Reading Thucydides

Solo Exhibition of screen prints by Maura K. Williams
Q.arma Q2 Gallery, February 14-21, 2025

Opening reception: February 14, 5–7 pm

Maura Kathleen Williams is owner and co-director of North Star Printmakers Studio, LLC in Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA. A member of the Northeast Minneapolis Arts Association since 2014, her hand-pulled screen prints have been seen in NEMAA’s annual “10×10” fundraisers, at Art-a-Whirl, Fall Open Studios and other events in the Casket Arts Building and Q.Arma Building. Other exhibits include Gamut Gallery (2017), Cream of the Crop Artists Gallery (2017), Twin Cities Print Exchange (2016).

Maura’s art education includes life drawing and 3-D studio at the University of Vermont (1987-1989), life drawing at Pacific Northwest College of Art (1991) and an apprenticeship before founding her own commercial printing business MKW Designs in 1993. Maura has a Ph.D. in Classics (2013) from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and currently teaches high school French, Latin and Greek in Minnesota.

Fracturing the Symbolic

Solo Exhibition by Andrea Bagdon
Q.arma Underground Gallery, November 8-23, 2024

Opening Reception: Friday, November 8th, 6:00-9:00 pm
Closing Reception & Artist Talk: Saturday, November 23rd, 3:00-5:00 pm

Andrea Bagdon’s latest body of work explores the shifting boundaries of femininity and contemporary domesticity through a dialogical interplay of digital time-based media and traditional oil and encaustic painting. Influenced by psychoanalytic theory, the work draws viewers into a space where meaning is in constant flux, revealing the tension between the self and the fragile boundaries that shape experience.

Andrea Bagdon is an artist and educator based in the Twin Cities. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally. She has received multiple awards and grants for her creative research, including a 2024 Minnesota State Arts Board Creative Individual Grant and a 2023 MRAC Flexible Support Grant for Ladylike, an experimental art project she co-launched in 2022. Andrea holds an MFA from Colorado State University and is currently a College Board-certified advanced placement art instructor at a college preparatory high school in the Twin Cities, as well as an MFA mentor at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design.

So Far, So Close

Group Exhibition by Katayoun Amjadi, Shirin Ghoraishi, and Ziba Rajabi
Q.arma Underground Gallery, Sept 6-26, 2024

Opening reception & Artist talk: Friday, Sept 6, 6-9 PM
Artists talk moderated by Aida Shahghasemi: Friday, Sept 6, 7:30-9:00 PM Closing Reception: Saturday, Sept 21, 3-5 PM

The So Far, So Close exhibition explores the complicated experience of displacement from the motherland through themes of space, distance, and memory by Iranian female artists who reside outside of Iran by choice or by force.

Even though these artists have resided so far from their homeland for years, they feel so close to it, and distance has not diminished their love and care for it. Through the Persian language and Iranian culture, a part of their existence is defined by where they are from, regardless of where they take these temporal bodies. Meanwhile, they embrace and value their borderless life journey and cherish experiences that they have had as a result of a deliberate choice to live abroad and the opportunity to explore the unknown. Throughout years of living in the United States–despite how the politics of this country have treated them–they have grown to develop a sense of belonging to this land, creating a community with like-minded, colorful people and trying to make a temporary home out of it until it becomes permanent–if ever.

So Far, So Close on MPR News

Fragments of a Dissipating Landscape

Group Exhibition curated by WICK
Q.arma Q2 Gallery, September 6-26, 2024

Opening reception: Friday, Sept 6, 6-9 PM

WICK's second exhibition opens a delicate and ethereal yet highly evocative group show of intimate observations of landscape. The show encapsulates drawing, painting, printmaking, sculpture, and video work from Midwest darlings to artists based on the East Coast and Canada: Ostensibly light and delicate depictions of landscape are alluded to in the space; however, all are but fragments of landscape itself. As always, choose your own path and linger through a multitude of perceptions of place and space via a gorgeous selection of artists: Meghan Duda (Fargo, ND), Nathanael Flink (MPLS), Emma Kohlmann (MA), Chris McHolm (BC, CAN), Guy Nelson (MPLS), Jennifer Nevitt (MPLS)

Landscape is not the distanced view we’ve been conditioned to notice; it’s immersive yet transient, enveloping yet comforting, powerful yet gentle. Immerse yourself in the fragments of this dissipating landscape.

WICK is a nomadic gallery, operating in established and transient spaces, focusing on critically curated exhibitions.

Heart Land Stories

2019 NCECA Annual Clay Conference
Group Exhibition by Katayoun Amjadi, Kelly Connole, Allison Rose Craver, Mika Negishi Laidlaw, Anna V. Metcalfe, Juliane Shibata, Erika Terwilliger
Q.arma Galleries: Q Underground, Q1 Gallery, and Q2 Gallery

It could be observed that the human enterprise oscillates between utopian and dystopian conditions, at times nearer to one than the other, yet never quite arriving at either coordinate. In this way it would seem that our place, our topia has always an inhered sense of movement and way-finding, a kind of on-going existential negotiation between ourselves and the world, of our place in the world, and unfolds as a narrative mediation. It could then be said that Claytopia is a place sought through the combined activity of hand and mind, a kind of way-finding, or rather way-making, imbued with human narrative. It is the story of the Heart Land, of beauty, simplicity and community, of vulnerability and abiding strength. It is the story of knowing where we are speaks to what we do.

Stories like ceramics are durable and mutable, and stories mark and measure our passage. Storytelling unfolds in a weave of reference points, of navigational coordinates that allow us to find our place, our history and trajectory, and ourselves. Storytelling moves from the individual stories we hold, our body’s knowledge, into the realm of cultural narrative, of reaching beyond self to other, to community and world. The act of looking out through other eyes gives us empathy and insight, that there is somebody like us, that we are not alone. Stories are one of the binding acts that help us locate self within community.