peoples of the Caribbean islands and land masses of South, North, and Central America and enslaved Africans whose lives and ways of knowing were violently disrupted and torn apart in the formation of the Americas.

We acknowledge that the Minnesota Marine Art Museum, like the City of Winona, Minnesota, exists on the unceded ancestral and contemporary homelands of the Dakota, Ho-Chunk, Ioway, Sauk, and Meskwaki people. The intertribal histories of this region, its ancestral lands, and the majestic and powerful stretches of the Hˇ ahˇáwakpa / Wakpá Tháŋka (Mississippi) River are not abstractions of a disappeared past but are a living presence of the future. 

While land acknowledgments can serve as sites of disruption, discomfit settler colonialism, and challenge erasure, we are aware that acknowledgments, on their own, are not without their challenges. They are not definitive or a one-time endeavor but an ongoing praxis for recognizing and observing

Indigenous treaty rights, learning exchanges, and alliance-building. We remain profoundly grateful and committed to learning from and supporting tribal communities, artists, activists, and scholars who make this work possible. We specifically thank Shelley Buck, Nicky Buck, Monique Verdin, Kirisitina Sailiata, Fern Renville, Brett Ramey, Cole Taylor, Jasmine Fiddler, Barry Hand, and Marlena Myles for encouraging us to think about the broader implications of this work with feedback, patience, trust, and commitment.

A Nation Takes Place is in conversation with interlocutors at institutions, initiatives, and projects, interrogating and exploring the creative possibilities of marine art beyond portraits of ships at sea. The recent groundbreaking projects Entwined: Freedom, Sovereignty, and the Sea (2024), curated by Akeia de Barros Gomes at Mystic Seaport Museum; Dawoud Bey: Elegy (2023), curated by Valerie Cassel Oliver at the Virginia Museum of Fine Art; In American Waters: The Sea in American Painting (2021), cocurated by Dan Finnamore and Austen Barron Bailly, presented at the Peabody Essex Museum and Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art; as well as Finnamore’s previous project Capturing Poseidon: Photographic Encounters with the Sea (1998) are a few examples of this reimaging. Artists have dedicated monographs to such ideas—including Allan Sekula’s Fish Story (2003) and Nona Faustine’s White Shoes (2021). We are honored to be in community with these projects and artists and are sincerely inspired by their innovative approaches.

There is a monumental genealogy of writing on relationships between the Atlantic Ocean and land, without which we could not have composed this project. We are profoundly thankful to have some of these voices in this volume. Thank you to Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Jessica Marie Johnson, Tiffany Lethabo King, Katherine McKittrick, Brenda Marie Osbey, and Erin Sharkey for saying yes and lending your ideas to shape this work; and to Matthew Fluharty, Scott Pollock, and Mai’a Williams for being in conversation on the timing, location, presentation, and thematic focus of A Nation Takes Place.

We appreciate the generosity, scholarship, activism, and curatorial approaches of Jessamine Batario (Colby College Museum of Art), Dan Finnamore and George Schwartz (Peabody Essex Museum), Kyera Singleton (the Royal House & Slave Quarters), Naomi Slipp, Melanie Correia, and Amanda McMullen (New Bedford Whaling Museum), Victoria Johnson and Peter Fay (Newport Middle Passage Memorial Project), Akeia de Barros Gomes and Christina Brophy (Mystic Seaport Museum), and the docents at the Mark Twain House & Museum and the Harriet Beecher Stowe Center homes, who walked us through galleries and historical sites, fed us, and held their time open to us as this project developed.

A Nation Takes Place is deeply grateful for the collective effort and unwav- ering support of directors, gallerists, curators, and archivists of institutions, collections, galleries, and museums. Your support in filling inquiries, holding meetings, approving loan and licensing requests, and to the artists who permitted us to include their work in the exhibition and catalog has been invaluable. We would like to expressly thank the Amistad Research Center, the Ancestors Project, the Bockley Gallery, the Brooklyn Museum, the Cristin Tierney Gallery, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Denver Art Museum, the Historic New Orleans Collection, Galerie Myrtis, the Horseman Foundation, Jack Shainman Gallery, Lehmann Maupin Gallery, the Library of Congress, Pace Gallery, Sean Kelly Gallery, Stephen Friedman Gallery, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the United States Naval Academy Museum, the Walker Art Center, and the collections of John Campbell and Colette Hyman.

Collaborations significantly deepened and transformed the scope and scale of this project, moving it beyond the walls of the museum and the pages of this publication. We are immensely grateful to the University of Minnesota Press for their patience, guidance, and feedback. We want to acknowledge historian JoJo Bell, who developed an interpretive framework in the early stages of the exhibition, which continued to guide its trajectory; photographer and curator Jaysen Hohlen for their invaluable assistance in working with archival materials; designer Matthew Rezac, who worked with us in creating the visual aesthetic and design of a publication we could be proud of; and a team of copy editors—Anitra Budd and Terri Simon, working independently but with care and integrity for clarity, depth, and coherence. Thank you.

The Minnesota Marine Art Museum was pivotal in making this project a reality. We sincerely thank executive director Scott Pollock for his unwav ering commitment, curatorial assistance, support of our vision, and flexibility of engagement as the project evolved and shifted over the past two years. We also wish to thank Dave Casey, director of engagement; Heather Casper, curator of learning and community impact; and Jon Swanson, curator of collections and exhibitions. Their patience and care in communicating with artists and lending institutions, tending to the needs of the exhibition, and developing public programming helped the project materialize. Together, the team helped shape the creation of a major national exhibition and monumental publication while helping to secure critically important funding for this undertaking.

Finally, we sincerely thank the Mellon Foundation, the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, the Terra Foundation for American Art, the Union Pacific Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts for their support and investment in this project.

- Tia Simone-Garder and Shana M. griffin