Fall 2024 MFA Faculty | Minneapolis College of Art and Design

Community & Context

Anniessa Antar (she/her and they/them)

MA, Education – University of Minnesota, Twin Cities
BA, Philosophy & Arabic – McGill University

Anniessa is an educator, cultural organizer and software engineer living in Bde Ota Otunwe, so-called Minneapolis. Her pedagogical approach centers on the power of creative, playful, and collective work to confront and heal systemic inequities. She has taught at l’Ecole nationale supérieure des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, France, and for learners of all ages across the Twin Cities. Currently, she also instructs in the Art and Art History department at Saint Catherine University, St Paul. Beyond working with artists and arts organizations in her prior role at the Minneapolis Institute of Art, Anniessa has been co-coordinating MASS Action (Museum as Site for Social Action) since 2016. This collaborative project strives to align museums with more racially just and liberatory practices. Anniessa received a Master’s of Education from the University of Minnesota and a Bachelor of Arts in Philosophy and Arabic from McGill University.

Graduate Critique Seminar III

Kim Benson (she/her)

MFA – University of Wisconsin, Madison
BFA - College of Visual Arts, St. Paul

Kim Benson (b. 1986, Denver, CO) received her MFA from University of Wisconsin, Madison, and her BFA from the College of Visual Arts in St. Paul, MN. Benson’s work is in numerous public and private collections, including Walker Art Center, Plains Art Museum, and North Dakota Museum of Art. In addition to her most recent solo exhibition at Jessica Silverman Gallery (San Francisco, CA), Benson’s work has been included in group exhibitions at MANA Contemporary (Jersey City, NJ), Museum of Wisconsin Art (West Bend), Plains Art Museum (Fargo, ND), Rochester Art Center (Minnesota) and NADA Chicago Invitational. She has enjoyed residences at La Macina di San Cresci, Adams State University, McCanna House with the North Dakota Museum of Art, Jentel Foundation, and the Soap Factory. Benson lives and works in Minneapolis, where she is an adjunct professor of art at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, in the department of Fine Arts & in the MFA Program.

Criticism & Theory I

William Franklin (he/him)

MLS, Art History - University of Minnesota, Twin Cities

William "Billy" Gustavo Franklin (he/him/his) is an educator and an independent art curator. Franklin has curated more than a dozen exhibits locally and served as panelist reviewing applications for grants and artist-in-residence programs. He earned a Master of Liberal Studies with a minor in Art History from the University of Minnesota and wrote his thesis on the international scope of Surrealism. He is co-curating the exhibit Latina and Latinx Minnesota: Re/claiming Space in Times of Change together with local artist and educator Zamara Cuyún. The exhibit opens this September 7 at The Catherine G. Murphy Gallery at St. Catherine University in St. Paul. Franklin is a part-time Educator at the Walker Art Center. He also teaches History of Design and Critical Thinking and Creativity at Dunwoody College of Technology. He is a contributing art writer for the local newspaper La Voz Latina.

Graduate Critique Seminar I

Rini Yun Matea (she/her)

Rini Yun Matea (aka Keagy) works in moving image and multimedia installation. Her research-based practice investigates race and labor, disease, and sites of historical and psychosocial trauma. She was raised in California and Guatemala. Rini is the recipient of the McKnight Visual Artist Fellowship; 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 at University of the Arts, Drexel University, University of California at Santa Cruz, Minneapolis College of Art & Design and Carleton College.

Screenings and exhibitions of her work include: Center for Contemporary Arts, Glasgow; REDCAT Gallery, Los Angeles; Ghebaly Gallery, Los Angeles; Galerija Nova, Zagreb; Souvenirs from Earth International TV Project, Cologne; Raum für Projektion, Bergen, Oslo & Buenos Aires; Katherine E. Nash Gallery, Minneapolis; PAPA Projects, St. Paul; Flaten Art Museum, Minnesota; Light Industry, Brooklyn; Mind TV/Media Independence, Philadelphia; Stella Elkins Tyler Gallery, Philadelphia; Philadelphia Film Festival, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia; Wits School of the Arts, Johannesburg; Festival Images Contre Nature, Marseille; Berlinale Talent Campus Editing Studio, Berlin.

Graduate Preparation I

Patricia McMeans (she/they)

PhD, practice-led, Contemporary Art Practice – Edinburgh College of Art
MFA, Sculpture and Combined Media – University of Minnesota

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.

Graduate Preparation I, Criticism & Theory I, and MFA Visiting Faculty

Gabriel Saloman Mindel (he/they)

PhD, History of Consciousness - University of California, Santa Cruz
MFA - School for Contemporary Arts, Simon Fraser University

Gabriel Saloman Mindel is an interdisciplinary artist, musician, and scholar. He works primarily in sound, text, visual mediums, and socially collaborative forms. From 2001-2012 his work with Sam Gould and Red76 was supported by Creative Time; the Douglas F. Cooley Memorial Gallery at Reed College; 01 San Jose; SF MoMA; The Bureau for Open Culture; Manifesta 8; The Walker Arts Center; the Department of Education and Cultural Affairs of the US State Department, and many others. He was also a co-founder of the Lower Mainland Painting Company (2011-2013) who received commissions from the Littman & White Galleries at Portland State University, VIVO Media Arts Centre, and Shudder Gallery. His solo works have been exhibited by the Audain Gallery, Unit/Pitt Projects, 221a, and Capilano University. His current artistic research focuses on surfacing sonic archives of political resistance and fugitive imagination.

For over two decades Mindel has also performed and recorded experimental music under his own name and in collaborative ensembles, touring internationally, composing for film and dance, and producing nearly 100 recordings. In addition to his solo work he currently records and performs with transmission artist Anna Friz, and as one half of the allegedly legendary noise duo Yellow Swans.

His recent curatorial work — Landscape and Life (Indexical, 2022-23); On Love and Revelation (Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History, 2024) — focuses on artistic experimentation, landscapes, and the trouble of settler colonialism. Previous curatorial projects have included speculative concrete poetry, feminist responses to sexual violence, the impact of parenthood on contemporary art practices, materials from the Grateful Dead archive, and the Strathcona Art Gallery (2011-15) a residency, library, and exhibition space run out of his Vancouver home in collaboration with artist Aja Bond.

Mindel received an MFA from Simon Fraser University’s School for the Contemporary Arts and a PhD in the History of Consciousness at the University of California Santa Cruz. His scholarly research focuses on the relationship between noise, protest, and power. Writings of his have appeared in both scholarly and para-academic publications, including Foundry, Resonance: Journal of Sound and Culture, RadioDoc Review, Sounding Out!, Folklife Magazine and The Journal of Aesthetics & Protest. His current book project, On Tumult, argues for noise’s potential to radically transform, evade, and abolish structures of political power that constrain people’s everyday cultural, political, and social lives.

Graduate Critique Seminar III

Jacob Yeates (they/he)

MFA – Minneapolis College of Art & Design
BFA - University of Iowa

Jacob Yeates (they/he) is an artist and educator originally from Iowa City, Iowa, who has been living and working in Minneapolis since 2015. Jacob received a Drawing BFA and an English minor from the University of Iowa in 2013, and an MFA in Visual Studies at MCAD in 2017, where they have taught since August 2017, and currently serve as an Assistant Professor of Illustration.

Through modes of visual storytelling in the traditions of drawing and illustrated journalism processes, Jacob’s work looks to provide new access points to more comprehensive understandings of the sociopolitical environments they and their audiences may inhabit, influence, and are subject to. Frequently focusing on the histories and current conditions present within the violent structures of empire, supremacist ideologies and global capital, through the illustrations, drawing series, zines, chapbooks, comics and essays Jacob shares, they ultimately seek to assist in whatever steps can be taken, individually and collectively, towards reflection, accountability, and redress.

Graduate Critique Seminar I

Marcus Young 楊墨 (he/him or any pronouns)

MFA, Theater – University of Minnesota, Twin Cities
BA, Music – Carleton College

Marcus Young 楊墨 is a behavioral and social practice artist making work for the stage, museums, and the public realm, as well as within mindfulness and learning communities. His work invites participation in artistic forms to expand the repertoire of human behavior and the expressivity of how we gather. Born in Hong Kong, Young has a BA in Music from Carleton College and an MFA in Theater from the University of Minnesota. He is a recipient of awards from the McKnight, Bush, and Jerome Foundations, and he received the Forecast Public Art Mid-Career Grant, given to one artist a year.

From 2006 to 2015, he was City Artist in St. Paul, where he helped redefine the role of the artist in government as daily collaborator and systems changemaker. His project Everyday Poems for City Sidewalk transformed the city’s sidewalk maintenance program into a publishing entity for poetry. This idea has been adopted by many towns and cities throughout the U.S. and beyond. From 2020 to 2022 he was Artist in Residence for the Minnesota Department of Transportation, one of two of its kind in the nation placing artists in statewide agencies. There, he created the Land Acknowledgment Confluence Room, re-making a top-floor conference room in the State Transportation Building into a space of broadening awareness around land, body, and place.

In a museum work titled With Nothing to Give, I Give Myself, he lived ten days around-the-clock at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts to foster the understanding that people are the great overlooked works of art. He is the founding artist for Don’t You Feel It Too?—a participatory street dance practice of social healing and inner-life liberation, and Stage Director for Ananya Dance Theatre. He teaches “Art+Life” at the University of Minnesota as well as in the Creative Leadership MA program at Minneapolis College of Art & Design. (Photo by Laichee Yang, courtesy of Ananya Dance Theatre)