Wednesday, June 24, 6:30—8:30 pm CT; Open Book Performance Hall
We invite you to join us for a public artist panel featuring our two 2025 McKnight Book Artist Fellows, Ellen Mueller and Sarah Evenson, and the visiting arts professionals working with them throughout their fellowship year!
Sarah Evenson (they/them/theirs) is a gay, transgender artist-at-large living and working with various forms of printed ephemera in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Their bright and colorful zines, artist books, prints and animations center play as resistance, celebrate queer joy, and testify to the strength and creative potential of the transgender body.
Their artworks are included in the collections of more than 50 institutions internationally including the libraries of the Walker Art Center, the MoMa, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Tate Britain as well as numerous publicly accessible high school and communities libraries. In addition to a desire to connect with the global trans community, Sarah makes art because they believe it is the right thing to do and it makes them happy to do so.
Sarah was a 2019-2020 Jerome Emerging Artist Fellow at the Minnesota Center for Book Arts, a 2021 Jerome Emerging Printmakers Resident at the Highpoint Center for Printmaking, and a member of the 2023 cohort in the Jerome Emerging Artist Residency Program at Anderson Center in Red Wing, Minnesota. They hold a degree in printmaking from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. They enjoy riding their bike, reading fiction of questionable quality, and cloud-watching.
Sarah will be in conversation with Edie Fake who is a painter and visual artist whose work examines issues of trans identity and “queer space” through the lens of architecture and ornamentation. Fake’s work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, including solo shows at the Everson Museum of Art in Syracuse, NY and Marlborough Contemporary, NYC, and in group shows at the Museum of Arts and Design, NYC and the Institute for Contemporary Art at VCU in Richmond, VA. His collection of comics, Gaylord Phoenix, won the 2011 Ignatz Award for Outstanding Graphic Novel and he was among the first recipients of Printed Matter’s Awards for Artists. Fake’s latest projects include mural installations for The Drawing Center, NYC and BAMPFA in Berkeley, CA. He is currently represented by Western Exhibitions in Chicago.
Ellen Mueller (she/her) has exhibited nationally and internationally as an interdisciplinary artist examining how capitalist systems affect everyday life, with particular focus on issues related to the environment. She received her MFA from University of South Florida and is currently the Director of Programs at Arts Midwest. Selected artist residencies include Ox-Bow, Ucross Foundation, Nes Artist Residency (Iceland), and Künstlerhaus Lukas (Germany). Mueller lives and works in Minneapolis, MN and has authored multiple zines, artist books, and textbooks.
Ellen will be in conversation with Guen Montgomery who is an artist and performer whose work investigates identity through studies of gender, regional narrative, and family mythology. Her recent work looks at the queer life of things, the longing to acquire, and how objects perform identity. Materially, Montgomery’s work is located in the intersections between printmaking, performance, and sculpture. Montgomery has exhibited nationally and internationally, and has work in multiple public collections including the Centre for Art and Design in Churchill Australia, and Mushashino Art University, Tokyo, Japan, with recent exhibitions in Nashville and St. Louis. Guen currently teaches in the Studio Arts program at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, where she lives surrounded by everyday treasures with her wife, dog, and two cats.