Exhibition on view: March 7 - April 19, 2025
Opening Reception: Friday, March 7; 6:30 - 9pm
public conversation moderated by teréz iacovino: saturday, march 15; 5 - 6pm
Please join us to celebrate the 2024 McKnight Fellows Grace Sippy and Fidencio Fifield-Perez at their Fellowship exhibition reception on Friday, March 7 beginning at 6:30pm. Can’t make it to the opening!? That’s okay, the exhibition will be on view through Saturday, April 19. Also, On Saturday, March 5 at 5pm, Fidencio and Grace will be joined by Teréz Iacovino for an artist conversation in the gallery (info here). This event is free and open to the public, we have limited seating though so we recommend arriving early.
The work featured in the McKnight Printmaking Fellowship Exhibition is all new! Created within the fellowship year, it serves as a literal charting of the artists’ progress. Their care, effort, and obsessive attention to detail will be easy to ascertain in the large multimedia works, subtle debossments, technically diverse explorations on view.
Read on to learn more about their fellowship experience and process:
Over the last year, Fidencio Fifield-Perez has begun to reintroduce the figure into his work. This began with a beautifully rendered stone lithograph depicting his chosen family. Fidencio said that previous works “relied on protection through abstraction. Important documents were shrouded and obscured by the depictions of indoor plants. But in new works, the bodies are present, while often furtive, cut, and embossed.”
Another stunning and ambitious work included in the exhibition is a mixed-media collage and painting that illustrates his parents' garden. The garden, he says, is “a physical space created with the anticipation of growth and a future in this country.”
He refers to the works as multi-media paradoxes, “They fill anxious hours and expand on the merging of printmaking and painting techniques. The biggest challenge this year has been adapting to the work’s need for increasingly meticulous processes while wrestling with the need to physically slow down and be in the garden. These depictions remind me to take the phone call from my mother, to reach out to the men in our family who are hurting, to tell friends I love them–– to exchange texts of our gardens.”
Although Fidencio relocated from Minnesota this fall, he was able to participate in studio visits remotely with recent guest artist and educator Emma Nishimura. Fidencio will also be present for the exhibition reception on March 7th and the artist conversation on March 15th.
Throughout the Fellowship year, Grace Sippy has been in the studio so much she’s an honorary staff member! This fall, she dove into deep exploration through a series of collagraph prints. She has transformed garments once worn by her two young children into collagraph plates and has explored different ways of making prints from these plates. Some exist as subtle, delicate embossments. Others incorporate color tissue papers as chine collé (collage during printing), while some are more “traditionally” inked, wiped, and printed. Grace has also begun to incorporate hand embroidery into her works.
Grace says, “With all of these variables, I think I have close to 40 prints and proofs. The transformation of the garment to a printing matrix is a paradox, destroying the garment in the process but creating something new, a remnant of what was there. My fellowship work presents a reflection of loss and grief: of hopes of having a child, of a child since grown, and the loss of a child.”
You can read a recent interview with Grace Sippy here.
Highpoint would like to thank the panelists Mike Cloud and Rachel Skokowski for their thoughtful review and consideration of all the applicants during the selection process. We’d also like to thank Miguel A. Aragon, Emma Nishimura, and Xuxa Rodriguez for conducting studio visits with the Fellows. And finally, thank you to Teréz Iacovino for all their work in preparing for and moderating the conversation with the Fellows on March 15.
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.