Highpoint
2009–2013
My heart was at Highpoint Center for Printmaking.
I found them the way I found most good things in Minneapolis — by showing up. They were a small nonprofit, a printmaking center with studio space and a gallery and the kind of scrappy, beautiful energy that only exists when people care more about the work than the money. I offered to build their website in exchange for studio time, and they said yes.
It was the best deal I ever made.
Being a small nonprofit, they couldn’t pay their staff well, so they’d negotiate perks with partner organizations — free tickets to the Walker, Twins games, that kind of thing. I got to tag along. I saw William Kentridge at the Walker Art Center, sitting among their biggest donors. I was there because I’d built a website. The absurdity of it wasn’t lost on me, but I wasn’t going to say no.
The real gift, though, was the people. The staff and fellow studio mates became my second family in Minneapolis. We’d travel to SGCI or MAPC together every year — the print conferences where hundreds of printmakers converge on a city and set up portfolios and trade prints and argue about ink viscosity over beers. At MAPC in the Twin Cities, Open Portfolio night was my favorite — upstairs at MCBA, tight and crazy, everyone showing their work. I got a decent reception even though my prints were old. There were fun parties at alternative spaces around the city afterward. We hung out in every context — the conferences, sure, but also bonfires and dinners and gallery openings and late nights at someone’s apartment.
They all loved art, so you’d see them everywhere. And that’s what I mean about the Venn diagram.
In Minneapolis, the communities overlapped in ways I’d never experienced in Green Bay. You’d meet someone at Highpoint, and then you’d see them at a cross-country skiing event, and then they’d show up at a design talk, and then they’d be at a punk show at the Triple Rock. Nature folks, skiers, design folks, punk rockers, cyclists — the circles bled into each other. It wasn’t that everyone did everything. It was that the kind of person who cared deeply about one thing tended to care deeply about many things, and Minneapolis was small enough that those people kept finding each other.
I made friends at the University through exhibitions and lectures and parties. Those friendships would cross over into the nature crowd, the cycling crowd, the printmaking crowd. It was a web of people who were all, in their own way, trying to make something — a print, a ride, a meal, a life — with intention.
I didn’t make as much art as I would have liked during those years. That’s the honest truth. I was next to it the whole time — immersed in it, surrounded by it, talking about it, supporting it — but not producing much of my own. The job ate my days. The catching up ate my nights. The art stayed in the periphery, close enough to ache, too far to hold.
But I was there. In the room. In the community. And that turned out to matter more than I knew.