Friday, October 2 - Saturday, October 3
Winona, MN [times + locations to be announced]
MMAM’s Upper Mississippi Plein Air Experience: Boats, Bridges, and Backwaters will include artist demonstrations in plein air around the Winona area. Participating artists include Kar-Keat Chong, Joshua Cunningham, Bob Upton, Hannah C. Heyer, Pam Luer, James Richards, and Jim Clark. Stay tuned for locations and times!
About the artists
Kar-Keat Chong
Kar-Keat Chong is a Minneapolis-based architect and watercolorist. Trained under local artists in his hometown of Georgetown, Penang, Malaysia when he was fourteen, Kar-Keat resumed his passion for watercolor painting in 2017. His work has been accepted into national and international juried exhibitions such as Audubon Artists of America and Transparent Watercolor Society of America. Besides running his own art and architecture studio, Kar-Keat also teaches watercolor at the University of Minnesota-School of Architecture. Kar-Keat Chong
Joshua Cunningham
Joshua Cunningham lives in St. Paul with his wife, Shannon, and their children, Greta and William. He has been a professional artist for 20 years. He is a member of the Outdoor Painters of Minnesota, Oil Painters of America, and a signature member of the American Impressionist Society. His work has been featured as a St. Paul Art Crawl Poster award winner, on the cover of Plein Air Magazine, and in numerous publications. Joshua’s paintings have won awards in regional, state, national, and international juried shows. He has exhibited with the Science Museum of Minnesota, The Bell Museum of Natural History, and The Minnesota Marine Art Museum. In 2024, his work was archived as part of a cultural time capsule on the moon, in the Lunar Codex, aboard the Odysseus Lander. Joshua Cunningham
Bob Upton
Bob Upton is a plein air painter who paints in oil and gouache. Bob is from St. Paul, Minnesota where he was trained in academic realism at the Atelier Lack, and with acclaimed landscape painter Joe Paquet. He has been awarded at many of the top plein air competitions around the country including, Plein Air Easton, Olmsted Plein Air, En Plein Air Texas and Laguna Plein Air Painters of America. Upton has won 15 awards in the Plein Air Salon, and was the cover artist of Plein Air Magazine in October 2014. He is also featured in the book “The Art of Plein Air Painting” by Stephen Doherty. Recently, Bob has made extended painting trips following the Mississippi River from St. Paul to St. Louis.
“My intention is to capture the uniqueness of that single day on canvas, as the French painter Corot said ‘Never lose the first impression which has moved you’” Bob Upton Fine Art
Hannah C. Heyer
Hannah C. Heyer is a self-taught artist living and working in rural southeastern Minnesota. Working primarily outdoors, painting from life, her work is a study and celebration of place, time, and season. Living on the farm which has been in her family for six generations, her roots and love for the land run deep. The rhythms of the seasons and the history, hardships, and beauty of this life inspire and inform her work. Hannah C. Heyer
Pam Luer
Artist, instructor and graphic designer, Pam Luer, is drawn to the outdoors and experimenting with new mediums. Her art has been licensed to products and packaging by retailers like Target and Crate & Barrel. But her first love is sketching in nature. This passion inspired a series of Sketchbook Workshops that she teaches in resorts, botanical gardens and arboretums across the country. Pam Luer
James Richards
Jim's work crosses many creative boundaries, and drawing has always been a cornerstone of his creative life and work. He is an award-winning artist, author, urban designer and former university professor whose work explores real places and real stories around the globe. Jim is the author of the award-winning book Freehand Drawing and Discovery: Urban Sketching and Concept Drawing for Designers, a popular text at design schools across the U.S. and abroad.
He is an instructor and former Board of Directors member for Urban Sketchers, an international non-profit that promotes on-location sketching around the globe. His sketches have been published worldwide, appeared in solo and group exhibitions, seen in the National Geographic film Selah and on NBC Nightly News. His solo exhibition "Hemingway's Cuba" was shown in Hemingway’s estate outside Havana (now a national museum) during the 2015 Havana Art Biennial. Richards is the first American invited to have an exhibition in the Nobel Prize winning author's home.
Jim is a popular online instructor on Skillshare.com, Craftsy and The Great Courses. He travels globally to teach urban sketching workshops for artists, designers and travelers. He's based in Siesta Key, Florida. James Richards Sketchbook
Jim Clark
Jim Clark lives and works in Hopkins, Minnesota. He was born and raised in an interstitial space, a pocket universe between the IDS building and Amber Waves of Grain. He grew up in the wilds of Minnetonka where great mares once ran free, Dead Man’s Hill swallowed sleds, and the Swamp and Woods held great treasure. The woods and swamp have shrunk, fully plundered. The hill has been capped with gardens and Dishes. And the horses have scattered west and east, north and south.
Wilderness, and the waters within, have been a source of inspiration since childhood. He spent his teen years paddling in northern Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Ontario, and his twenties living in Fairbanks, Alaska. His trekking there included the Wrangells, Brooks, and Alaska ranges. His favorite wilderness is the Boundary Waters, where he uses a paddle or canoe hull as drawing boards.
He received his undergraduate art degree at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, an MFA at Vesper College, in addition to study at Cours de Civilisation Française de la Sorbonne and at the Academie de Port-Royal in Paris. JIM A. CLARK
