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 Summary

Juan Carlos Quintana took up residency at A Studio In the Woods to further explore and investigate how my personal history of growing up in Louisiana intersects with the histories of the region along the Mississippi River between Baton Rouge and New Orleans. By using mixed media drawing and printmaking techniques, Quintana created works that questions how his family, as immigrants from Cuba, ended up living not only in the heart of Louisiana sugar cane region but in a dilapidated plantation house built in the 1700’s on the edge of the Mississippi River. Quintana began to investigate the history of his childhood house (Godchaux Plantation) and found out that during the period after the Civil War it became one of the largest sugar producing plantations in the country. Quintana was interested in how his personal history interconnects to a larger historical context, and how his attempt to make sense of it all through both real and imagined visual narratives would play out. 

Quintana was also interested in critiquing Louisiana’s relationship with its petrochemical refineries and the so-called Cancer Alley corridor. “Taking a ride along the river between Baton Rouge and New Orleans one can not help but notice how the past collides with the present,” noted Quintana. “The sugar cane plantations stand together with the refineries as testament to the brutality of our past and the environmental degradation of our present and future. I see my work as an attempt to connect the historical dots and question our collective connection to history to better understand who we are as a nation and where we are heading.”

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

Elana Mann took part in a residency at the Minnesota Marine Art Museum to build on her ongoing practice of making ceramic rattles for rituals, protest and performance. The time in the area allowed Mann to engage with community members about her project, "Let the Mississippi Speak," a continuation of a larger ongoing work titled "Shake, Rattle, Roll" (2019-present).  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. During her time in Minnesota, Mann travelled to various locations to check out clay reserves and research Mississippi clay, established relationships with grassroots community / civic orgs working for social change and equity, connected with ceramic artists to explore the feasibility of a future community workshop, and met with collaborating exhibiting artists to explore future sonic collaborations.

Residency 3

Dameun Strange

Minnesota Marine Art Museum, Winona Minnesota

March 2025

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 Summary

Dameun Strange proposes to use his residency to engage community members around their personal and historical relationship with water and how it relates to American history and culture, and to encourage participation to share these stories in a creative way that will eventually lead to the creation of a visual score that would be performed and broadcast by the Minnesota Marine Art Museum. Strange will host a story harvesting session at the Minnesota Marine Art Museum during the closing weekend of the exhibition, and compose a new soundscape in an effort to expand the use of my AquaSonos canon to engage with community members to create art/tell stories of their own relationship with water.  

Residency 4

Monica Moses Haller

Plaquemines Parish, 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 works internationally and is based in Minneapolis, where she is an associate professor of art at the University of Minnesota, Department of Art.

Residency Summary

Monica Moses Haller will take part in a 6-day residency in New Orleans and Plaquemines Parish, LA using the residency to contribute to her ongoing work in the coastal wetlands in Plaquemines Parish, where her maternal family is from and has returned for over six generations. During the residency, Moses Haller will make new photographs. Building on her practice of photographing one live oak tree, which she has been photographing for 25 years, Haller will use a new, experimental lens construction that she has been developing for this residency. Moses Haller will also work with her long-time collaborator to advance work on their book of text and images. This includes recording conversations about her collaborators' relationship to the wetlands and ongoing work/activism to restore it; these recordings are used in the book’s text. Haller will also photograph based on those conversations. Last, Moses Haller will meet with a family member, with whom she has not previously worked creatively, to establish the possibility of collaborating.

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