N Studio Magazine, Fall 2018

Think Global, Art Local Of course, oil spills aren’t the only threat facing our environment. Plastic pollution is a huge problem too, from the Texas-sized garbage gyres in three of our five oceans to the mountains of microplastics working their way back to us through the food chain.

It’s a problem of global proportions that you can see right in your own neighborhood park, which is where artist Sean Connaughty can often be found. A professor at the University of Minnesota, Connaughty spends his free time collecting garbage by kayak out of Lake Hiawatha and pushing city officials to install better storm drain filters to keep street trash from funneling directly into the lake. When asked Sorted plastic straws from garbage collected in one mornhow vigilante trash collection fits into one’s studio ing at Lake Hiawatha for This Is Ours by Sean Connaughty. practice, he replies with a dry sincerity: “I don’t take pains to separate art from everything else.”

Clearly art, science, and civics go hand-in-hand.

But back at Water Bar, Kloecker brings the discusThis past September, he and local artist and curator sion to something more spiritual. “Different ideas of John Schuerman organized a one-day exhibition on how the world works in this place have always been Hiawatha’s lakeshore called This Is Ours. With the shaped by water. Through our partnerships with help of thirty-seven volunteers, they collected a gi- Healing Place Collaborative and the Dakota Lanant heap of trash from the lake in a matter of hours guage Society, we’ve learned a lot about the Dakota and then began sorting the garbage by type: styro- people, whose homeland we’re on right now, and foam, plastic bags, aluminum cans, bottle caps, cig- their understanding of how the world works is that arillo tips, drinking straws. The organized specificity we are all connected. The origin of the universe for drives home the point, explains Schuerman: “Now the Dakota people is the Bdote, where the Minnesoyou see what a problem straws are. If you don’t sort ta and the Mississippi meet. So water is central not it, you don’t make that connection.” just to a colonized idea of place and industry, where a city might form, but is central, we think, to underOther installations included Presley Martin’s collec- standing the universe.” tion of 1500 styrofoam chunks, standing skewered on sticks in a giant circle, and Mayumi Amada’s float- Water has long been an inspiration for art, and now ing styrofoam water lilies and forest floor fungi, wo- art is inspiring action. At Water Bar, it starts with ven out of shopping bags. The delicate beauty of the mindfulness. “We serve water to build relationships sculptures made them all the more disconcerting. to transform culture,” says Kloecker. Culturally, politically, biologically, ecologically, water is a fundaThe issue of storm drains helps give Connaughty mental part of our story. It powers our industry, our some focus. “It’s easy to get misanthropic” clean- trade, our agriculture, and our bodies; it’s what we ing up an endless stream of neighborhood garbage, drink, bathe in, garden with, and flush down the “but with the help of the volunteers and the shared drain every day. Water flows into every crack and disgust that we have, and the Park Board and the crevice of our society, touching race, class, access, City finally getting involved, I have hope that it’s go- and privilege. We’ve ignored them for years, but the ing to be resolved.” waters are rising.

24 Fall 2018