Threshold Gallery

On view: October 2, 2024 - January 1, 2025

Jasper Duberry uses woodcuts to explore themes that encompass the Black experience – pain, joy, excellence, healing, and resistance to name a few. STILL addresses the overshadowing of Black excellence.  The image depicts a black male with wealth who also has a contradicting white collar around his neck symbolizing enslavement.   

Moving to Rally, this piece highlights the many victorious moments in Black history while also honoring those that have sacrificed and fought for equality.  In that similar light, Chairman acknowledges the work of the late Chairman Fred Hampton, a civil rights activist who led the Illinois chapter of the Black Panther Party up to his assassination in December of 1969.

            In Just Us Duberry further explored the themes of resistance and breaking down barriers by bringing attention to the Voting Rights Act of 1965 – an act that prohibits racial discrimination in voting, giving Black Americans the right to vote.  Scrambled letters on the ballots are a nod to the prior literacy tests that were in place as tactics to keep Blacks from voting.

            With Mortal Man – Part 1 and Mortal Man – Part 2, the transformation of the caterpillar symbolizes the journey and healing of trauma from the environment in which it came. The wings represent the internal strength that help the caterpillar overcome hardships.  Inspired by a metaphor by Kendrick Lamar, it ends with, “although the butterfly and caterpillar are completely different, they are one and the same.”

Jasper Duberry is a printmaker that lives in St. Michael, Minnesota. Jasper practiced and received his BFA from Viterbo University in La Crosse, Wisconsin.

Please join Highpoint in welcoming the 2024 McKnight Printmaking Fellows Grace Sippy and Fidencio Fifield-Perez! Panelists Mike Cloud and Rachel Skokowski were tasked with reviewing a record number of applications (nearly double our previous high). Their initial evaluation was followed by in-person studio visits with the finalists after which they ultimate determined to award the fellowship to Fidencio and Grace.

When asked what excites them about the fellowship and what they think they might accomplish, Grace offered this: “I am excited and grateful to have the resources and mentality to be able to pursue my practice to an extent I have not had before. It feels validatin I am excited and grateful to have the resources and mentality to be able to pursue my practice to an extent I have not had before. It feels vaildatiing.”

“I have had a completely new and separate vein of work spark up in the last year or so, and I still need to decide if I will pursue its creation for the fellowship, or if I will continue to push and evolve what I have been working on for many years.”

And Fidencio said this: “I'm excited about printing in a studio that draws community members and printers from all over the area. Based on my experiences teaching and exhibiting with Highpoint, I knew I wanted to be a part of this community. It's unlike any other print shop I've been in. I'm most excited about printing and taking classes taught by other printmakers in the upcoming year. 

Undoubtedly, this fellowship will enable me to print new work as well as components that will be incorporated into other collaged works. The prize, facilities, and working alongside others during workshops will spur new directions, techniques, and processes. My studio practice is one driven by material curiosity and learning new processes.”

For updates on the progress of the artists and other fellowship happenings, stay tuned to Highpoint’s website and social media.

Highpoint would like to thank the panelists Mike Cloud and Rachel Skkowski for the thoughtful review and consideration of all the applicants.

About the panelists:

Mike Cloud is a painter, writer, and educator.  His work and research in the field of painting is anchored in the contemporary life of reproduction, symbolism and description. Cloud’s paintings “aestheticize their subjects and function on social and political terms that go beyond the stakes of authentic expression.”

Cloud earned his M.F.A. from Yale University School of Art and his B.F.A. from the University of Illinois-Chicago with a concentration in art education. Cloud has lectured extensively on his work and contemporary theoretical art issues at the Jewish Museum, Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University, School of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Yale University, the Cooper Union, Bard College, New York Studio School, Kansas City Art Institute and the University of New Orleans.

Mike is associate Professor of Art, Theory, Practice at Northwestern University in Chicago.

Dr. Rachel Skokowski is the Curator of the Janet Turner Print Museum at California State University, Chico. She has worked with museum print collections in the US and abroad, including at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, the University of Sydney, and the Ashmolean Museum. She received her PhD from the University of Oxford, where she studied as a Rhodes Scholar, and holds a Masters from Oxford and a BA from Princeton University. Her research interests include 19th century French print culture, text and image studies, and women printmakers.

The McKnight Printmaking Fellowships are open Minnesota artist/printmakers who are at a career stage that is “beyond emerging” — defined here as artists who demonstrate a sustained level of accomplishment, commitment, and artistic excellence. Fellows are selected on the basis of the artistic merit of their work, and their dedication, interest, and contributions to Minnesota’s arts ecosystem.