Exhibition: “Vivid Survival”

The Anderson Center presents Vivid Survival, a collection of works curated by Lindsey Cherek Waller that showcase artists using color for impact and as a means of survival. The exhibition opens with a free artist reception on Friday, January 28, 2022 from 6 to 8 p.m., featuring hors d’oeuvres and live music by Mike Kota, and runs through March 26, 2022.

From paintings and contemporary sculpture, to traditional beadwork and more, Vivid Survival brings to light our collective ability to persevere. “Despite living through a pandemic, and all of our individual, intricate histories of trauma — we are still here,” Lindsey shares. “We are still bold and vibrant beings.”

Featured artists include Andrea Fischer, Hilary Greenstein, Lora Hlavsa, Tiffany Lange, Meg Lionel Murphy, Kelly O’Brien, Madison Elyse Rubenstein, and Meg Elaine Veitenheimer (Nelie G. Mae jewelry).

“Vivid Survival is a space to experience the healing properties of color and visual storytelling, to witness our power to live through tenebrous times, and the joy that can be found when we do,” explains Lindsey. “This art is based in personal experience, healing from violence, in heritage and identity, and especially in a bold reclamation of survivorship. This is not art that stays static on the wall, but instead it reaches out to us through color, through concept, always high impact. To experience the work of these artists is to experience the vibrance of human perseverance.”

Handicapped accessible and free to the public, the Main Gallery at the Anderson Center is open Wednesday through Saturday from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m.

This exhibit is made possible by the voters of Minnesota through a Minnesota State Arts Board Operating Support grant, thanks to a legislative appropriation from the arts and cultural heritage fund.

About the Curator

Lindsey Cherek Waller (they/she) is a painter based in Red Wing, MN, that maintains a year-round studio space at the Anderson Center. Lindsey paints to understand and create dialog around the human experience of queer, non-binary, and otherwise marginalized individuals.

About the Artists

Andrea Fischer (she/her) identifies as a fiber artist living in Denver, CO. With the strict use of recycled yarn, she makes one of a kind soft sculptures. Andrea’s color experiments mingle with her own self discovered technique of rug making to create whimsical functional objects.

Hilary Greenstein (she/they) is a fine artist and educator based in Minneapolis, MN. She draws femme figures from strangers’ found personal photos and mines our collective, intimate histories for protagonists to paint into magical realist spaces outside time.

Lora Hlavsa (she/her) is an artist, illustrator + designer based in Minneapolis, MN. Raised by a Filipina mother and an American father in Minnesota and California, identity has been a core focus of Lora’s work, and her bold and colorful pieces aim to convey a lush, multidimensional world that reflects the many layers of the daily human experience.

Tiffany Lange (she/her) is a visual artist based in Saint Paul, MN. Her newest series, “Hyperconnection,” examines overstimulation and anxiousness through abstraction with paintings and sculptural works that ask audiences to ponder the glow and flicker of screens differently.

Meg Lionel Murphy (she/her) is an artist based in rural Wisconsin. Directly influenced by her experiences with PTSD from severe domestic violence, she paints detailed, vivid works on paper and panels depicting heartbroken bodies that magically grow larger, stronger, and scarier than the world around them. Her work depicts a reverence for fragility and humanity while examining questions about gender, sexuality, class, sacrifice, pain, whiteness, sickness, loneliness, and most of all—violence and its haunting memories.

Kelly O’Brien (she/her) is an Associate Professor of Contemporary Sculptural Practices at the University of Wisconsin-Stout, WI. Her most recent exhibition, Unprecedented, was a ferocious baring of fangs in painting and hybrid sculpture. Those powerful gestures, generated from the anxiety of America 2020, carry no words—do the mouths spew vitriol, or warnings to back off?

Madison Rubenstein she/her/zey/zem) is a visual artist living in Minneapolis, MN. Madison’s work explores themes of trauma, mental illness, and chronic pain and how they shape our relationship to our bodies. Her paintings depict figurative images and abstractions of the human form, depicting experiences of control and surrender, contraction and expansion, tension and lightness.

Meg Elaine Veitenheimer (Nelie G. Mae jewelry) (she/her) is a beaded jewelry artist based in Minneapolis, creating works of wearable art- mostly earrings. Meg’s connection with her Anishinaabe lineage is the heart of her beadwork, and she is an enrolled tribal member with Red Lake Nation. For Meg, creating jewelry is a practice of ancestral healing and cultural reclamation.

Featured image: “The Last Time 6,” by Hilary Greenstein,  40” x 30”