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“Vitamin D: A Pep Rally For Spring,” 2018

“Hope locates itself in the premises that we don’t know what will happen and that in the spaciousness of uncertainty is room to act.”

—Solnit, Rebecca. “Grounds For Hope.”

What actions do you take when you want to build up a community, improve the place where you live, or make meaningful connections with the world around you? What do you do when it’s 20 degrees below Fahrenheit and winter feels like it will never ever end? If you are Alyssa Baguss, you throw a party or more specifically a pep rally to usher in spring and warm things up. Alyssa’s  “Vitamin D: A Pep Rally For Spring,” 2018 was a part of “Illuminate South Loop” a three-day creative placemaking festival created by the City of Bloomington, Artistry, and Northern Lights.mnin in the lead up to the Super Bowl. It featured cheerleaders and a drum corps and was a simple act of defiant joy.

Our class of Nomads met Alyssa Baguss at Silverwood, an art-focused public park in the Three Rivers District of Hennepin County, Minnesota that she helps run. We were there as part of a class with artist Amanda Lovelee called Art and Place Reconsidered. Both women are part of a tight-knit group of socially engaged artists in the Twin Cities. Alyssa and pretty much everyone else we met in Minnesota, mentioned how deeply cold the area can be and I realized seasonal depression in a place with this much winter must be hard to contend with, the immense amount of joy and humor in her work relates directly to the realities of living in this place.

In another of her works titled HB2U:MIA, Alyssa created a voluminous spatial installation out of a multicolored parachute (a giant version of the kind I and many others played with in elementary school). Taking a theme, in this case, Minneapolis Institute of Arts’s 100th birthday and running with it, she accompanied this enveloped spatial experience with birthday cake sculptures ready for decorating. Alyssa’s practice is play-based and impulse-driven. She makes space for creatively focused experiences that are for her enjoyment and the community around her.

Silverwood Park, Hennepin Co. Mn    

Bethel University. Archenteron, Silverwood Park, Hennepin Co. Mn

In her other life at Silverwood, Alyssa Baguss is the Artist and Arts Programming Coordinator. The park is a relatively new suburban open space focused on encouraging an understanding of nature through art and art-making. The trails have poetry stops and contemporary sculpture nestled into wooded areas, bird habitats, and along the water. There is an artist-in-residency program for writers and an onsite gallery. As programming coordinator, she manages a team of full and part-time staff members to create events and classes, works with artists, and the broader community to build meaningful connections around the environment.

Oceanic,2018 Folded photo wallpaper mural

While we were in Minneapolis, I also got a chance to see some of her installation work at Minneapolis College of Art and Design. These drawings were created as part of a set of new works for the Jerome Fellowship. They are large and beautiful digital depictions of place and space folded like origami, so they move into three dimensions. The works depict the outside world, vast expanses of water and earth, but they feel made only for interior space. Oceanic, 2018 was the first piece I saw when I walked into the gallery, and it floats like an ice-burg reflecting in the speckled highly polished floor. These remind me of rainy-day activities, plans for future adventure, or sets for imagined ones.

I’m impressed with the balance she’s able to maintain between her individual practice, where one participates with one’s community but is personal in nature, and Parks or institutional work, which is service driven and collective in nature. Each piece informing and influencing the other, time made for each.

I live on the east coast of the USA in a pretty rural (relative to things here) town in Southern New Jersey called Mays Landing. There’s a lot of creative placemaking that goes on in other parts of the state and especially in nearby Philadelphia, where between organizations like Philadelphia Contemporary, Mural Arts Philadelphia, and the city government there seems to be a new event, park, or festival every day of the week with a high focus on contemporary public art. I grew up in New Jersey but, I’m pretty new to Mays Landing, and I’m still getting to know this place. I’ve met a lot of people who participate in committees like Friends of the Park, and the historical society and they run some pretty wonderful programming but turn out to things is still really low. The town itself has about four big community events a year and based on anecdotes from friends and family the turn out for those is going down too.

One thing I took away from this trip was that everyone we met manages to make things happen and a huge part of that is the community of artists and educators and how well connected they are to each other. There seemed to only be two-degrees of separation between everyone we met with, and that’s if they didn’t already know each other.

Another is that I’ve had vague ideas of how to start creating programs and things here before we went to Minneapolis but, after this trip and spending time at Silverwood, I think there’s a need to look deeper into my interest in the parks here and my understanding of nature. As part of Amanda Lovelee’s class, we listened to an interview with Robin Wall Kimmerer where she said: “…attention is that doorway to gratitude, the doorway to wonder, the doorway to reciprocity.”It’s about the way children look and through their wonder can build relationships with the world. It’s something I try to keep alive in my work when I research and paint but not something I’ve thought to include in my collaborative projects, not something I thought to share.