Women Across the Water

Seven female artists from elsewhere, now living in the Twin Cities. Seven places make the changes in their lives.
Seven art works tell the stories between them and the city.
Come to the Show Gallery on August 2nd, and share the stories of them, and the stories of you.

Through this project artists will consider why they live and work here, while local audience gains perspective on their familiar city and sees it with new eyes. Places we pass everyday but overlook may be resonant for others. This project inaugurates shared vision and brings diverse people to voice.
Through the project, we want not only to share our stories, but also encourage people like us, women artists from other places, to think about the stories that ushered them into this new community. More importantly, to the audience, especially local people, they can see the city through these artists’ eyes, and start to think about their city differently. To the viewers who are newly relocated here, they may find they are not alone, they may start to find such a place for themselves.

Special thanks to artistic consultant Ta-coumba T. Aiken

Artist List
Molly Barrett
Frankie Castillo
Zoe Cinel
Gretchen Gasterland-Gustafsson
Sherry Muyuan He
Yijia Li
Xiaohan Ma

About Artists

Molly Barrett, a Renaissance artist, works in a multitude of mediums. She has found success in public and private art from the East to West and here in the Midwest. In her works, she strives to create images in which the viewer can see more than one thing and walk away with an image in their mind that they hadn’t had before. Pause, Ponder, Play!

Frankie Castillo is a graphic designer focused on printmaking and editorial publications. Their conceptual approach incorporates the analysis of cultural background related with the way we read and the written word, not only as a functional element in a discourse, but also as an object existing in a spatial field.

Zoe Cinel is an artist and curator from Florence, Italy. Her practice is distributed across disciplines: sculpture, performance, video making, graphic design and more. She sees art as a platform for dialogue. Her current work explores the common ground and differences of experiences of immigration in the US.

Gretchen Gasterland-Gustafsson lives in Saint Paul, and was born in Edina, Minnesota, having thus crossed only the Mississippi River, but in the intervening years she lived in Italy, Sweden, and travelled throughout Europe and North America. When she was working on her thesis project at Cranbrook in the early 1990s, during the first of the Gulf Wars, she wanted to inspect American culture in its broad variety, having experienced more definable cultures in Sweden and Italy. Culture differed from Michigan to Minnesota, so she was curious about how people in Minnesota at the time would answer a set of questions pertaining to their own history and culture, and how this affected their attitudes toward American culture. We are now living through a similarly difficult time in which the definition of culture is at stake, and those welcome to contribute to this definition are in question, so she revived her set of questions from a quarter century ago to address to the participants in Women Across the Water to see what could be discerned from our thoughts about culture broadly, and American culture particularly, in this time and this place. Her resulting quilt is meant to represent this collaborative community.

Sherry Muyuan He is an interdisciplinary designer. He has worked with Boston Medical Center, Children’s Theatre Company, Pillsbury United Communities and the Works Museum. She has a growing collection of food-shaped stationeries. When she is not eating, sleeping or designing, He likes to break dance to burn calories.

Yijia Li is a painter from Shanghai, China, who uses female figures as my main subject matter. Li focuses on using western painting techniques and skills to discuss Chinese philosophy as each person is a unaversive. Her art making process is not only for exploring skills or telling stories, but more importantly, a process to learn and understand the world.

Xiaohan Ma is a graphic Designer and Digital Artist, specializing in digital print, UX, motions graphics, and digital 3D modeling. She was born and raised in China and moved to Minneapolis, MN in 2015. Professionally trained and worked as a graphic designer for 7 years, Xiaohan seeks not only strategic but also artistic aspects in graphic design, seeing it as a meaning to explore the unknown possibilities and to observe the details of life and humanity.