Summer Studio Resident Dani Sanchez has lived countless lives. Over the past few years she’s traveled the country working as a wilderness first responder, wood carver, and most recently, an industrial arts teaching assistant. Her introduction to crafts and making came in Northern Montana–what started as a short stop during a road trip became an extended stay, where she was first introduced to spoon carving and helped set up a small spoon shop near a hostel.

“I spent three weeks out there carving spoons and setting up the shop,” Dani says. “And then I came back for the winter to carve some more. There weren’t any production protocols–he just said, ‘make what you want to make’ and then took off to Belize!”

With the owner’s blessing, Dani set to work in what was essentially her own private wood shop.

“I carved all winter and froze my butt off,” she laughs. “But it definitely set a fire in me for making things, and ever since then I’ve wanted to expand on that!”

To shape her residency at CAFAC, Dani looked back to that winter, where she first dipped a toe into craft.

“I wanted to focus on making sculptural spoons,” Dani explains. “Spoons are one of my favorite tools, and I knew that the visions I had for them would require me to branch out into different methods–perhaps casting and welding.”

Since arriving on site in June, Dani has been keen to learn more. She’s looked to instructors for inspiration, technical knowledge, and support.

“Just talking to the instructors here is opening up worlds to me!” she says. “Brighton [McCormick] is so knowledgeable, and I was able to hop in a class with Serg [Vaynshenk] last night. They’re just so generous with their knowledge and advice. I’m feeling a lot more confident in how doable my project is, because there’s such a great network of instructors here and resources to rely on.”

Her creations will involve a mix of blacksmithing, found object sculpture with oxy-acetylene welding and brazing, and enamel–a totally new medium for Dani.

“Playing with color is going to be a lot of fun! I’m really excited for that,” she says. Her sculptures involve a mix of technical experimentation and abstract concepts; for example, turning a rake into a prairie fire flower–a representation of rebirth and renewal–or emulating a rope with forged steel. One of the concepts that has her most excited is a play on words: a “cuchara cuchara.”

“[Cuchara] means spoon in Spanish, but it's also slang for vulva in Argentina and other parts of South America,“ Dani explains. “That connection is something I want to explore. Ever since I started making spoons, I was like ‘I have to make a cuchara cuchara.’ It’s been on my list for a long time!”

Finally, at the end of her residency Dani intends to offer a spoon-making class to the general public at CAFAC.

“There’s still a lot I need to work out in how the class is going to be structured, but I already have interest,” she says. “I’m feeling very inspired!”

Dani works in the CAFAC smithy, prepping for her upcoming class.

If you’re in the Twin Cities, there’s a chance you’ve come across CRICE’s murals or digital work in the past few years. A public-sphere mixed media artist, CRICE is one of our two Spring 2024 Studio Residents, and has been embracing the discomfort of being a beginner since he came into CAFAC this Spring.

“I’m fully a fish out of water with this,” CRICE laughs, “But it's exciting because I really like when my artistry is challenged in a way.  It can lead to ‘happy accidents.’”

CRICE’s repertoire includes a mix of techniques, including printmaking, painting, graphic design, and digital illustration, but he hasn’t had in-depth experience with the fire arts. During his residency he’s started to explore enameling, and has started practicing welding again for the first time since undergrad.

“The more that I’ve been in the public art realm, the more interest I have in pieces that can stand the test of time,” he says. “It’s so different than the pristine-and-clean print world, or really tech-heavy projection mapping. You really have to focus or you’ll get burned–it’s a bit more zen in that way.”

CRICE’s proposal for the residency builds off of a body of work he’s been developing throughout his career as an artist. It’s a collection of imagery, motifs and icons that build off of personal, family, and cultural histories in a kind of symbolic language.

Once of CRICE’s symbolic creations, featuring two faces pointing in opposite directions with ornamental designs between them.

“Life in general influences me. I like to think that the symbols kind of find me in the moments that I’m wanting to create around specific themes,” CRICE says. “[They] kind of just reveal themselves.”

As he continues his residency, CRICE is keeping an open mind about the final form his project will take. But, he admits, the amount of possibilities there are at CAFAC have made it tough to think about narrowing down the scope of his work.

“Every time I come in here, my head’s spinning–it’s like ‘wow, I want to do that too!’” he laughs. “I’m just getting more and more excited, and ready to just do the work.”

CRICE practices cutting metal with an oxy-acetylene torch in the CAFAC shop.

Brighton kneels on the ground as she pours molten aluminum from a small crucible into an ingot mold.

Despite making a living as an artist specializing in foundry–-the practice of melting metal and shaping it with molds—Brighton makes an effort to not take her art too seriously. 

“I make fun of art constantly,” they say, laughing. “It is like my whole world, but it’s also like, it’s art. If it’s not fun, why are you doing it?”

That’s the perspective she tries to share with students in her introductory class at CAFAC, Creative Metal Casting: Mold-Making Fundamentals.

“Casting is a great way to experiment, because you have to do something that is a little bit out of your control,” Brighton says. “I want students to just mess around. Some of those miscastings, those things that don’t turn out exactly how you wanted, end up being some of the best pieces.”

That attitude comes in part from their indirect path towards becoming a working artist. At 25, Brighton found themself working in finance in New York City, living comfortably but unfulfilled. Looking for an escape brought her to New York’s arts scene. A few short years later–after a stint as an oil painter, a reluctant introduction to sculpture, and a second degree–she’s become a integral part of the metal casting community in the Upper Midwest.

“As soon as I got in the foundry, I just kept taking [metal casting classes] over and over again,” Brighton says. “I was like ‘Holy crap, this is so hard, this is so much work—and nothing's ever been worth it like this before.’”

A row of open-face molds on the left and two-part molds on the right sit on the ground in CAFAC’s shop, ready for metal to be poured. A lit furnace fueled with propane is visible in the back.

At CAFAC, Brighton teaches Sand Mold Fundamentals throughout the year, an introductory class to mold-making using – you guessed it – sand. Sand is one of the oldest mold materials used in metal casting, and Brighton’s favorite first technique for students.

“It's a really great introduction to mold making, and mold making is foundational for casting anything, whether it’s jello, chocolate, bronze, aluminum, or cast iron,” she explains. “It also gets people looking at the world differently. You can identify if something you see on the street is a cast object or not,” including all kinds of plastic and rubber objects, which are often manufactured with molds.

Brighton’s class focuses on two main projects. In the first, students work “in the positive,” creating a one-to-one representation of an object that they want to cast out of metal..

“They sculpt something fresh out of their mind,” says Brighton, “so they're creating a positive pattern, they’re molding what will become a negative void in the mold.” Students learn how to make shapes that can be removed from a mold easily, meaning they don’t have overhanging edges or sharp angles.

For their second project, students mold a found object—a bowl, normally—and then carve directly into the mold to add detail.

“So they go from working in the positive by creating the initial bowl mold, to working in the negative and free form carving into a mold,” they say. “They're doing reductive carving.” All of the material they remove from the mold becomes space for molten metal to flow into.

On top of the foundational skills it teaches students, Brighton chose sand casting for its ease of entry. Students who want to create sand molds at home need less equipment, and can buy raw materials at lower cost than some other mold-making methods, like ceramic shell. Plus–there’s a sustainability element to sand molds.

“I create these little discs–I call them button molds,” she says. “Essentially it's sand waste that I turn into a small mold, which students can carve into. I like to find ways to utilize that waste material.”

A range of bowls cast by students in Brighton’s Sand Mold Fundamentals course. The raised patterns were created by carving away at sand. Sand molds give the final products a unique texture.

When they first started teaching foundry classes, Brighton assumed that their students were fascinated by fire and eager to get up close and personal with molten metal–in the “splash zone,” as they put it.

“I had this realization that not everybody likes to be around fire,” she says. “Like you don't want everything to be chaotic and crazy and hot–that's a deterrent to some people.”

“One approach I’ve definitely changed in the past year of teaching is to spend extra time on teaching body movements and muscle movements that you need. You know, ‘Here’s how to bend your knees and lock your elbows, and here’s the equipment that we’re using. This is going to feel hot and be a little heavy.’”

Getting students prepared also means teaching breathing techniques and how to take care of their bodies in what can be a stressful environment.

“If you’re in an environment where you’re having a startle response multiple times, you’re going to get frustrated quicker. You’re going to be exhausted,” she explains. “So part of the training is encouraging students to pay attention to their bodies. If you’re noticing yourself jumping from loud sounds multiple times, you need to remove yourself from the noise, take a couple of deep breaths, and then recenter yourself.”

Although the metal pour itself is central to the foundry process, it’s a small portion of the overall time you spend in the shop.

“I want people to know that you don’t have to jump in there and get right up close with molten metal. There’s a lot of steps along the way,” says Brighton. “The mold-making process is 60% of it. And then 5% of it is casting, and the rest is finishing.”

As the majority of the work students do in her class, mold-making itself is what she really wants to emphasize for their students.

“With casting, there’s just so much that’s out of your control that you really need to enjoy the mold-making process,” they say. “Casting especially is a kind of art form where you can’t be too focused on the end product.”

Students in Brighton’s course break open their sand molds post-pour, revealing the cast metal pieces inside.

From Fall 2023 to Winter 2024, Emily McBride and Emma Wood worked tirelessly to develop their artistic practice and produce work for their culminating exhibit, “re-ti-cu-la-tion: Studies of Familiar and Unfamiliar Networks.” The two found an unexpected similarity between their projects, which used very different approaches to working with glass. Emma’s work drew on mycorrhizal networks and their fruiting bodies, mushrooms, while Emily took a more literal approach to “networks” with a series of structures built from thin glass rods.

Read on to hear the artists speak about their work, inspirations, and post-residency plans!

_________

Tell me about your arts practice. What’s your relationship with glass?

EMILY MCBRIDE: I feel like there's two sides to my practice where I do functional items you can use, and then I make more sculptural, installation-based work. Sometimes I feel like they're in conflict with each other, and sometimes they can inform each other.

But I’ve been working in Glass for about 17 years. Oh my god, that just sounds so wild now! But, that was what I originally went to school for and kind of got sucked into. There's such a steep learning curve and there's so much you can do with it that I did end up just sticking to it.

When I went to grad school, I took some time to expand to other mediums. It was really refreshing, just knowing that I can make art that isn't tied to specific equipment and materials. But I do keep coming back to it, and I keep finding different ways to challenge myself in glass.

Emily McBride’s “Warped Grid.” Borosilicate glass, 2023.

EMMA WOOD: I have kind of taken a non-traditional route with my art practice. Right after graduating from high school here in Minneapolis, I studied in Sweden at a community college for about a year. And that's when I got into my own art practice. Since then I’ve been taking on residencies as a way of working through my artwork and as a kind of self-study.

I started working with glass in, I believe, 2020. I had a chance to do a work exchange with FOCI, the Minnesota Center for Glass Arts. I’d always wanted to get into glass–my mom's side of the family is from Sweden, and so I have a strong connection to Småland, home of the “Kingdom of Crystal.” So, glass has been around for a while for me, and I was really excited to find a way to get into glass myself.

A selection of realistic depictions of fungi, by Emma Wood. Borosilicate and soft glass, 2023.

What techniques or project did you aim to explore during the residency?

EM: I took a class this past summer specifically in a technique called “networking,” which is building structures using thin rods. This was a direction I wanted to explore, so I focused on using this technique in larger-scale pieces. With other types of flameworking, you're working over a big flame, but with this a lot of times I'm working with a really tiny pinpoint flame which lets you work in a much bigger scale.

Part of the residency was making forms and then seeing how I could distort them using different processes. For some I use the big torch, and for others I have been putting these pieces in a kiln and letting them slump over a form to change shape. It’s come down to having a very structured piece, but then making gravity a factor to give it movement.

EW: During the residency I was working on a collection of glass mushroom specimens from the Midwest. The project is kind of a natural merge of my interest in foraging and my interest in glass.

I've been really interested in foraging since I lived in Sweden, because my grandparents would forage all the time and I learned from them. Over time, I became interested in a way of documenting fungi to help myself ID them, first through photography and then through 3D sculpture as that’s become part of my practice.

I was really inspired by the Blaschka Glass Flowers collection at the Harvard Museum. It's an extensive body of work–I think there's over 780 specimens–of botanically accurate plants, preserved in a medium that doesn’t deteriorate. I was so captivated by it! But I was also like, “where are the fungi?” They're such a fleeting, mysterious organism that are always around us. In comparison to 50% of plants, less than 10% of fungi are classified. And that's just a weird disproportionate number.

Emily McBride fuses two curved glass rods together with a small hand torch.

What are some of the first ideas you had for this project? And how has it changed from the start of the residency until now?

EM: In the beginning I was trying to kind of go large scale, but then I'd be like, “wait, I don't really know if I like this or not.” I started making smaller tests to kind of see what I wanted to focus on. For the show I incorporated some of those smaller tests, and some larger versions of them. 

I'm excited to kind of have some space with it a little later on, to be able to sit with the objects and see how they can inform other pieces in the future.

EW:  I did a lot of tests for most of the residency. Glass sometimes looks a little bit different when it’s cold versus when it’s melted, so it’s been a lot of testing and making small pieces of specimens to really get the forms and colors down.

I originally wanted to do a lot of different native species from Minnesota specifically, but after going through these tests it became clear that the finished work is going to be on the smaller end. It's been a huge learning experience that has been really awesome.

What are your future plans? Either for this body of work, or for your flameworking practice in the future?

EM: Working in flameworking specifically with this type of glass is new to me. I've only been doing it for a year now, and I want to keep exploring it.

I’ve just been really drawn to the grids and meshes and patterns that you find in, say, construction materials. I’m playing with incorporating a little color into it too, but everything might just stay clear. I do want to spend more time photographing the pieces, and maybe playing with the images. 

EW: I definitely want to continue with this project. It's been a project that I've wanted to do for a while, but this was the first step of being able to actualize it because of the generous studio access and material stipend. In order to achieve really detailed specimens, flameworking is the route to go—You just can't get those dimensions or that detail in the hot shop or with flat glass.

This residency has been a pivotal point for me, just having time, space, and funding to learn about flameworking. Flameworking is actually really new to me. It's really just opened up a whole set of material and tools that I have now, so it’s more a matter of adding more time and practice to it. 

Emma Wood works at a bench. A number of finished pieces are visible on the table in front of them.

Comments have been edited for clarity and length.

As a science illustrator, Vera Ming Wong exists at the intersection of art and science. She’s published quite a bit of work in books and magazines focused on ecology, biological diversity, and conservation. On top of that, she’s become known for her unique work with cut paper pieces, which depict environments, organisms, and even relationships between species in a single continuous piece of paper.

It’s this approach to illustration that earned the attention of Caitlin Potter and David Tilman, the Associate Director and Director respectively at Cedar Creek Ecosystem Science Reserve (CCESR). Cedar Creek staff had developed what they call an “ecology walk” in the reserve, where visitors and tour groups could pass through three different biomes in a small area.

“Biomes are generally huge areas, like the coniferous forest or the prairie, but here it was these little tiny pieces. There’s a deciduous forest,” Vera describes. “A section of oak savanna…. A little further there’s pine trees and spruce trees–the coniferous forest.”

These three key biomes, although ecologically distinct, aren’t always easily recognizable to the untrained eye. So Caitlin and David came up with the idea of placing signs at the transitions between biomes–a gentle reminder to be more aware of your surroundings.

It was Caitlin who first thought of Vera’s paper cutting work, and brought her on board. The project’s emphasis on biomes as complete ecosystems, rather than individual organisms taken out of context, appealed to Vera.

“I got a species list for the prairie, of [organisms] that they have there,” says Vera. “They’re the scientists and they do know what’s most typical of the different biomes. But then I look at the list of names, and the names that jump out to me are the things that I have personal experience with.”

“It’s like, ‘I know that’s tall. I know this one’s short. This one’s too little, I can’t cut that small,’” she says. “It’s a combination of things.”

Vera’s cut paper practice requires much more planning than pen and paper or watercolor, she explains. “It’s not something I can take out on the trail and do in the woods, but I use the images that I collect when I’m out in natural areas.” Sometimes, Vera will be visited by native insects or investigated by a curious mouse. Those encounters stick in her mind, make themselves into her sketches and watercolor paintings, and eventually end up in the final cut paper pieces she makes.

One of the completed ecology walk signs, installed in the oak savanna biome at CCESR.

“Even though I do a lot with watercolor, my strength is more in black and white,” Vera says. “With cut paper, it’s sort of super black and white. It’s either there or not there, and I like the challenge of having it have to hang together. In block printing you can carve out isolated areas without any ink. With paper, all your pieces have to be connected to everything around them.”

“And that appeals to me as a metaphor,” Vera continues, “that everything is connected to everything. And at the same time, there’s the negative space and the positive space. The images or organisms that I put into my cut paper pieces can be defined by the spaces around them, or they can be the spaces that define their neighbors.

“That’s another way in which everything is interdependent as well as interconnected. That’s part of the idea I’m trying to get across.”

Some of Vera’s past work has drawn on this concept of interconnectedness to great effect, specifically pieces that focus on endangered species. “Some of the work that I’ve done shows the endangered species as part of a whole,” she says. “I try to convey the idea that those things can’t be taken out of this space.”

A draft of Vera’s oak savanna design on paper.

Since this was a completely new area of work for Vera, having CAFAC’s Heather Doyle on the team was a huge asset, she says. 

“Heather had worked with public art before where you have to be aware of where little fingers can get stuck,” says Vera. “That was a huge difference between this and everything else I had done.”

The different ways that visitors might interact with a three-dimensional piece was something Vera had never needed to consider so deeply before.

“It took weeks and weeks and weeks.I had to change the size of holes and redo a lot of the designs. Heather was really encouraging, which I found very helpful! Otherwise I’m like, ‘can I really do this?’” she laughs.

Once her reworked designs got the thumbs up, Heather took charge on the logistical side of the project. What material suits the environment the best? How thick should the metal sheets be? What’s the best way to frame each illustration? Some short months later, the first signs were installed in the ground at Cedar Creek.

“I actually had not thought of myself as a public artist before this,” says Vera. “This is actually my first foray into public art!

A team of CAFAC fabricators and CCESR staff works together to install one of the ecology walk signs.

The Cedar Creek project isn’t the first project Vera’s done with metal–but it’s by far the most ambitious.

“I did do one cut metal piece a long time ago. Maybe about 10 or 12 years ago, but it was small.” Vera holds up her hands. “How tall is that–15, 18 inches maybe? It’s the pages of an open book.”

This piece involved fine details cut into thin metal pages, and offered its own set of challenges. 

“For that piece, I found out that my work was too fine detailed for laser cutting,” says Vera. “But at the place where I bought the steel, they said it won’t work. It would heat up the metal too much and warp it–and so that’s when I heard about water jet cutting.”

Water jet cutting uses a high-pressure stream of water, sometimes mixed with abrasives, to get a clean cut on temperature-sensitive materials. For thin sheets of metal, it’s a more reliable option than laser cutting. Vera’s exposure to this technique came in handy for the Cedar Creek project, too.

‘When I was working with Heather to pull it all together, I told her about those water jet cutters,” says Vera, “And when they sent in a bid, it came in within the budget. Heather said they were great to work with. I’m really happy that after all these years, I could actually send more work their way!”

Vera stands beside one of the completed signs, smiling.

Every July, Lori Beck embarks on an annual pilgrimage to CAFAC from her home in Michigan. Each year, she’s greeted with a private forge, and plentiful iron stock, and uninterrupted, one-on-one access to blacksmithing instructor Brad Buxton’s guidance.

Lori is one of hundreds of students who take classes at CAFAC to refine their skills in the fire arts, including welding, stained glass, metal casting, neon, enamel, and–her medium of choice–blacksmithing. Her passion for the art form started as a child, when she used to watch her grandfather forging at home and looked forward to visiting historic villages specifically for the blacksmiths.

“Once I found the blacksmith shop, that was it,” Lori laughs. “I was done. Leave my lunch with me and I’ll be there two and a half hours later.”

Lori shapes hot metal at her personal workstation in the CAFAC shop

For Lori, blacksmithing has been more than a creative outlet. It’s reconnecting to childhood experiences–and it’s therapeutic.

“The reason I say that is because I was involved in four, for lack of a better term, terrorist attacks,” Lori explains. “One of them I had a building fall on me. Another I got thrown about 20 feet. And the other two… are more like an implosion. I can’t describe what it felt like.”

In addition to the physical trauma they brought, these experiences planted the seeds for an intense, deep-seated fear of fire. 

“It’s anything with fire,” Lori clarifies. “Sparks, particular sounds like a welding instrument. The popping noise from the forge. Holding on to a flint striker–just about anything you can think of brings about a fear in me. It’s all got to be rewired because of what happened.”

It’s taken Lori a long time to become comfortable working with a flame. On her first day, she recalls, seeing a forge from 20 feet away was enough to stop her in her tracks.

“I literally froze,” she recalls. “So I had to work with it gradually. Gradually approach the forge. Be told that it’s fire, you’re going to make something with it.

“The element that was missing for me was the respect for fire. The people here [at CAFAC] know what it can do. For me, everything in here was out to hurt me. I was basically trying to convince my brain that it was okay.”

With time, patience, and self-compassion, she was able to start forging with a piece of extra long metal stock. 

“A lot of it was keeping at it, trying to move forward and get used to the forge,” she explains. “Now make it shorter, that piece of metal. Keep shortening it.”

Starting with a hook–one of the most popular beginner blacksmithing projects here at CAFAC–Lori started to see that fire didn’t just mean danger. It could also represent creation.

Once she started to internalize that respect for fire rather than a fear of it, “that’s when I could really start blacksmithing and healing,” Lori says, “making all these different connections.”

Little by little, Lori expanded her repertoire of projects. Leaves, fire pokers, small sculptures–she keeps them all as a reminder of how far she’s come. Her most memorable project? A seven-foot-tall tripod for campfire cooking, requested by a friend.

“I have to giggle at that one every time I think about it,” Lori laughs, “I'm only five foot three. I'm working with these seven foot poles, bending them and hammering on them. They’re almost a foot and a half taller than me!”

Gloves and earmuffs rest on a workbench, on top of a sheet describing the project Lori’s working on: a candleholder designed to look like a symmetrical plant, with curling vines and broad leaves.

Lori’s journey isn’t always a straight path forwards. Now and again, there are setbacks. 

“It all depends on how I relate to the fire that day,” says Lori. “Part of my brain goes ‘Okay, you’re blacksmithing, you’re lighting a forge, you're hammering on hot metals.’ That's part of my brain.

“The other part of my brain is going, you're in a complete danger situation, get away right now, because you're back in the time of the explosion, you're seeing fire, you're smelling smoke, you're seeing sparks,” she explains. “It's moment-to-moment. And, you know, even those moments are not so horrible anymore. They still are scary, but nothing that I cannot overcome.”

One of the most significant signs of Lori’s healing is a change in her mindset since she’s started blacksmithing. In the beginning, everything in the forge was out to hurt her. Now she recognizes that it can hurt her, but isn’t destined to.

“For someone like me to come from where I was, four and a half years ago, has taken a lot of work,” Lori says. “It's been a rough, hard journey you know. I won't deny that one minute, but when I accomplish things–even the little things–it just makes all the difference in the whole outlook of the journey, from where I’m at to where I'm going.

“And I'm just going to keep going forward as much as I can.”

Lori smiles behind a table holding some of her finished projects, including two inspired by plants.

For local Dakota artist Angela Two Stars, finishing the installation of Okciyapi was a huge step in her career as a public artist. But finishing such a large project left her feeling aimless.

“It was a whole process itself–a journey, a celebration,” says Angela. “And afterwards it was kind of like, ‘And then what am I gonna do?’”

Jeff Hall of Hall-Sweeney Properties offered an answer to that question when he reached out to Angela about designing a artwork for their new apartment building, located in Minneapolis’s Hiawatha neighborhood. The building’s name–Wakpada, meaning “creek” in the Dakota language–and Hall-Sweeney’s approach to the project intrigued her.

“It wasn't just another apartment building going up,” says Angela, “it was more intentional in acknowledging the Dakota people and honoring our language.”

Hall-Sweeney partnered with Dakota Language Instructor Sisoka Duta as a language and culture consultant, in an effort to center Dakota language and culture through the development process.

The plaza at Wakpada apartments, designed by Angela Two Stars.

For this project, Angela was both an artist and a consultant to Hall-Sweeney, offering feedback on RFPs and suggesting artists whose work could become part of the building’s interior. With Angela’s help, Hall-Sweeney worked with Dakota, Ojibwe, and Cree artists to beautify the interior of the apartment building, including photographers Ne-Dah-Ness Rose Greene and Jordan Iwan, painter Brian Dow, and muralist Gordon Coons. Ensuring a variety of Native artists were included was important to Angela.

“It shows the general public that we’re not just this generalized plains Indian, you know,” Angela says. “There’s all these different Native communities that have different identities, cultures, languages…. Tenants can know more about the different tribal peoples that live within their neighborhood.”

Angela herself was responsible for creating a dynamic courtyard reflecting the history of the area. She set about designing this installation by pondering a simple phrase: “Let Life Flow.”

“I was thinking about life and the elements of life,” says Angela, “You know, like oxygen, nitrogen, hydrogen, phosphorous. And then [I thought about] how that ties into the four directions.”

Two of the sidewalk stamps Angela designed. The left is based on carbon and fire, and the right on phosphorous and earth.

The four cardinal directions, Angela says, are associated with the medicine wheel and are an important part of Native American culture. Each direction has other associations with meaning.

“Birth, childhood, adulthood, elder years,” she explains. “There’s the four seasons. There’s fire, wind, water, earth.”

All in all, Angela created designs for seven different groups of four associated with life and teachings of the medicine wheel. Some of those–the elements of life, and the classical elements of fire, wind, water, and earth–she incorporated into sidewalk stamps in front of the building. The rest hung in her mind as she designed the most complex piece of the project: a tall, rectangular weathered steel frame around a grid of 28 enameled steel circles.

The twenty-eight enameled steel circles, hanging from a weathered steel frame. The designs shown reflect groups of four that are important in Dakota culture, many of which are associated with the medicine wheel.

“I wanted to use circles, because in our culture, a circle is a sacred shape. It has no beginning, no end,” she says. “And then I was also thinking about the seven generations teachings, and how we are to lay out our lives and take care of the earth with the seventh generation in mind.”

One side of each panel is designed to emulate the flow of water. The other side has designs, color, or words in the Dakota language in groups of four, depicting different teachings of the medicine wheel.

The final element of Angela’s installation is a series of weathered steel planters, with branching patterns reminiscent of a river or creek–a nod to the building’s name and the location.

“Just down the street is Minnehaha falls. And then down the way is Bdote,” Angela says, “so the planters’ design and the name of the building are reinforcing place and Dakota history at the site.”

Another view of the enameled steel grid, featuring patterns that emulate water flowing.

Angela made great use of CAFAC’s resources to fabricate the project, just as she did when working on Okciyapi and Under the Surface, We Are All the Same. At CAFAC, she was introduced to vitreous (or porcelain) enameling, which she now uses in a variety of artwork. Enameling is a process of fusing glass powder to metal with a kiln, creating a strong, durable finish that has been known to last hundreds of years. 

“It’s been one of my favorite mediums to work with now,” she says. Despite her experience, Angela says she learns something new with each project. This time, the team tried a new drying process for the enamel graphics coat, and small errors in Angela’s enameling technique became apparent. 

“I think I had made my enamel too thick and so it was chipping off. I had to grind it down–I’ve never had to do that before and it was not fun, but it’s like ‘Ooh, here’s something new that I get to learn about enamel!” she laughs.

After painstakingly grinding and re-coating each piece, the final piece of the sculpture was installed at Wakpada in the spring of 2023.

Angela says she hopes her sculpture will allow community members–Native and non-Native–to deepen their understanding and appreciation of Dakota culture. The project serves as a reminder that the Dakota people are still here.

“Native American history has been kept from everybody, including me. I didn’t know that Minnesota was my ancestral homeland until I graduated from high school,” Angela says. “Now, I’m learning all of this information about sacred sites that I didn’t know growing up on a reservation in South Dakota.”

When CAFAC Artistic Director Heather Doyle was contacted by Lake Street Council with an offer to design a piece of public art, she saw it as an opportunity to try something brand new. 

"I had been wanting to really push the limits of our kiln into 3D territory in enamel," Heather says. "I said 'I don't know how to do it yet, but please just give me a shot.'"

The response?

"'Well, if it's a complete failure, you'll make us something else cool?'" Heather laughs, "And I was like yes! Yes I will!"

Left: A paper mockup of one iteration of the sculpture’s design. Right: A small-scale maquette of the sculpture, created with materials that would be used in the full-size version.

After a long, iterative design process, Spirit of Hope started to take shape as a nearly eight-foot-tall piece featuring two interlocking enameled hearts.

"The design was partially inspired by the art form itself and by what had happened on Lake Street," Heather says, referring to the civil unrest sparked by George Floyd's murder. "We had all come through the fire and emerged better than before." The heart features fourteen lobes, intended to represent the fourteen neighborhoods that are touched by Lake Street from the lake to the river.

Because of the complexity of working with enamel on such a large scale, Heather couldn't do it alone. So she enlisted the help of Jessa Boyer, a long-time member of the CAFAC community, enamel artist, and fabricator on public art pieces including Zaníyaŋ Yutȟókča: Brave Change.

Put simply, enameling is a process of fusing powdered glass to metal in a kiln. Each piece of metal needs to be thoroughly cleaned so that a protective ground coat will stick to it. After that, the piece is treated with a second layer, called the cover coat, before the final, colorful graphics coat can be applied. With CAFAC’s large enameling kiln, artists are able to create public art-scale works with durable, colorful, UV-resistant finishes. A kiln of this scale is an uncommon resource nationwide, and allows artists an alternative to the typical palette of metal finishes seen in outdoor sculptures.

Spirit of Hope was a particularly difficult undertaking, because of its novelty. After fabricating the steel lobes of the heart, Heather spent weeks testing the kiln for quality at different locations and working with Jessa to rig each piece of the sculpture.

"The three-dimensional shape had to fit in the kiln just right," Jessa says. "Even after we got it rigged and would fire it, the pieces would flex because of the heat." The tough, glossy finish of enamel can will crack if the metal it’s applied to flexes too much.

One sleepless night, the solution popped into Heather's head fully formed. Using a series of threaded rods and nuts, the two created a rig that would maintain its shape even when red-hot. But their struggles weren't over yet--the drying process for the graphics coat was equally tough to work out, if not harder. 

Two examples of failures in the graphics coat that occurred due to improper drying.

"We had a couple failed pieces because we heated it up too quickly, and the enamel literally crumbled off of it. We had to remake two entire feet, because there was no way of getting them completely clean [to try again].”

The testing process dragged on, and soon another complication arose: supply chain issues. To make sure the piece could be installed on time, Heather reluctantly resorted to a temporary fix.

"We went ahead and sprayed latex paint on it, which was just so painful for all of us," says Heather. "Just knowing that you're going to have to take it off later, it was pretty brutal." As expected, the paint lasted only a few months before it started to fail. Heather and Jessa took that time to experiment with different enamel processes and temperatures to create a beautiful, durable finish.

"What we ended up figuring out is that we have to heat it all up evenly, at a very low temperature," Jessa says. "So the graphics layer has to sit in the kiln for two hours at 150F so it's fully dry before firing." Including this drying step, each piece of the sculpture needed to be fired a minimum of four times.

The two worked over the spring to peel off old paint and re-enamel each piece of the sculpture before installing it for the second--and final--time on June 5th, 2023.

The final sculpture, installed at the corner of Lake Street and Chicago Avenue on June 6, 2023.

"Once we got it in the ground and we saw the finished piece, it was like, oh my gosh, it's done, we did it!" Jessa laughs.

Both agree that this project was pivotal in increasing CAFAC's capacity for large, 3-D enamel work.

"We really broke barriers with this sculpture. We were able to create a three-dimensional sculpture and have it completely successful in every way it could be," Jessa says.

"It's a really important piece to us,” Heather adds. “We couldn’t ask an artist with a commission to fabricate a 3D enamel project at CAFAC without us having the process figured out. Lake Street Council gave us the opportunity to expand our capacity and offer artists a process that is really rare and fantastic.”

Our friends at Juxtaposition Arts (JXTA) were recently commissioned to create an outdoor public art piece for the Guthrie Theatre, and CAFAC was fortunate to be asked to fabricate their beautiful design.

For those who aren’t already familiar with JXTA, their innovative JXTALabs hire teens, primarily from the Northside, to apprentice on projects for paying clients such as the Guthrie and many other local businesses and organizations. Currently, young people ages 14-21 can apprentice in six different JXTA Labs: Graphic Design, Ceramics, Public Art and Murals, Textiles and Screen Printing, Tactical Urbanism (which includes community engagement and urban planning) and Environmental Design (focusing on architecture and public spaces).

The Juxtaposition Arts Environmental Design Lab 2021. Clockwise from bottom: Qadiym Washington, Morgan Laramy, Preston Dorsett, Irene Woods, HeavenLee Henderson

Niko Kubota-Armin is one of the two adult professionals who work as Environmental Design Lab Leads, along with Robbie Seltzer. Niko was hired at JXTA in 2017. While Niko is a licensed architect, his favorite kind of design work always addresses the intersection of place and social justice, and his role at JXTA allows him to work with younger people on a variety of different kinds of projects that do just that. One thing that he loves about his job is the opportunity to introduce teens to the ways that architecture and design can be positive agents of change.

The “Enviro Lab” has worked with the Guthrie before, designing an installation called “Luminous Current” which is open to the public on the Guthrie’s ninth floor. When they were approached by the Guthrie for this outdoor installation, each apprentice in the Enviro Lab developed and pitched their own project ideas.

In generating his ideas, youth apprentice Qadiym Washington considered what would make his work relate to the Guthrie and to their specific location in downtown Minneapolis. He took note of the ribbon design of the Guthrie’s logo and began playing with the idea of benches for outdoor seating that would also look like a ribbon unfurling toward the Mississippi River. Qadiym joined the Environmental Design Lab in 2015 and credits his years in the program as sparking his interest in architecture. He recently completed a 2-year Diploma in Architectural Technology from Minneapolis College and is now enrolled in Dunwoody working toward his Bachelors of Architecture.

Images from left to right: Qadiym’s initial concept sketch for the bench system, Early study of locations considered for the work, Concepts for how a bench might occupy different spaces around the Guthrie, Design image of the final Guthrie bench design by Qadiym Washington

Day 1 of fabrication

Finishing the bench edges

The team at the Guthrie chose Qadiym’s design and from there the Enviro Lab worked on finalizing elements of the design, like the specific site on the Guthrie campus, the materials, the number of benches and their dimensions. They chose steel because of its durability, strength and ability to make the shapes they were looking for. Because they had previously worked with CAFAC on another project, Niko, Qadiym and the other members of the Enviro Lab knew that CAFAC had the equipment and knowledge to execute their plans for the benches. JXTA apprentices had also had the opportunity to tour CAFAC and felt CAFAC’s community-oriented values align well with JXTA’s mission.

As Qadiym, Niko and the rest of Enviro Lab finished the final design for the benches, they worked through different iterations – one more boxy and angular, one more loose and curvy – and settled on their current design as “just right” based on a combination of aesthetic, safety and metal fabrication factors. CAFAC has now completed the fabrication, and the next steps are painting the metal – it will be a vibrant red color that matches the color of the Guthrie’s theater seating – and for the site to have the concrete foundation prepared.

The benches are scheduled to be installed later this summer, so look for them on the Mississippi River side of the Guthrie. As for what’s next for designer and architect-in-training Qadiym? He intends to pursue licensure in architecture when he finishes his BArch, but says his goal overall is to be an artist. He is also a musician with an interest in working with other kinds of media including film. Don’t be surprised to see his name in the future!

Mikha Dominguez aka Mikhamik (they/them) is a Queer non-binary latinx Venezuelan visual artist, photographer and sculptor who has lived in Minneapolis since 2014. Their early career was spent working in the Venezuelan national television industry where Mikha experienced state censorship under the dictatorship of President Hugo Chávez.

Using techniques drawn from self-portrait, collage, make-up, performance art, photography and sculptures, Mikha explores themes of gender, the body, religion and the reinterpretation of reality. Their most recent work combines wood, resin, plastic, metals, and bold colors, where ribbons of metal appear to blow on the wind, and flowers remain still and frozen, glistening. Mikha is a recent recipient of CAFAC's full-tuition Blacksmithing scholarship, made possible by the Society for Inclusive Blacksmiths.

Edited from a conversation with us, they agreed to share the story of how they fell in love with metalwork. [All images courtesy of the artist]

In 2014, I was one of the seven million people who left Venezuela for a better life. Back there, I was an art director and set designer for TV and theater so I was always interested in building things creatively. Working with metals was always in my head, but I didn’t want to go to a trade school for something like welding, because it was something that was 100% straight male dominated. But once I moved to Minneapolis, I came a few times to visit the memorial at George Floyd Square, and then I watched Seven [Bailey] on Metal Shop Masters and I thought, ‘I want to do this, I need to do this, and I have to do this’.

I was really, really depressed in 2020; I had to find myself again. And then I found the blacksmithing classes at CAFAC, and I was awarded the scholarship supported by the Society for Inclusive Blacksmiths. It has been better than the gym for me; it’s an incredible antidepressant. Blacksmithing is amazing because you are creating something, you’re building muscles pounding with your arms, you are sweating, you’re meeting other people, and you can learn from everyone who is around. In a way, then, I was those metals in the fires - blacksmithing has helped me to reshape who I am and where I want to go.

Now, every day when I come to class I come up with more ideas, bigger ideas and I make more stuff. People in class think I’m like a robot, and ask "how did you make all of these things in one night when I’m still working on one?!" When I leave Tuesday night I start thinking of new ideas and then by the next Tuesday afternoon I have it all planned out in my head and I just get to produce.

But metal has made me have more discipline. I have so many ideas that I always have more than one piece going at a time, but when you are blacksmithing you have to follow a certain order in the process and timing is important so I have to focus on each piece at just the right time through every step.

I started with blacksmithing because I wanted to make weird shapes and add them to my craft. All of my life, I just always want to learn new things and add new dimensions to what I know. Resin is a trending topic, pouring paint is trendy, but blacksmithing and welding will always be used to make art until the end of days. Metalwork is such a great skill to have as an artist. Now I want to learn to do welding so I can use that in my work.

My work has always been bold, extremely colorful and very kitsch. With metal now, my work has a movement and fluidity that sometimes surprises people. It’s amazing how something so hard can have such beautiful silhouettes. And if you see my photography, I try to capture that same feeling of flowing movement by using fabrics.

That’s what I like about coating the metal with resin, it makes the work come alive. I really, really like the look of the material raw, I enjoy being able to work the material but leave it raw. In some cases it will get rust, other places it won’t, and adding resin changes the color, too. The results are always unexpected.

I started my first course here in October 2021. In the first class you have to make all of your own tools: pointers, markers, punch holder, tongs and three hooks. I particularly spent three classes making the freaking tongs! It was so hard. And then one night I came in and Dan let me use the power hammer…what you can do with your hands in 45 minutes, the power hammer can do in three seconds…I just thought, wow! Why am I not using this every day!? I fell in love with it. And I used it to finish my tongs right away.

After I had finished the first class series, I was so hungry for more. I thought ‘Now, how can I take this to the next level and see what I can create?’ I was able to sign up to take the class again in spring as a “Reheater” and got the scholarship again, too. Right away I got to work on my own creations, and I always feel supported. Dan [Osadchuk, CAFAC instructor] says, “If you can draw it, you can make it.”

The scholarship to increase access to metal trades is one of the best opportunities I have been given. Without it, I would not have been able to sign up for these classes. Everything is included except the materials, but if you’re like me you can look in the trash or recycling to see what pieces of metal people have gotten rid of from the last week to see how you can create something new with it.

Everyone at CAFAC has been super helpful and welcoming; it really feels like a family, where people ask you about how you are and actually remember what you said to them last time. If I could take more classes in the week here, I would. Tuesday is my craziest day, but it is my favorite day because I get to come here.

See Mikha’s work this summer! They’ll be at the NE Sculpture Gallery, where they are an Intern Artist Fellow, June 10 - 11; at the Twin Cities Pride Festival, June 25 - 26, in Loring Park; and at Squirrel Haus Arts at the end of July.

The vibrant glow of neon light has graced storefronts and streetscapes for generations. Though less used commercially these days, neon still has an aura that draws artists. We sat down to talk to CAFAC instructor and neon artist, Jon Ault, about his decades bending neon light.

One of Jon’s signs. The first Neonistics shop was at Nicollet & 26th, now the home of Roadrunner Records.

Jon started his neon journey as an MCAD student in the 1970s. They had a neon shop and an “old timer” who’d worked in neon since the ‘50s but not a formal program. Jon says all he had to do was ask to give it a try, and that’s how he started his informal education and lifelong career in neon bending. MCAD eventually taught classes in neon and as neon’s popularity surged in the 1980s, the American School of Neon also offered classes in the Minneapolis Warehouse District. 

With an MCAD degree under his belt, Jon held a string of varied jobs, but seeing the high demand for neon by designers and architects, he decided to launch his own neon business. He quit his sales job, spent some savings living on a beach in Mexico for a few months, and then apprenticed with local neon artist Beth Juliar. In 1981 he opened Neonistics and hit the ground running. At its peak, Neonistics had a salesperson and two full-time neon benders on staff. He did a lot of commercial work, from Arby’s signs to the Lotus restaurant in Loring Park. Jon also enjoyed private commission work, including a neon Ray Charles ordered by a guy who wandered into his shop, and two 3-foot tall George Jetson sculptures bought by a wealthy father for his twin daughters.

One of Jon’s more creative private commissions, Ray Charles in neon.

Jon kept busy at Neonistics through the 1990s but the development of easy-to-use and affordable LED light dealt a blow to neon signage in the early 2000s. Minneapolis had been a hotspot for neon sign shops and suppliers, but now most are closed. Still, Jon currently has plenty of work bending neon for Kaufman Signs, a Minneapolis sign company since 1935. He attributes the mid-century modern design aesthetic as a driver of much of that demand. 

Jon has also taught neon on and off over the years and championed the startup of CAFAC’s program in 2017. He’s happy to be sharing his knowledge of the art and science of neon and points out that most neon artists currently working are of his generation. Because of the learning curve and the lack of training programs, there are few younger people doing neon. Jon says he doesn’t see the demand for neon going away entirely however. It’s got a captivating allure, continuing to draw enthusiasts, artists, and designers to its unique glow.

Start your neon learning journey with classes at CAFAC!

You can also take neon classes at Foci Center for Glass Arts in Minneapolis.

Remember Newton’s Apple? Here’s Jon featured on the show in 1988.

“We take responsibility for the finite resources used in fire art forms by promoting creative reuse, repair, and environmental stewardship.” This is one of the foundational values that we at CAFAC work to embody on daily basis. Recently we have been working on some larger-scale projects on our own site to offset our organization’s environmental impact, including the installation of a new solar array on our roof and the design of a stormwater management system, to be installed next year.

We have collaborated with Metro Blooms on a number of community projects over the years including garden trellises and sculptural water conveyances, and we love to design beautiful, eye-catching, and educational elements that draw attention to these normally subtle or even invisible conservation practices. Now we are lucky to be able to work with Metro Blooms on a project in our own backyard (well, side yard, really). Our new cistern and stormwater conveyance will be installed next year, funded in part by a Hennepin County ‘Good Steward’ grant. CAFAC’s Artistic Director Heather Doyle is designing the system and Metro Blooms is helping to evaluate our infrastructural needs so we can hold as much water as possible on site and prevent runoff. When we break through part of our existing pavement this spring, Metro Blooms will bring their infiltrometer (which sounds so cool, right?!) to measure how efficiently water can penetrate the soil on our site.

This past summer, we also worked with local solar installer Greenway Solar for our new 66-panel solar array, covering about two-thirds of our roof area. Our facilities require a fair amount of electricity, and we are excited to be able to draw from a non-finite resource to power tools like our welders, furnaces, and kilns, as well as the space heater inside the greenhouse at George Floyd Square. In the future, we plan to install a battery system to store some of the energy we can generate from our array. We learned a lot from this process about the challenges and opportunities for local businesses using solar power, so if you have questions, we would love to talk more about it.

And we’re not done with our efforts! We continue to work toward turning our parking lot into a Parking Yard, which will include parking spaces for cars as well as rain gardens and areas of permeable pavement. We look forward to welcoming you and others into the space as we make it more beautiful and more sustainable.

photo by Eric Papenfuss

Angela Two Stars is a public artist, enrolled member of the Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate and the Director of All My Relations Arts. Her latest public art piece, Okciyapi, was installed at the Walker Art Center in the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden in October 2021.

“Okciyapi” (which translates to “Help Each Other”) is the advice Angela Two Stars’ late grandfather, Orsen Bernard, offered to Dakota language learners. That message of language revitalization, and of healing, resonates throughout much of Angela’s work.

Okciyapi is an immersive and participatory artwork, inviting visitors to move through it with all of their senses. Angela designed concrete seating areas that form concentric circles around a central water vessel. She says “I thought about the legacy that my grandfather left behind when he passed, like how one drop of water can ripple across an entire pond, one speaker’s knowledge can ripple across generations of speakers.” Visitors to the sculpture will also find plants native to Minnesota growing around the perimeter of the piece, opportunities to listen to audio recordings of Dakota language speakers, and to read Dakota words and phrases on panels affixed to the benches.

Angela worked on the enamel panels for Okciyapi at CAFAC, having learned the enameling process from CAFAC Artistic Director Heather Doyle for another public art piece called Under the Surface; We are all the Same.

While she was finishing Okciyapi, we spoke with her about her most recent work and here is what she shared.

“I wanted people to be able to sit and both see and hear the Dakota language when they enter into this piece. When you go to the artwork label, you can scan a QR code and hear a number of fluent Dakota speakers who I recorded telling stories in Dakota. Dakota is an oral language and so it was important to me that people could hear how it sounds.”

“My grandmother, whose husband was the inspiration behind the work, told a childhood story of growing up in South Dakota, another elder had shared a story about the creation of the language, a few other elders talked about some childhood memories, so it’s a variety. They were sharing a gift with me by giving me a story that could be incorporated into this piece, so it was of their choosing, what they wanted to share in that moment.”

“And there are also the written language panels on the benches, which are the enamel pieces I’m working on here at CAFAC. They incorporate some Dakota values and also encouragement phrases. There is trauma connected to our language because of boarding schools, and it can be difficult trying to acquire the language skills because of all of that history. And so, for me, these are some of the encouragements you might want to hear to keep you going, to keep you motivated.”

“Through the design process for Okciyapi, I was working here at CAFAC on another project where I learned enameling and I just really took to it. So when I was proposing how we could incorporate these written language components on the benches, I recommended that we do enamel because I had learned it, I excelled at it, it would perform everything that we were needing, and it was something that I personally could do so I was really having my hand in the work.”

“It was my first time working with enamel on my project called “Under the Surface; We are all the Same” and I was looking for a material that would be durable all-seasons outdoors, when exposed to the sun it wouldn’t fade and also be anti-grafitti, and so Heather [Doyle] suggested enamel. That was my first time doing it, and I think, for me, why I was able to really embrace it, is that I’m not a painter, so I don’t use the material with the same expectations that a painter would; I’m respecting the material and how it performs rather than expecting it to perform like paint would. Even though it looks like paint, it’s not the same. I think that might be a big reason why I’ve been able to learn it and just excel at it. I’m really loose about my designs and act subconsciously about how I’m creating the forms, it’s an organic process for me.”

“My first public art project was the Bde Maka Ska project. It was right after I’d graduated and I was eased right in to professional work. I was fortunate to be teamed up with Mona Smith and Sandy Spieler, who actually did her decorative rails for that project here at CAFAC. That piece was really special because it was honoring Mahpiya Wicasta, my great- great- great-grandfather. So for me it was an opportunity to learn more about my ancestors, and where they had come from. It was really a kind of coming home to Minnesota, because growing up I lived on the reservation in South Dakota, and when I moved here I was like “this is where we’re from!” It’s been a reconnecting with the land and place, and a real sense of belonging, so that project was really great to be a part of.

“It’s funny because a lot of my work is based on Dakota language and raising awareness for revitalization efforts, but a lot of the other work that I do is just being an artist. So when I work on this [enamel piece] I’m painting, but not really; I don’t act or think the way a painter does. For the City of Minneapolis Public Works piece I used watercolor but I don’t consider myself to be a watercolor artist; it was what the work was needing to be. When I first started incorporating language into my work, I had to overcome my intimidation about printmaking, because that was what the work demanded. So that’s kind of the artist I am; I will learn and work with the kind of materials the art is demanding.”

“I just really enjoy working in public art, there are so many different ways an artist can exist and thrive, but for me what I’ve found about public art that I enjoy so much is that it is something that is there for everybody. You don’t have to have an admission ticket to go inside a museum, or to go into a gallery where you might feel intimidated being in that space, it’s almost like hidden surprises. I took my kids on a public art tour, and was like “Look! That’s public art! And that’s public art!” and to be a part of that is really special.”

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Quentin with the axe head he forged and welded in summer camp this year, which won a first place prize at the MN State Fair.

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Quentin with his hot dog skewer, featured in a CAFAC gallery show in 2018.

We are excited to highlight the work of another CAFAC student and artist, 15-year old Quentin Egginton. This fall he’s taking his 12th class at CAFAC, having started back in 2015 with a summer camp sampler class. He says, “We somehow stumbled across CAFAC’s website, and figured it would be something cool to do. So I took the sampler and learned that I really like metalworking.”

“We did blacksmithing and plasma cutting and some welding, and out of those I liked blacksmithing the most. So for the next few years I continued doing that every summer. And in more recent years, I’ve been branching out a bit more in the things I do at CAFAC, like welding, casting and that sort of stuff, so it’s been fun.”

Blacksmithing is still Quentin’s favorite. He recently took CAFAC’s forge building class so he could work on blacksmithing projects with his own forge at home. In that class, he was by far the youngest student, but he said the teachers and some of the more experienced students made him feel welcome. “The instructors were very helpful when I sometimes couldn’t keep up. I’m hoping soon to finally get the rest of the things I need to get the forge operational.”

And Quentin has been busy. Besides preparing to start the 10th grade at Nova Classical Academy, he entered a project that he made at CAFAC into this year’s Technology Education competition at the Minnesota State Fair, and he won first place. 

“This year, I entered an axe head that I made at one of the welding and metal fabrication classes that I took this summer. It’s not quite finished yet, but the form alone, I guess, was enough to get it first place, which is exciting, as always. Two or three years prior I actually submitted another one of my blacksmithing projects, and that one also got first place. That project was a double egg spoon that I made. It was a very unique design.”

In addition to his passion for metalwork, Quentin likes to create sculptures out of other media, such as cardboard. And he will be delving into new territory when he takes glassmaking at CAFAC this fall. But, even when playing video games, he is still getting inspiration for metalwork projects. He says, “Metal arts are a great medium of art where you can do things that not a lot of sorts of artistic materials will allow you to do. It’s a good way to make things that are useful and artistic.”

At CAFAC, we love to hear that we’ve ignited a spark in someone’s life. Quentin started working in the fire arts young, but is looking forward to growing his skills into the future. “One thing that CAFAC has definitely helped me with is thinking about future possible careers with metalworking. I quite enjoy welding and that’s something that I’ve definitely thought about as a career option later in life.”

Esther and Sankofa

First pass through the enameling kiln

Esther at work

Sankofa emerges from the enameling kiln

Detail of Esther's enameling technique

Detail of Esther's enameling technique

Esther and her install team, Heather Doyle and Jess Bergman Tank

Esther Osayande recently installed her public artwork, Sankofa, as part of the "Illuminating Legacies" project with Pillsbury House + Theatre. She and a cohort of three other local African American artists met together virtually throughout 2020 as they developed their individual pieces, though none of them anticipated all of the challenges the year would bring.

“When we started off in January [2020] the Illuminating Legacies project’s focus was to highlight the positive impact of some of our POC neighbors on South Minneapolis’s history.” Esther continued, “But then in March, COVID just exposed so much injustice. And the same after the George Floyd incident, because that wasn’t new, but what was new was that it was a televised public execution. So, I think all of us artists just had to go deeper.”

Esther’s piece, Sankofa, is made of enamel paint fired on to steel panels. While she has worked in painting and illustration for many years, she first began working with enamel on metal during the John Biggers Seed Project in 2015. The John Biggers Seed project is a tribute to a short-lived but very impactful mural and public art engagement project from 1996 called Celebration of Life. Esther was one of the many artists who worked on that mural. She said, “When the City tore it down only 4 or 5 years later, in 2001, the community was really upset. There was a lot of anger. So then in 2015, Seitu Jones and Ta-coumba Aiken and a couple of national artists led a project to continue the legacy of the Celebration of Life Mural, but in a different media.”

“None of us started off with any idea of how to work with the enamel, and it is very tedious and time consuming. We started working on the panels in 2015 and finished with them in late 2018. It has to be primed and cleaned and then you have to do several firings of your layers of mineral paint. There are 300 panels in the project and I am thinking I probably did about 40 or 45 of the panels, over the course of the four years.”

While some artists didn’t love the new media, Esther found that working with enamel on steel suited her well. “With the enamel, you can’t just do what you want with it, you have to learn how to work within its bounds. But once you do, I just found I really took to it right away.” From that experience, Esther knew she would return to enamel for future projects, such as Sankofa.

When asked about her choice of imagery and the title, Esther said “For the imagery, it is the Sankofa bird and also the flames of the phoenix around it which represents rebirth. Sankofa is an old Akan tribal symbol from Ghana, meaning ‘If you don’t learn from the past you are doomed to repeat it’. And I think every culture really has this philosophy. You have to take the good and the bad from the past and learn from it, bring it forward to the present and make things better for the whole…for everybody.”

She chose to install the piece on the side of Cup Food’s building at George Floyd Square. “I knew I wanted it to be installed [at George Floyd Square] because that’s where the power is right now, and the spirit of what happened that day is always going to be there, so I had to get permission from Cup Foods. And I’m hoping that when people go by, they will see it, and there will be a plaque there explaining the significance of Sankofa and it will cause people to do some self-reflection. The truth is, if we’re going to make a change, it actually starts with us individually before it can happen collectively. So, I hope it brings some reflection and that people will understand what it means. I loved working with that project, and I think it made me look at myself even more. And I think that the community is starting to realize that art is really healing.”

As with the enameled panels from the John Biggers Seed project, Esther worked on Sankofa at CAFAC. “I didn’t want to stop working on it. I knew I only had a limited amount of time to work on it at CAFAC, but I just felt like a messenger, and really believed in the message behind it. Sometimes I would get frustrated if I made a mistake because it is so tedious, but then I was always excited to get back to it again. I’m so appreciative of CAFAC and I’m glad that more and more people are finding out about them. They’re so helpful to us as artists.”

For the rest of 2021, Esther is looking forward to applying for local public art commissions, as well as some exciting developments for the Roho Collective, of which she is a part. “And I am looking forward to doing some of my own work because while I have been focused on some of these commissions in the past few years, I haven’t been able to do as much of my own paintings. But If I do get some more projects with the City, enamel is always the first media that will come to my mind.”

In August, CAFAC launched the Spark Project, a weekly drop-in workshop for neighborhood youth to learn welding, casting, and blacksmithing skills. Supported by CANDO, the Spark Project is aimed at Black and Brown young people, ages 12 and up, who live or spend time near 38th & Chicago. Once trained in basic skills, Spark participants can create whatever inspires them, whether for themselves, to give as gifts, or to sell. Spark meets on Friday afternoons, from Noon to 4:30 p.m., through September 4. Snacks provided and participants receive a $25 Visa gift card each time they attend a full session!

The Spark Project will continue this fall, with a schedule to be determined as students transition back to online learning for school. Plans are underway to work with 612 Mash on the creation of a "Giving Tree" sculpture to place in George Floyd Square. Are you with a youth-serving organization in South Minneapolis, or do you know a young person who might be interested? Get in touch with us at 612-294-0400 or info@cafac.org.

Have you ever wondered how steel is made?

At a recent 2-day workshop at CAFAC, students worked with instructor Wayne E. Potratz to learn about making high-carbon steel through the traditional Japanese smelting process called Tatara. Two of CAFAC’s regular instructors, Jess Bergman Tank and Brad Buxton, assisted in the workshop. We sat down for a conversation where they shared more about this ancient technology.

One student’s portion of the “bloom”, or chunk of steel, created in the Tatara workshop.

So, what is Tatara? And is it the same as smelting?

BB: Smelting is heating up some kind of metal ore until it melts…

JBT: …and then impurities are removed and it is transformed into its more elemental form. Smelting could be different kinds of metals, but the Tatara that we did is a style of smelting, specific to iron, where you also add carbon. Tatara is the name for a Japanese furnace style that dates back to antiquity, and the process by which you make a kind of high-carbon steel.

BB: You heat iron up with charcoal, to about 2850 degrees Fahrenheit, and then the carbon from the charcoal converts the iron into steel. So iron has little to no carbon, and steel has carbon. And the higher the carbon, the harder the steel is. If you’re making a knife, you want higher carbon.

JBT: The instructor, Wayne Potratz, has studied metal work in other places and he’s spent a lot of time in Japan studying the Tatara.

The Tatara furnace is built with firebricks. Charcoal is packed into the bottom.

BB: The primary person he has studied with is Akira Kihara. In addition to knives and swords, they used to make armor with this, and I’m imagining how you would need a great big thin sheet of it, but that would take so much steel to start out with. In that Japanese tradition, the smelter is at a school, and the whole school is involved with kids participating, so it’s a class project that takes weeks and really involved everybody.

JBT: I think it is a really great process, like many of the fire arts, especially cast metal, because it takes a group working together to really do it well without breaking your back. So it is a fun, collaborative thing that you can do together and all share in the results.

The charcoal burns down until you have a very hot layer about 8-12 inches deep.

What did you do in class?

JBT: The first day was just building the stack out of fire bricks, and the second day we ran it. You have to cut the charcoal up to the right sizes and prep all of the components.

BB: We had 100 pounds of powdered MN iron ore from up on the Iron Range.

JBT: We built the Tatara, which is the name for the furnace, out of firebricks, and at the bottom is a nice compacted bed of burnt charcoal that we keep burning until it gets to about one foot deep, and then you start adding the iron ore powder. If it’s running efficiently, then you add more iron powder about every 10 minutes.

BB: It’s tracked about every 10 minutes; we chart the ore weight, charcoal weight.

JBT: And as the ore starts to melt and turn into steel, the byproduct of that is called slag, or “noro” is the Japanese word for it. In the photos we shared, that is when there is the hot, molten noro dribbling out from between the brick. As it pools, if you don’t clear it out, it will start to solidify and get in the way of your bloom, which is your product, the clump of steel. And also it can clog your smelter or tatara. We put in 100 pounds of iron ore and we ended up getting about 38 pounds of steel, so a 38% yield, which is decent for a rainy day like we had. Really, a dry day would be ideal for getting the most yield from your product but we had some huge downpours.

Iron ore powder is added into the Tatara. We added a total of 100lbs of iron during the workshop.

JBT: When the Tatara is done, you have to let it burn down to a certain level and then you have to pull it apart and fish out the bloom, which for us at that point was about a square foot chunk. So we had this basketball sized thing, give or take, and you have to hot cut it. Which means we get out the sledgehammers and a maul and literally hammer it apart into chunks for everyone. It is labor intensive and another time when we really have to work together.

When you have your chunk of steel at the end, the bloom, what happens next?

BB: Today I heated mine and then used the power hammer to pound it and form it into a solid, rectangular core of steel called a billet that can be worked into a blade.

JBT: Another important thing that Wayne does is that he has everyone take some salt and use it to bless every component, to give good intention and care, so every student got a little handful of salt to sprinkle with good intention on a component in hopes of success. Because we could work all of that time, and sometimes the chemistry doesn’t add up and you don’t get good steel. And that’s kind of a bummer.

Would anything be salvageable?

BB: You’d be able to re-smelt it.

JBT: Sometimes you end up needing to process it again, because maybe you have a lower-quality chunk but you can add more carbon content to make it a higher quality.

Can you tell it is a higher quality by looking at it?

JBT: We actually did what’s called a spark test, so you hold a chunk of the bloom up to a bench grinder, and you can tell by the color, length and quality of the sparks, how much carbon is in there.

The “noro” or slag byproduct melts off, leaving behind the steel inside the Tatara furnace.

Had you done this process before?

JBT: This was my fourth time, I think, doing a Tatara, mostly with Wayne.

What about you, Brad?

BB: This was my first time.

Will CAFAC offer the Tatara workshop again?

JBT: Wayne is the one with the knowledge and it’ll be up to him so if anyone reading this is interested, write to us and let us know you’d be interested in taking it at a future date.

This fall, Wayne E. Potratz will be teaching Metal Casting with Recyclable Clay Molds.

Brad Buxton will be teaching Blacksmithing classes, including Open Forge Time, Blacksmithing Basics 1, and Hand-Forged Utilitarian Knife Project.

Jess Bergman Tank will be teaching Sculptural Metal Casting Fundamentals: Ceramic Shell Molds and co-leading the weekly Spark youth program.

Aqurbane at Theo Wirth Parkway

M from BLACK LIVES MATTER street mural on Plymouth Ave N

3rd Precinct Station After George Floyd

Bike Board Blade 2020 Mural

Christopher E. Harrison is a Minneapolis-based visual artist working in sculpture, painting, drawing, collage and graphic design. He is also a curator and educator.

How did you first connect with CAFAC?
I connected with CAFAC because we worked together on the John Biggers Seed Project, but [CAFAC Artistic Director] Heather Doyle and I also served together on the Minneapolis Public Arts Commission in the early 2000s. Then I joined the Board because because I thought it’s good to have someone of color on the Board and I believe in what CAFAC is doing and want to help advance that goal.

And you have recently completed some public art projects in collaboration with CAFAC?
My first project with CAFAC was "Aqurbane". It’s a sculpture from 2018 in North Minneapolis at Theodore Wirth Parkway. My second project with CAFAC is a ceiling sculpture called “Elements” at the new Public Services Center Building downtown Minneapolis. The hope is that it will be installed at the end of October or early November of this year. The building will be opening in November and then it will be accessible to the public. My piece is a 3-tiered sculpture, 27 feet long by 7 feet wide with organic shapes and made of aluminum, bronze, glass and computer pieces. There are sculptures by 8 different artists: one in the main lobby and one on each of the seven floors. CAFAC is my main partner in helping the vision become reality.

Growing up, did you have art mentors or inspirations?
I was a big fan of TV and comics and cartoons. My parents always supported my interests and so I was taking classes at the local arts center where I grew up in Ohio and I was the only kid in the class with a bunch of adults. Also, my teacher, Mr. Stevens, was a good role model for what an artist should be…you need to contribute to the community as you can, be honest in your expression and do your work for a positive goal.

What have you been working on recently?
Over the past couple of months I’ve probably done about 8 murals. I think it is important to be a part of the cause. And to be vocal for change, to be honest and allied with the good side of history. I try to use my work as advocacy for the social issues of this place and time.

What is coming up next for you?
In October, the plan is to do a solo show at Ridgewater College in Wilmar, MN and also to do a mural there. The idea behind the show is the restraint of the Black and Brown body. I’m also working on a show for 2022 at the Duluth Art Institute and I will be curating a couple of shows for February 2021 at the Bloomington Arts Center and the Central Library in downtown Minneapolis.

Keep up with Christopher here:
Instagram
Facebook
www.harrisonartstudio.net
rohocollective.org