Jesse Dermody
The Deep Dreams of Roots
May 1 - May 31, 2025
Artist Reception: Friday, May 23, 4:00pm - 6:00pm
Jesse Dermody is a multi-disciplinary artist based in rural northern Minnesota. A sculptor, poet, and musician, Dermody sees his three creative pursuits as the roots of a single tree–with sonic, lyric, and sculptural branches. His large, dynamic sculptures are composed of driftwood, roots, barn boards, stones, animal bones, and other found objects that he collects on his daily hikes near his home north of Duluth. Inspired by these collected treasures from the woods, he assembles them into mystical, emotional creature-forms that straddle internal and external worlds. Dermody had a solo exhibition at Macrostie Art Center in Grand Rapids in 2021 and tours extensively with his brother, Ryan, and their band The Brothers Burn Mountain.
Daniel Kerkhoff
The Least Among Us
May 1 - May 31, 2025
Artist Reception: Friday, May 23, 4:00pm - 6:00pm
Daniel Kerkhoff is a Minneapolis and Mankato-based artist whose practice includes painting, drawing, mixed media, collage, sculpture, photography, and social practice. He studied at the Art Students League of New York, as well as with instructors in San Francisco, Japan, Italy, and Ghana. Since 2009, he has been creating his own residencies, as artist-in-community, in Ghana, Ecuador, and Vietnam, where he exhibits and curates, provides materials for libraries, makes art with children, and documents their shared experiences in creating, witnessing, and connecting.
Phyllis Bramson
The Bliss of the Picturesque
June 5 - July 26, 2025
Artist Reception: Saturday, June 28, 4:00pm - 6:00pm
Phyllis Bramson’s paintings include elements of collage and assemblage, and inspire feelings of childlike wonder, longing, heartbreak, frustration, and delight. Inspired by 18th-century Rococo, Chinoiserie, Chinese Pleasure Garden paintings, French artists Boucher and Fragonard, and American Henry Darger, fairy tale illustrations, erotic bedtime stories, and knick-knack kitsch, many of Bramson’s paintings are reactions to romantic events–the courting, the longing, the risking, the coupling, and every unpredictable event in between. Refusing to separate matters of taste from larger questions about “good behavior,” her work nods to decorum but exposes its more colorful underside with wit, theatrics, and subtle innuendo.
A recipient of Guggenheim, Rockefeller, Louis Comfort Tiffany, and multiple NEA fellowships, Bramson has an extensive exhibition history. Beginning with The New Museum in 1979, she has shown at the Smithsonian Institution, The Chicago Cultural Center, Smart Museum, Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, WI, Littlejohn Contemporary in New York, and Phyllis Kind, Carl Hammer, Zolla/Lieberman, and Engage Projects galleries in Chicago. A longtime Professor of Studio Art at both the University of Illinois at Chicago and The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Bramson lives and works in Chicago, keeping a studio and an apartment in the same loft building, on different floors.
Nate Young
June 5 - July 26, 2025
Artist Reception: Saturday, June 28, 4:00pm - 6:00pm
Nate Young works across media, creating sculptures, works on paper, and installations that engage with issues of race and racialization. Using diverse materials (wood, glass, pencil and paper, bone, and sound, among others) his work explores the systems and objects that impact one’s beliefs. Often addressing theological themes through text and architectural elements, Young strips away any specific content, leaving behind a universal lexicon of primordial signs and symbols. These arrows, circles, grids, and negative spaces strongly suggest meaning without in fact conveying it; a profound void, at once empty and full, invites the viewer’s activation. This quiet gravitas and austerity, at odds with the work’s meticulously hand-crafted nature, prompts a post-minimalist interrogation of authority, material, and the artist’s hand.
Young has exhibited nationally at museums and galleries, including MASS MoCA, MA; The Studio Museum, Harlem; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Visual Arts Center, Richmond, VA; Front Triennial at the Cleveland Institute of Art, and moniquemeloche gallery, Chicago. His work is in the collections of MOCA, Chicago, DePaul Art Museum, Fabric Workshop and Museum, Philadelphia, Milwaukee Art Museum, the Walker Art Center, and the Smithsonian Museum of African American History and Culture, Washington, D.C. A co-founder of the experimental gallery The Bindery Projects (Minneapolis, 2011-2016), Young is currently Assistant Professor of Art at University of Illinois at Chicago, and lives and works in Chicago.
Nancy Friedemann - Sanchez
July 31 - September 30, 2025
Artist Reception: Saturday, August 2, 4:00pm-6:00pm
Nancy Friedemann-Sánchez is a Colombo-American interdisciplinary artist. She grew up in Colombia, the child of a Colombian and a U.S. citizen, and migrated to the U.S. as an adult. Her art mines the curious and intense experience of having physically migrated, yet feeling a piece of herself rooted in Colombia. Nancy Friedemann-Sanchez’s work is included in the Utah Museum of Contemporary Art, The Nerman Museum of Art, Miami Museum of Contemporary Art, Blue Star Contemporary, The Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, La Bienal de Cuenca, Ecuador, The Sheldon Museum of Art, The Joslyn Art Museum, The Portland Museum; El Museo del Barrio and Bronx Museum of the Arts.
CHARLEY FRIEDMAN
July 31 - September 30, 2025
Artist Reception: Saturday, August 2, 4:00pm-6:00pm
Charley Friedman is sculptor, photographer, performance, video artist whose main material, and medium, is humor. Humor allows ideas to take root in the body, and has been, he writes, “a useful tool verbally and aesthetically, from the lowly to the holy . . . to make sense of the absurd world we live in, and [is also] deeply rooted in Jewish history.” Exploring the ways that images and objects take on value–on a continuum from the sacred to the disposable–Friedman’s work questions the ways in which society agrees to assign meaning and value to symbols. His deployment of humor and absurdity magnifies cultural vulnerabilities and prejudices, revealing individuals’ humanity, and ultimately asks us to think about how we all internalize and filter the outside world–whether through magical thinking, institutionalized religion, or consumer culture. Friedman has shown nationally and internationally, notably at the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, AR; MOMA PS1, NY; Everson Museum of Art, NY; Art Omi, NY, and the Joslyn Museum of Art, Omaha, and is included in many museum and private collections, including the Walker Art Center, Brooklyn Museum, New York Public Library, and the Karen and Robert Duncan collection in Lincoln, NE.