MCAD/Jerome Artists 2008-09

Panel discussion:
Wednesday, October 7
6:30pm



The exhibition will run from October 2-November 8, 2009 at the MCAD Gallery, with an opening reception on October 2 from 6-8 p.m. and a panel discussion with the artists on Wednesday, October 7, at 6:30 p.m. The artists are Evan Baden, Barbara Claussen, Kirsten Peterson, Benjamin Reed, and Lindsay Smith.

The MCAD/Jerome Fellowship Program provides each recipient with a $10,000 stipend and opportunities to discuss their work with nationally recognized art writers and museum professionals. The yearlong fellowship culminates with the exhibition at the MCAD Gallery, which is accompanied by a catalog.




Evan Baden is a photographer who explores the nexus of intimacy and digital technology by making public an array of seemingly private acts of sexual self-promotion. Baden received his BFA from the College of Visual Arts in St. Paul in 2007.

Barbara Claussen's project Modern Monoliths investigates how systems--be they social, political, or corporate--exercise power and control in the public and private realm. In her installation the viewer becomes a part of the power exchange by physically interacting with the work. Claussen received her MFA from the University of Minnesota in 2001.

Also a graduate of the MFA program at the University of Minnesota, Kirsten Petersen is a painter interested in the construction and deconstruction of appropriated images. In her Infrastructure series, she takes apart digital images of controlled destruction, translates the information between two and three dimensions, and then reinterprets it through the lens of painting.

Benjamin Reed, who received his MFA from MCAD in 2008, is a sculptor and sports enthusiast whose newest work, Strategy through Creativity, involves diagramming important plays from World Cup games on black slate and staging them on tables that resemble fields. Larger-than-life-sized porcelain figures in suits stand over one table charting strategies for a game that is both art and business.

Lindsay Smith's drawings offer us a speculative vision of how wasteful consumer culture interacts with nature--landscapes where trash and trees coexist and where our role in this synthetic wilderness is unclear. Smith received her BFA from the University of Minnesota in 2007.

These five fellows were chosen from a group of 317 applicants by a jury composed of Paul Ha, director of the Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis, Missouri; Sara Krajewski, associate curator at the Henry Art Gallery in Seattle, Washington; and Rob Silberman, associate professor of art history at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities.

The MCAD/Jerome Foundation Fellowship Program is nationally recognized as an outstanding Twin Cities foundation-based grant program for visual artists. It was established in 1981 with the purpose of identifying and rewarding emerging visual artists across Minnesota who have not yet attained professional acknowledgement commensurate with the quality of their work. In its 28 years, the Jerome program has influenced the careers of more than 100 artists. Their work, in turn, has enriched the creative life of the region.