A conversation with Kate Sutton Johnson

Ben Noble is a Minneapolis-based artist and producer. Noble’s serene, innocent melodies drift lithely along sonic textures that range from sleepy-time folk to intrusive, experimental hyper-synth scapes. Through any aural difference, the heart is the same: Noble wants to embody his truth and experiences in his music. bennoblemusic.com

Chris Bartels is a producer, musician, husband, and father from Minneapolis, Minnesota. He has spent hours upon hours of his life crafting textures, melodies, emotions, soundscapes, and stories through music. Bartels' musical obsessions are varied, plentiful, and often. anthemfallsmusic.com

Allison Vincent is a performer, director, writer, and teacher known for devised work, physical theatre, and gender-bending performances. She has been honored to collaborate with companies and theaters across the Twin Cities, including The History Theater, Jon Ferguson Theater, WLDRNSS, Theater Forever, The Four Humors, Mainly Me, The Illusion, The Guthrie, Frank Theatre, Sod House, Strike Theatre, Transatlantic Love Affair, the University of Minnesota, and Walking Shadow. Allison has received two Ivey Awards for her work creating performance in ensembles and three Golden Lanyard Awards from the MN Fringe as a director. 

In addition to performing, Allison is a co-artistic director and founding member of Transatlantic Love Affair, a teaching artist at the Guthrie Theater and Loft Literary Center, and has collaborated as a writer on over twenty produced scripts. In 2022 Allison wrote and performed a solo storytelling show about caretaking for her father succumbing to dementia as a Pillsbury House + Theatre’s Naked Stages Fellow. Recently she’s had her scripts published in The Empty Room, Rejection Letters, Dirty Girls Come Clean, and Roi Fainéant Press. She teaches at the University of Minnesota in the Writing Studies Department’s First Year Writing Program. LinkedIn

Taja Will (they/them) is a non-binary, chronically ill, queer, Latinx (Chilean) adoptee. They are a performer, choreographer, somatic therapist, consultant and Healing Justice practitioner based in Mni Sota Makoce, on the ancestral lands of the Dakota and Anishinaabe. Taja’s approach integrates improvisation, somatic modalities, text and vocals in contemporary performance. Their aesthetic is one of spontaneity, bold choice making, sonic and kinetic partnership and the ability to move in relationship to risk and intimacy. Will’s artistic work explores visceral connections to current socio-cultural realities through a blend of ritual, dense multi-layered worldbuilding and everyday magic.

Taja initiates solo projects and teaching ventures and is a recent recipient of the Jerome Hill Artist Fellowship, in the dance field, awarded in 2021. Their work has been presented throughout the Twin Cities and across the United States. Including local performances at the Walker Art Center Choreographer’s Evening, the Red Eye Theater’s New Works 4 Weeks, the Radical Recess series, Right Here Showcase and the Candy Box Dance Festival. They were the recipient of a 2018-’19 McKnight Choreography Fellowship, administered by the Cowles Center and funded by The McKnight Foundation. Will has recently received support from the National Association of Latinx Arts & Culture, the Minnesota State Arts Board, and Metropolitan Regional Arts Council. Website Link

Rachel Moritz is the author of two poetry books, Sweet Velocity (Lost Roads Press, 2017), and Borrowed Wave (Kore Press, 2015), as well as five chapbooks. She’s also the co-editor of a collection of personal essays, My Caesarean: Twenty-One Mothers on the C-Section Experience and After (The Experiment, 2019), which won the Foreword INDIES Award in Silver.

Rachel’s work has appeared in American Letters and Commentary, Aufgabe, Colorado Review, DIAGRAM, Iowa Review, Tupelo Quarterly, VOLT, Water-Stone Review, and other journals. Her poems and critical writing have been featured in Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day, Verse Daily, and in the anthologies Queer Nature, Rocked by the Waters: Poems of Motherhood, Uncoverage: Asking After Recent Poetry, and Jean Valentine: This World Company. She’s received a 2019 Best American Essay Notable mention as well as awards, grants, and residencies.

Rachel teaches creative writing with the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop, Unrestricted Interest, and CommonBond Communities. She lives in Minneapolis with her partner and son. www.rachelmoritz.com

M. Ahd grew up moving frequently. They have resided in New Jersey, Iowa, Texas, Spain, the United Kingdom, and the Czech Republic. M has worked as a software company recruiter, sports camera operator, reader to the blind, and arts magazine writer, among other jobs. After teaching high school English and coaching Quiz Bowl for a decade, they now write from home full time. M has been the recipient of the 2016 Barnes and Nobel Regional My Favorite Teacher Contest, named the 2018 National High School Quiz Bowl Coach of the Year, and a finalist for the 2019 Loft Literary Center Mentor Series. M lives in Minneapolis with their spouse, two dogs named Zero and Eleven, and a rotating cast of teens and young adults in need of a spare room.

John Noltner is a freelance photographer based in Minneapolis. For 25 years, he has created images at home and around the world for national magazines, Fortune 500 companies and nonprofit organizations.

His images have appeared in National Geographic Traveler, Smithsonian, Forbes, Health, Midwest Living, New York Daily News and more. 

He is the author of two award-winning books from his series A Peace of My Mind. His work exhibits regularly across the country and he leads lectures and workshops around the idea that art and storytelling has the ability to transform hearts and communities. www.noltner.com

Darren Garvey is a multi-instrumentalist, songwriter, and record producer best known for his extensive touring and session work as a drummer and percussionist. He has written and released records under his own name (Under A Common Ceiling, Heart Attack Sleeves, Social Distance), co-written with the likes of Daniel Rodriguez (Elephant Revival) and Jimmie Linville (Daniel and the Lion), and appears on 200+ albums as a session musician and sideman in his 25+ year career. 

Garvey’s latest single No Love Is Wrong is a song of acceptance and possibility inspired by and dedicated to the LGBTQ+ community. Followed up by the release of his cover version of Friday I’m In Love, Garvey is currently putting the finishing touches on his third full-length studio album. A member of Colorado transcendental folk sextet Elephant Revival since 2016, Darren is widely regarded for his creative and collaborative work in the folk and indie music communities as a cross-pollinator.

As a drummer Darren has worked with Daniel Rodriguez, Cameron McGill & What Army, Shook Twins, Courtney Hartman, Steve Poltz, John Craigie, Bonnie Paine, Andreas Kapsalis Trio, Danny Barnes, Lindsay Lou, Chicago Farmer, Daniel and the Lion, Miles Nielsen & The Rusted Hearts, Sandra Bernhard, Danny Burns & The Defectors, Ernie Hendrickson, and Cory Chisel and The Wandering Sons. www.darrengarvey.com

Debra J. Stone’s poetry, essays and fiction can be found in Brooklyn Review, Under the Gum Tree, Random Sample Review, Green Mountains Review (GMR), About Place Journal, Saint Paul Almanac, Wild Age Press, Gyroscope, Tidal Basin, and forthcoming in other literary journals. She’s received residencies at the Vermont Studio Center, Callaloo, The Anderson Center for Interdisciplinary Studies, New York Mills Arts Residency and is a Kimbilio Fellow. Sundress Publishers nominated her essay, Grandma Essie’s Vanilla Poundcake, Best of the Net, judged by Hanif Abdurraquib in 2019 and in 2021 her poem, year-of- staying–in place, was nominated Best of Net and Pushcart nominated. www.debrajeannestone.com

Anna Farro Henderson is a scientist and artist. She served as an environmental policy advisor to Minnesota Senator Al Franken and Governor Mark Dayton. Her publications have appeared in Kenyon Review, River Teeth, The Rumpus, The Common, The Doctor T.J. Eckleburg Review, Seneca Review, Water-Stone Review, Cleaver Magazine, Punctuate, The Normal School, Bellingham Review, and Identity Theory. She is a recipient of a Minnesota State Art Board grant, a Nan Snow Emerging Artist Award, an Excellence in Teaching Fellowship at the Madeline Island School of the Arts, and a Loft Literary Center Mentor Award. She founded The Nature Library art installation that was up in the Landmark Center in Saint Paul for several months in 2019. She teaches creative process at the Loft Literary Center. www.eafarro.com

Sam Kalda is an illustrator and artist based in Saint Paul. His commissioned works include editorial, book, advertising and pattern illustration. In 2017, he received a gold medal in book illustration from the Society of Illustrators in New York. His first book, Of Cats and Men: History's Great Cat-loving Artists, Writers, Thinkers and Statesmen, was published by Ten Speed Press in 2017. He recently illustrated his first picture book, When We Walked on the Moon, written by David Long and published by Wide Eyed Press in 2019, as well as the follow-up, When Darwin Sailed the Sea. www.samkalda.com

Matthew Ricketts is a Canadian composer based in New York City. His music moves from extremes of presence and absence, from clamor to quietude, at once reticent and flamboyant. Matthew’s music has been called “lyrical, contrapuntal, rhythmically complex and highly nuanced” (The American Academy of Arts and Letters) and is noted for his “effervescent and at times prickly sounds,” “hypnotically churning exploration of melody” (ICareIfYouListen) as well as its “tart harmonies and perky sputterings” (The New York Times). He is a 2019 Guggenheim Fellow. www.matthewricketts.com

KRISTI COLE
kristicole.com

Kristi Cole (she/her) is a Queer, Queens-based performer and choreographer with a Bachelors of Arts in Dance and Political Science from The George Washington University where she received the Elizabeth Burtner Theatre & Dance Award for her excellence as a performer, as well as a Luther Rice Research Fellowship. In 2019, she founded Kristi Cole & Guests with the mission of bringing together artists to create powerful and thought- provoking interdisciplinary work. Her stage and film work has been presented in the tri-state area and Atlanta, Georgia as well as in Toronto, Canada.

MAX COKER
Max Coker is a digital audio/visual performer and installation artist based in Brooklyn with a background in radio, sculpture, and software engineering. Education includes media studies, new media art, engineering and computer science from Stony Brook University and Brooklyn College. As an artist’s assistant to collaborative duo LoVid based on Long Island, Max gained skills and knowledge of video technology and paradigms of video art performance. Performances fill spaces with improvised sound mixing and real time video composite projections using an amalgamation of custom software and a collection of found sound and video.

In this podcast, we sit down with artists Kim Gordon and Melanie Johnson to hear about their week at the Everwood Artist Retreat.

KIM GORDON
www.kimgordonfineart.com
“Art has been at the core of my life since early childhood. Making art is as inherent and important to me as speaking, allowing exploration of the exterior/natural world and of my place in it. I work with landscape because it encourages my connection to the world around me.”

MELANIE JOHNSON
melanielynnjohnson.com
“My drawings recall the sensory and emotional connections inherent in my bonds with animals and the natural landscape, and the ways in which animals provide some of my earliest empathetic relationships and routine caregiving experiences.”

David Huckfelt has shared stages with a staggering diversity of artists: from Mavis Staples, Emmylou Harris & Greg Brown, to Bon Iver, Arcade Fire & Gregory Alan Isakov, and more recently an impressive array of Native American musicians including John Trudell, Quiltman, Keith Secola, and Annie Humphrey. In thousands of shows across the United States, Canada & overseas, Huckfelt’s grassroots following has grown from small-town opera houses, Midwestern barn concerts, and progressive benefit events to national tours and festival stages like Hardly Strictly Bluegrass, Edmonton and Calgary Folk Fests, and the legendary First Avenue club in his beloved Minneapolis home.

Jeremy Ylvisaker is a multi-instrumentalist from Minneapolis, Minnesota. He is a member of the indie rock bands Alpha Consumer along with Michael Lewis and JT Bates, and The Cloak Ox with Andrew Broder of Fog, Mark Erickson and Dosh. He plays guitar in Andrew Bird's touring band alongside Martin Dosh on drums and Michael Lewis on bass.

Bart Buch is a puppet artist, poet and arts educator who focuses on interpreting poetry from written text into puppet performances and looks for the poetic qualities of any story to highlight. He calls his work “puppet poems.” In 2016-2018, he conducted a community residency with youth, artists and community members, co-creating several performances about the “helpers” of the Phillips neighborhood. The neighborhood project ended in a main stage production called Make-Believe Neighborhood at In the Heart of the Beast Puppet and Mask Theatre (HOBT), featuring puppets, projections, live music by Martin Dosh with mixed-in covers of Fred Rogers’ songs by Sylvan Esso, Andrew Bird, Bonnie Prince Billy, Karen Peris of The Innocence Mission, Jayanthi Kyle, Leslie Ball, and MPLS imPulse Chorus. Make Believe Neighborhood was received warmly by theatre reviewers and audiences and was rated the 3^rd best Twin Cities theatre performance in 2018.