Gallery Opening Reception: Our Bright Unfolding

Description

Join Lanesboro Arts in celebrating the opening reception for “Our Bright Unfolding”, a group exhibition including paintings, photographs, quilted textiles, and more. The opening reception will take place at the Lanesboro Arts Gallery on Saturday, June 7th, from 6 – 8 pm with the artists, live music, and refreshments. The exhibition will run from June 7th through August 9th, 2025 and features work from artists Sarah Abdel-Jelil, Sophia Alhadeff, Marge Buckley, Kish Daniels, Candida Gonzalez, Avery Hunter, Prima Jalichandra-Sakuntabhai, Avigail Manneberg, Kelly Ristau, and Dana Sikkila.

This Opening Reception is a free public celebration of their work. Visitors will have the opportunity take in the stirring paintings on display and hear from the artists themselves. This joyful, artful evening will also feature live music from a local performer and light refreshments.

This group exhibition embodies interconnectedness in motion, a much-needed light uplifting the power of artistic expression as a tool of practice for societal change. The artwork in ‘Our Bright Unfolding’ reflects personal and collective growth, resilience, radical acts of joy, and the power of unapologetic existence. In a time of profound upheaval when marginalized communities are increasingly under threat, this exhibition serves as a necessary reminder to lean on community, roots of resistance, and visions for change.

Sarah Abdel-Jelil is a Mauritanian-American filmmaker, dancer, musician and multimedia artist based in Minneapolis, Mni Sota Makoce (Minnesota). Her work explores the relational nature of home, movement, and liminal spaces. As a filmmaker and dancer, she is drawn to the tension between the digital and physical, between the ephemerality of dance and the enduring nature of video.

Marge Buckley is an experimental artist who works with oils, acrylic, collage, ink, canvas, paper, and wood panels. Her figurative works involve portraits of queer community. She uses dramatic colors and surreal compositions as tools of optimism which assert that the systems can be transformed in radical ways.

Kish Daniels is a Minnesota-based, first generation Liberian-American filmmaker and photographer. His photographs represent moments of introspection, simple pleasures and reclamation of time and space. The images are a remembrance that everyday activities can bring joy, can become a practice of empowerment and that stillness is a healing and radical act.

Candida Gonzales is a multimedia artist who uses collage, photography, found objects, text, video, and sound to create interactive installations that hold space for complex emotions. Their digital collage work often reimagines the traditional archetypes of the major arcana in tarot, creating space to celebrate the regal sacredness of the QTBIPOC community.

In Avery Hunter’s acrylic paintings, he looks to expose vulnerability and to explore the depths within himself and others through self-portraits that seek the abstract of light, darkness and color. These works mirror the idea that disability and identity isn’t simply a linear journey.

Prima Jalichandra-Sakuntabhai (b. Bangkok, Thailand) is a transdisciplinary artist, curator and art worker, currently based in St Paul, Minnesota. My Father Ruminates on the Origin of Love (2025) is a part of the larger research project, Neung Jed Si that uses their family archive to create a mythic origin story for their chosen exile from Thailand.

Avigail Manneberg processes current personal and political events in their work, including the destruction of households, homelands, and relationships. Their art—like their life—is based on their history and culture, a combination of German, Israeli, and American. They explore the relationship between power dynamics and destruction and search for growth.

Olam Haba Quilt: This community quilt, guided by artists Sophia Alhadeff and Sophia Munic, asks “How is Jewish safety and Palestinian liberation inherently intertwined?” Olam HaBa translates to “the world to come.” Drawing from the history and legacy of community activist quilts, this quilt acts as a communal practice of envisioning the world we wish to live in.

Kelly Ristau is a linocut printmaker exploring the concept of queer intimacy. Through their work, they hope to spark a deeper conversation about how intimate relationships are evolving in a technology-driven world, while encouraging others to celebrate and take pride in the connections they hold dear.

Dana Sikkila’s work displays, through visual repetition, the obsessive relationship between the art-making process and final products. In these screen printed and painted works, Sikkila battles the question of “What’s Next?” This constant, mostly innocent inquiry triggers her manic stages of working, which you see in the repetition and mark-making within her paintings.

This show was curated by the Equitable Gallery Systems Review Program advisory committee, made up of BIPOC, LGBTQIA+, and disabled artists. Lanesboro Arts has launched this program as a commitment to further align practices with equity values and more deeply serve BIPOC, LGBTQIA+ and disabled artists.

Accessible and free to the public, the Exhibition Gallery is located at 103 Parkway Ave N. in Lanesboro, Minnesota, and is open Tuesday – Saturday, 10 am – 5 pm. The organization provides year-round arts programming and serves as a regional catalyst for artistic excellence and educational development, by providing diverse art experiences for people of all ages. For more information, visit www.lanesboroarts.org.

This work is funded in part by Minnesota Humanities Center with money from the Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund that was created with the vote of the people of Minnesota on November 4, 2008. This activity is made possible by the voters of Minnesota through a grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board, thanks to a legislative appropriation from the Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund.