St. Paul – Minnesota Writers Off the Page: Tia-Simone Gardner and Erin Sharkey
February 21, 2025. | 6p - 8p | Free, registration required
Online or In-Person at the Minnesota Humanities Event Center [987 Ivy Avenue East, Saint Paul, MN 55106]
Join us at the Minnesota Humanities Event Center in St. Paul, MN, for a conversation at the intersection of artwork, images, and writing based upon the catalogue A Nation Takes Place: Navigating Race and Water in Contemporary Art. Edited by Tia-Simone Gardner and Shana M. griffin, the book is a companion to the art exhibit “A Nation Takes Place,” currently on view at the Minnesota Marine Art Museum in Winona (through March 2, 2025).
Editor and exhibit curator Tia-Simone Gardner will be in conversation with contributing writer and author Erin Sharkey, navigating through the themes and meanings that surface when considering water, place-making and place-taking, the maritime world, and how it relates to race, colonization, dispossession, rebirth, and creation.
Following the discussion, audience members are invited to participate in a Q&A session, enjoy light refreshments, and have further informal conversation with the featured speakers. Copies of A Nation Takes Place will be available for purchase at the event and the evening will finish with a book signing.
This event is presented in partnership with the Minnesota Marine Art Museum, which engages visitors and the community with great art inspired by water, and is part of the Minnesota Writers Off the Page series, bringing the inspirational voices of Minnesota’s authors directly to readers. While the event is free, registration is required to reserve your spot. Don’t miss this unique opportunity to explore a text that brings together both writing and art!
About the Book
Neither the metaphorical birth of a nation nor its actual violent formation is a one-time event. It is a process. A process of erasing, naming, and unnaming. Settling and unsettling. Extracting, dispossessing, and disappearing—a process of taking and placemaking. It is a tool of conquest, unthinkable without waterways, voyages, slave ships, and hemispheric maps of colonial and imperial demarcation. A companion to the exhibition A Nation Takes Place at the Minnesota Marine Art Museum, this catalog examines how artists bring critical attention to the “liquid fantasies” of the sea and navigate race and the violent silences, voids, ruptures, breaks, and counterworld formations unattended by the visuality of traditional maritime art, pushing the boundaries of what marine art is and can become. (University of Minnesota Press)
About the Speakers
Tia-Simone Gardner is an interdisciplinary artist, educator, and undisciplined Black feminist geographer, committed to understanding relationships between Blackness and landscape. She is a 2023–24 McKnight Visual Artist Fellow and a 2024 Anonymous was a Woman Grantee. Her photography and moving image work has shown both nationally and internationally, and her co-curated exhibition, “A Nation Takes Place,” is currently on view at the Minnesota Marine Art Museum in Winona. Gardner is an Assistant Professor of Media and Cultural Studies at Macalester College in Saint Paul.
Erin Sharkey is a writer, arts and abolition organizer, cultural worker, and film producer based in Minneapolis. She is the co-founder, with Junauda Petrus, of an experimental arts collective called Free Black Dirt and is the producer of film projects including Sweetness of Wild, an episodic web film project, and Small Business Revolution, which explored challenges and opportunities for Black-owned businesses in the Twin Cities in the summer of 2021.
Registration
This event is free but registration is required.
Registration Questions: registrations@mnhum.org
