Patty McMeans

Patricia is an artist, researcher and co-producer of projects taking the form of artists’ residencies, social sculptures, sound and participatory printed matter. Her work investigates how radical hospitality and slow immersion within the artist-led social studio leads to residential learning and new practice. Since 2012, she’s run iterative experimental artists’ residency events in her two homebases, Minneapolis and Edinburgh (UK), for international sets of emerging artists called Ten Chances Art Res.

She has conducted these itinerant experiments trans-nationally, most recently in Edinburgh and other regions of Scotland, Galway, Helsinki, New York City, Boston, as well as Minneapolis and North Branch, MN. Her co-producing endeavours include five culminating events from 10XArtRes iterations (2012-2016), and is affiliated with the Number Shop, the Fruitmarket Gallery, Bargain Spot, Embassy Annuale, Cove Park Residency, Hospitalfield Arts, formerly Soap Factory (Mpls), Art Shanty Projects and Night Owl Farm. Recently, she’s joined a cohort of artist-builders in a self-designed dwelling project called Moveable Feast Bothy, occuying sites in and around Edinburgh.

She has taught college art courses on a ship for Semester at Sea, leading field practicuums in Cadiz and Istanbul, and also on land at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design from 2007 to present. She holds an MFA in Sculpture and Combined Media from the University of Minnesota, and has recently earned her practice-led PhD in Contemporary Art Practice at Edinburgh College of Art, studying Lived Residencies, Experiential Learning and Thick Geographies: How Artists Produce Knowledge(s) in the Social Studio. Primarily identifying as an artist, her strategies continue to place the artist first and give them room to move.