Announcing Our 2026 McKnight Artist Fellows
Congratulations to the 2026 McKnight Book Artist Fellows, Christopher Selleck and Brooks Turner! Christopher is an artist, photographer, and book artist whose interdisciplinary practice explores masculinity, identity, and vulnerability through photographs, sculpture, and intimate book-based forms. Brooks is an artist, writer, educator, and parent. Through methodologies that include archival research, collage, drawing, and installation, Brooks engages histories of labor, fascism, and resistance in Minnesota.
Christopher and Brooks will both be awarded $25,000 in unrestricted funds to explore and deepen their art practice thanks to our partnership with the McKnight Foundation, which supports two Minnesotans who demonstrate sustained practices within the book arts annually. The pair will also receive a range of professional benefits through MCBA, including studio visits from a national arts professional; stipends for travel, residencies, and educational support; the opportunity to participate in an artist panel at Open Book; 24/7 studio access for two years; and a group exhibition in MCBA’s Main Gallery.
Esteemed jurors Anthea Black, Imin Yeh, and Benjamin Rinehartshared their positive impressions of the two artists' portfolios following virtual studio visits with five finalists in early May.
“This award is really the gift of time and freedom—which is so rare and deeply meaningful in our era of accelerating labor exploitation. Personally this means time to complete ongoing projects, time to make new experiments, but also time away from labor and time to be with my family.” -Brooks Turner
Imin Yeh reflected, “I was drawn to Brooks' lifelong research, passion, advocacy, and teaching in anti-fascist histories. The work exploits a large range of the history of print and paper and their relationship to stories, news, propaganda”.
“During the fellowship, I plan to develop artists’ books and sculptural container forms that integrate archival research, ephemera, and tactile structures, while continuing to experiment with systems that support both small editions and unique artists’ books. Through this work—alongside travel, collaboration, and dialogue with peers—I aim to further investigate queer histories and personal narratives, creating intimate works that foster reflection, discovery, and sustained engagement.” -Christopher Selleck
Anthea Black felt that, “Christopher's sense of craft, objecthood, and representation of queer masculinity in the artist's book form [was] meticulously considered” and that, “this McKnight award is both a recognition of his work, and my expression of excitement for what's coming next in his practice”.
Explore the work by the 2026 McKnight Book Artist Fellows below by viewing their winning portfolios and full artist statements. Beneath that, you can also find biographical information about our jurors.
Congratulations to our 2026 fellows!
Christopher Selleck
Christopher Selleck is an artist, photographer, and book artist whose interdisciplinary practice explores masculinity, identity, and vulnerability through photographs, sculpture, and intimate book-based forms.
Drawing on the visual language of early 20th-century physique photography, his work reinterprets the idealized male body by presenting diverse, male-presenting weightlifters as complex individuals marked by idiosyncrasy, openness, and humanity. Informed by his experience growing up closeted in the post-AIDS, pre-internet 1990s, Selleck engages questions of queer identity, body image, and the internalized pressures of normative masculinity, often incorporating self-portraiture to examine his own evolving sense of self. His tactile artist books and sculptural objects—such as reimagined weightlifting forms in ceramic and plaster—serve as metaphors for strength, vulnerability, and emotional weight, while their layered, compartmentalized structures reflect the constraints and negotiations of gendered experience. Functioning as both personal inquiry and cultural archive, Selleck’s work preserves and honors queer histories and lived experiences that persist alongside and challenge dominant narratives of masculinity. He recently presented a solo exhibition at the Minneapolis Institute of Art and is a recipient of the MCBA/Jerome Book Arts Residency.
Work
Artist Statement
Photographs, sculptures and book arts that feature male presenting weightlifters comprise my current work. These nod towards the tropes of physique photography, a genre depicting semi-nude, muscular men, popular in 1900-1960s as postcards or magazines. While physique photography presented models as idealized types, I echo these idealized bodies but present them as people complete with idiosyncrasies. I don’t filter according to age, race, or sexuality, rather reflecting how individuals choose to present themselves to me in the studio environment. Rather than a meditation on ‘toxic masculinity,’ these subjects project their gendered identity with a degree of vulnerability and openness. Including a self-portrait, I interpolate myself in this project working through my own issues, attempting to make myself more vulnerable and open to changing my own views.
Growing up closeted in the Post-AIDS epidemic and Pre-Internet 1990’s, I often felt powerless and restrained by my internalization of the constraints enforced by normative masculinity. Within gay culture, the proffered idealized body invited body dysmorphia. While printed materials disseminated alternative queer ideology and desire, these conveyed only idealized body images. Understanding what it means to be man, and a gay man inside of that space, has been crucial to my work. Identity formation drives my artistic explorations. Examining my self-imposed internal restraints and formative social external constraints informs my own self-understanding and becoming.
Brooks Turner
Brooks Turner is an artist, writer, educator, and parent. Through methodologies that include archival research, collage, drawing, and installation, Turner engages histories of labor, fascism, and resistance in Minnesota, with a focus on the 1934 Truck Drivers Strike.
A member of the Remember 1934 Collective, he helps organize support for contemporary labor struggles through commemorating this history. Turner’s solo exhibitions include Voters in Revolt at Hair+Nails, Pedagogy and Propaganda at the Perlman Teaching Museum, and Legends and Myths of Ancient Minnesota at the Weisman Art Museum. He is a 2023 Jerome Hill Artist Fellow, and his work is held in the collections of the Walker Art Center, the Minnesota Historical Society, and the Minnesota Museum of American Art. His essays have appeared in Labor Art Review, Art Papers, MnArtists, and TEMP.
Work
Artist Statement
History is shaped through storytelling. The fragments of the past are pieced together by individuals, institutions, and public interests, the gaps filled by prevailing ideologies. Just as art synthesizes a complex relationship between truth, reality, feeling, and fabrication, so too does History. This aesthetic dimension of History is not fixed in the past but continuously formed through reaffirmation in the present. Through this lens, I see art as a tool for engaging the structure of History, exposing and deconstructing the ideologies enshrined by textbooks, libraries, archives, and museums.
Since 2018, I have pored over thousands of documents in archives, seeking out stories of fascism and anti-fascist resistance. More than any other political ideology, fascism relies on the aestheticization of History, transforming fragments of the past into foundational myths rooted in white supremacy. American fascism is a dire threat to democracy in the present; my turn toward its past is an attempt to better understand the forces shaping our moment. Within these histories I am equally drawn to the ways people banded together to reject hate, offering glimpses of alternative futures that once seemed possible—and may yet be again.
The book—present in the materiality of history, in the collage of current events circulating on newsprint, and in the narrative forms through which societies imagine their futures—serves as a conceptual framework for my practice. My research filters through these aesthetic cues, materializing as artist books, drawings on handmade paper, tapestries woven by machine from digital collages, and experimental essays. By working with forms that record and narrate the past, I seek to transform exhibitions into pedagogical environments that invite viewers to reconsider American history and imagine new possibilities for an antifascist future.
Jurors
Helen Hiebert is a Canadian artist, art publisher, and curator based in San Francisco and Toronto. Her studio work takes the form of artist’s books, limited edition publications, drawing, and textiles, to address feminist and queer histories, materiality, and archives. Black has exhibited in Canada, the US, Korea, France, Germany, The Netherlands, and Norway, and her artist publishing work is represented in over 60 libraries and galleries.
Black’s curatorial projects include The Embodied Press: Queer Abstraction and the Artist’s Book, No Place: Queer Geographies on Screen, PLEASURE CRAFT, and SUPER STRING and she has held roles at Stride Gallery, Illingworth Kerr Gallery, and Art Gallery of Alberta. She is the San Francisco region curator for the National Museum of Women in the Arts’ Women to Watch 2027: A Book Arts Revolution exhibition, and will open an exhibition focusing on the legacy of Bay Area artist Betsy Davids titled The Joyful Body of the Word: Betsy Davids and the Book at San Francisco Center for the Book in October 2026.
Black's writing on contemporary art, craft, and performance appears in numerous publications, and she is co-editor of two books, The New Politics of the Handmade: Craft, Art and Design and HANDBOOK: Supporting Queer and Trans Students in Art and Design Education. Recent essays include “In the making: Queer Publishing and Transpedagogies,” for the Art Journal special issue on Trans Visual Culture, and “Women in Print: feminism’s collective artist’s book spaces,” in Art and Feminisms: Histories, Methods, and Legacies, from Routledge. Black’s third book, The Embodied Press: queer liberation and the artist’s book focuses on artist’s books by queer and transgender artists from the 1950s to today.
Black has been awarded research and creation grants from Canada Council, Ontario Arts Council, Toronto Arts Council, Alberta Foundation for the Arts, and Centre for Craft, and residencies from Banff Centre, Canada; Small Projects, Norway; Anima Casa, Mexico; Van Abbe Museum, Netherlands; and In Cahoots, California.
Black is an Associate Professor of Printmedia, Artists Books, and Graduate Fine Arts at California College of the Arts, where she is also the Yozo Hamaguchi endowed Curator of Printmedia Awards and Programs.
Imin Yeh is a project-based artist working with sculpture, installation, artist publication and multiples, and participatory projects. Her diverse practice is unified by both the social history and the materiality of paper and print.
She has received support from the Heinz Foundation, Women Studio Workshop, and the Fleishhacker Foundation. She is the 2026 Contemporary Art Fellow at the University of Alabama. Recent Exhibitions include, a solo exhibition at the University of Alabama, Catharine Clark Gallery in San Francisco, and Grizzly Grizzly (PA), and group exhibitions at the National Museum of Women in the Arts (DC), MOCA Jacksonville (FL) and Chautauqua Institute (NY). Imin’s work is collected at the Carnegie Museum of Art, Bainbridge Museum of Art, and San Jose Museum of Art. Her artist publications are collected in dozens of academic and institutional libraries, including Stanford Library, Harvard Library, Rochester Institute of Technology and VCU Library.
She holds a BA- Art History and BS Art from the University of Wisconsin Madison, a MFA from California College of the Arts. She is an Associate Professor and Director of Foundational Studies at Carnegie Mellon University.
Benjamin Rinehart is an artist and educator that specializes in multimedia images with a dedicated focus in printmaking, book arts, pop-ups, and movables. He is intrigued how pop-ups and movables keep the viewer physically engaged by providing a tactile and psychological experience when interacting with the various elements. His socially charged work is currently a part of over 83 public collections and has been exhibited both nationally and internationally. He received a Bachelor of Fine Arts at Herron School of Art in Indianapolis, IN and a Master of Fine Arts from Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, LA. Ben is currently a Professor of Printmaking and Artist Books at Lawrence University in Appleton, Wisconsin.
About the McKnight Artist & Culture Bearers Fellowship Program
Founded on the belief that Minnesota thrives when its artists thrive, the McKnight Foundation’s arts program is one of the oldest and largest of its kind in the country. Support for individual working Minnesota artists has been a cornerstone of the program since it began in 1982. The McKnight Artist & Culture Bearers Fellowships Program provides annual, unrestricted cash awards to outstanding mid-career Minnesota artists and culture bearers in 15 different creative disciplines. Program partner organizations administer the fellowships and structure them to respond to the unique challenges of different disciplines. Currently the foundation contributes about $2.8 million per year to its statewide fellowships. For more information, visit mcknight.org/artistfellowships.
About the McKnight Foundation
The McKnight Foundation, a Minnesota-based family foundation, advances a more just, creative, and abundant future where people and planet thrive. Established in 1953, the McKnight Foundation is deeply committed to advancing climate solutions in the Midwest; building an equitable and inclusive Minnesota; and supporting the arts in Minnesota, neuroscience, and international crop research.
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