McKnight Visual Artist Fellowships The Minneapolis College of Art and Design is the administrative home of the McKnight Visual Artist Fellowships for mid-career artists.The 2025 McKnight Visual Artist Fellowship application cycle is now closed. The 2025 fellows and jurors will be announced on Tuesday, May 27. Image About the McKnight Visual Artist Fellowships Since 1982 the McKnight Fellowships for Visual Artists has rewarded talented Minnesota visual artists whose work is of exceptional artistic merit and who are at a career stage beyond emerging. Each year six $25,000 fellowships in the visual arts category are awarded. The focus of the fellowship program is to connect fellows to national and international visiting critics, participate in a McKnight Discussion Series featuring fellows and invited critics, and work with each fellow to pursue additional professional development opportunities. In addition, the fellows have the opportunity to have their artwork professionally documented, access a range of MCAD facilities, and enjoy discounted MCAD Continuing Education classes. All McKnight Artist Fellows are eligible to receive eight hours of consultation support from Springboard for the Arts and participate in a one-two week residency facilitated by the Alliance of Artist Communities. Contact Program Director Keisha Williams or Associate Fellowship Coordinator Melanie Pankau at gallery@mcad.edu or 612.874.3803 for more information. About the McKnight Artist Fellowships Program Founded on the belief that Minnesota thrives when its artists thrive, the McKnight Foundation’s arts program is one of the oldest and largest of its kind in the country. Support for individual working Minnesota artists has been a cornerstone of the program since it began in 1982. The McKnight Artist Fellowships Program provides annual, unrestricted cash awards to outstanding mid-career Minnesota artists in fourteen different creative disciplines. Program partner organizations administer the fellowships and structure them to respond to the unique challenges of different disciplines. Currently the foundation contributes about $2.8 million per year to its statewide fellowships. For more information, visit McKnight Artist Fellowships. About the McKnight Foundation The McKnight Foundation is a Minnesota-based family foundation that advances a more just, creative, and abundant future where people and the planet thrive. Established in 1953, the McKnight Foundation is deeply committed to advancing climate solutions in the Midwest; building an equitable and inclusive Minnesota; and supporting the arts in Minnesota, neuroscience, and international crop research. Meet the 2024 Fellows On behalf of the McKnight Foundation, Minneapolis College of Art and Design (MCAD) announces the six recipients of the 2024 McKnight Fellowships for Visual Artists: Rachel Breen, Dahn Gim, Alison Hiltner, and R. Yun Matea from the Twin Cities; Sophia Chai and Chris Rackley from Rochester. Designed to support mid-career Minnesota artists, the McKnight Fellowships for Visual Artists provide each recipient with a $25,000 stipend, public recognition, professional encouragement from national critics, an opportunity to participate in a speaker series, and a residency facilitated by the Artist Communities Alliance (ACA). The fellowships are funded by a grant from the McKnight Foundation and administered by MCAD. The 2024 McKnight fellows were selected from a group of 141 applicants by a national panel of arts professionals. Jurors were Jessica Hong, Senior Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, Toledo Museum of Art; Jared Ledesma, Curator of Twentieth-Century Art and Contemporary Art, North Carolina Museum of Art; and Cosmo Whyte, Los Angeles-based Visual Artist, Assistant Professor of Painting and Drawing, UCLA. Banners for the Commons #1 Rachel Breen Through acts of unmaking and remaking, Rachel Breen creates projects and spaces for cultivating deeper understandings of labor rights and solidarity. Breen’s work has been shown widely across the country and internationally. Her exhibitions include a solo exhibition at the Minneapolis Institute of Art in 2020. Her exhibition, The Price of Our Clothes, at the Perlman Museum, was included in the Best of 2018: Our Top 20 Exhibitions Across the United States by Hyperallergic (December 20, 2018). She was the recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship to India in 2022 and was awarded artist residencies at MacDowell, Virginia Center for Creative Arts, and Willapa Bay AiR. An inaugural recipient of the Jerome Hill Artist Fellowship, she has also received four Minnesota State Arts Board grants and a fellowship from Walker Art Center’s Open Field. Her social engagement projects have been presented across the state, including two projects commissioned for Northern Spark, a public art festival that addresses climate change in Minnesota. She holds an MFA from University of Minnesota and a BA from The Evergreen State College. A resident of Minneapolis, Breen works as Professor of Art at Anoka Ramsey Community College and maintains an active studio practice. rachelbreenart.com ㅁ (1209-01) Sophia Chai Sophia Chai was born in Busan, South Korea. With her most recent body of studio-made photographs, Chai references the phonetic alphabet of Korean, her mother tongue, and enacts three key ideas of language, optics, and photography. She received her BA in chemistry from University of Chicago and earned her MFA from University of Illinois at Chicago. Chai has presented her work widely at sites including Luhring Augustine Gallery, A.I.R. Gallery, Bronx Museum of the Arts, Knockdown Center, Marinaro Gallery, Tiger Strikes Asteroid, Hyde Park Art Center, among others. Solo exhibitions include 106 Green Gallery in Brooklyn, NY (2016), Rochester Art Center in Minnesota (2020), Hair+Nails Gallery in Minneapolis (2020, 2023, and Light Work in Syracuse, NY (2024). Chai has received financial support from the Jerome Foundation (2019-2020), Minnesota State Arts Board (2020, 2022, and 2023), and Southeastern Minnesota Arts Council (2019). Her first permanent, public outdoor art project, commissioned by the City of Rochester and Destination Medical Center, is scheduled to be completed in summer 2024. sophiachai.com How to Become a Professional Foreigner (installation view) Dahn Gim Dahn Gim is an artist, curator, and educator who was born in Busan, South Korea and raised in Canada. Her work reflects the dual perspectives of being both an insider and outsider, shaped by the nomadic ebb and flow of perpetual immigrant status. She explores the complexities of hybrid identity, grappling with the friction and fragmentation of assimilation and dislocation. Her artistic practice is deeply informed by self-inquiry during times of dispersion, uncertainty, and rootlessness. Gim channels these experiences through various mediums, including video, sculpture, participatory drawings, durational performance, and installation. After completing her MFA in media arts at UCLA, Gim has exhibited her work internationally. Notable venues include Somerset House (UK), ifa-laboratory (Belgium), Post Territory Ujeongguk, Dongdaemun Design Plaza (South Korea), Rabindranath Tagore Centre (India), Hammer Museum, Steve Turner Gallery, AA|LA, Human Resources, Barnsdall Art Gallery, Gas Gallery, Battery Leary-Merriam, Angels Gate Cultural Center, and various campuses of State University of New York (US). She has also participated in international art festivals such as Currents New Media (Santa Fe), UCLA Game Art Festival, SPRING/BREAK Art Show, Other Places Art Fair, Now Instant Image Hall, LA Art Book Fair at The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA (US), Art Souterrain (Montreal), and Now Play This at Somerset House (UK). dahngim.com Life Once Removed Alison Hiltner Alison Hiltner's visual arts practice explores how science-fiction cinema influences our current understanding of scientific research and how that filter of knowledge will affect technological advancement in the future. This examination takes the form of multimedia installation and interactive display. Hiltner has exhibited nationally and internationally in solo and group exhibitions; some of her recent credits include shows at Minneapolis Institute of Art and Telemark Art Center in Norway in 2017, Weisman Art Museum in 2019, 16 Tech in Indianapolis in 2020, and Rochester Art Center in 2022–23. She received numerous Minnesota State Arts Board Artist Initiative Grants, three MRAC/McKnight Foundation Next Step Grants, the 2011/12 MCAD–Jerome Foundation Fellowship, an Artists on the Verge Northern Lights/Jerome Foundation Fellowship in 2013/14, a 2018 McKnight Visual Artist Fellowship, and an artist in residence at University of Minnesota’s School of Medicine through an experimental program at the Weisman Art Museum in 2018–20. Most recently, Hiltner received the 2021 Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant and had a solo exhibition at UCLA Art | Sci Center in Los Angeles in 2023, and The Other Four at Weisman Art Museum in 2024. She has an upcoming solo exhibition at University of Minnesota Morris Edward J. and Helen Jane Morrison Gallery in fall of 2024. alisonhiltner.com El Cenote R. Yun Matea R. Yun Matea is a moving-image artist based in Minneapolis. She is Guatemalan and Korean-American and was raised in rural California and Guatemala. Her recent projects include the large-scale, multi-media installation, El Cenote, which animates archival and found materials to reify Mayan conceptions of cyclical time. Another recent video-based installation, They became ill and their pages were left blank, blends archival, biographical, and ecological records from Mexico’s Oaxaca region, where Matea researched the Florentine Codex and the region’s medicinal herbs while working with Don Hilario Paz, a local organic farmer. She also co-published with Alexa Horochowski two editions of the bilingual Spanish/English experimental broadside Scorched Feet/ Pies Quemados with contributions from local and international writers and visual artists. Matea’s films and videos have been screened and exhibited in festivals, museums, and galleries internationally and has work in the permanent collection at Walker Art Center, Flaten Art Museum, and the British Library. She is the recipient of the McKnight Media Artist Fellowship; Jerome Foundation Film, Video and Digital Production Grant; and University of Minnesota Libraries’ Archives and Special Collections Olson Innovation Artist-in-Residence Award. She has taught art and moving-image courses at University of the Arts in Philadelphia, University of California at Santa Cruz, Minneapolis College of Art and Design, and Carleton College. siblingprojects.com Going Outside to Play While Matt Throws Out Empty Boxes Chris Rackley Chris Rackley is an interdisciplinary artist based in Rochester, MN who integrates multiple mediums to explore memory and narrative. Rackley earned an MFA in painting from George Mason University and a BA in studio art from Davidson College. Rackley’s work has been shown in solo and group exhibitions nationally and internationally, including shows at DeVos Art Museum (Michigan), Boston Cyberarts (Jamaica Plain), Transformer (Washington, DC), and Badischer Kunstverein (Germany). Rackley’s most recent solo exhibition was mounted at Kolman & Reeb Gallery (Minneapolis) in 2023 and was generously supported by a grant from the gallery. Rackley is the recipient of two Minnesota State Arts Board Grants (2018, 2022), a grant from Springboard for the Arts (2020), and an Art(ists) On the Verge Fellowship from Northern Lights (2018–2019). During his childhood in the 1980s and 90s, Rackley’s family was relocated multiple times across South Carolina and Georgia by his father’s employer, a shoe company with retail stores in shopping malls. Rackley spent his days playing in the stores’ stockrooms that his father managed, or wandering the malls where they were located. Rackley is currently making tiny versions of the vast mall spaces he inhabited as a child. Relying on family recollection, social media posts by dead-mall enthusiasts, and satellite images, he painstakingly constructs miniature vignettes. These little worlds evoke nostalgia for a past cultural moment and are imbued with details specific to Rackley’s experience, addressing themes of displacement, isolation, and the fragmented nature of memory. chrisrackley.com Additional McKnight Visual Artist Fellowship InformationFellowships Community Values Statement2025 McKnight Application GuidelinesPast Recipients Gallery Visitor PolicyThe MCAD Gallery is open to the public the following hours:Monday–Friday: 9:00 a.m–7:00 p.m.Saturday: 10:00 a.m.–4:00 p.m.All visitors must enter through the north (main) entrance, sign in at the welcome desk in the main lobby, and stay in designated gallery areas.Accessibility InformationThe gallery has limited padded and non-padded seating. Some artworks contain light, projections, sound, screens, and scent. The Main Gallery is on the first floor of the building, at the main entrance off Stevens Avenue and 25th Street. The Concourse Gallery is on the second floor and can be accessed via elevator or stairs. The building is equipped with wheelchair-accessible and gender-neutral bathrooms and accessible entrances from the main and parking lot entrances. MCAD is committed to providing students, faculty, staff, and visitors with disabilities equitable access to MCAD-sponsored programs and events. For more information or any disability accommodations, please contact MCAD Gallery staff at 612.874.3667 or gallery@mcad.edu.Transportation and ParkingThere is disability-accessible parking at two locations: the main entrance off Stevens Avenue and 25th Street and the MCAD parking lot off 26th Street and Second Avenue South. General event parking can be found in the MCAD parking lot off 26th Street and Second Avenue South, street parking along Stevens Avenue, or the Mia parking ramp.For more information on how to find us and where to park.