This Is Ours
A one day, outdoor exhibition at Lake Hiawatha Park

The Opening Reception is on Saturday September 8, from 6:00 to 8:00pm. The exhibition is open from Sunrise to Sunset, one day only, Saturday, September 8in the SE corner of Lake Hiawatha park. All art work will be or happen near the water’s edge between where Minnehaha creek enters and exists Lake Hiawatha (south side of the Lake). Featuring the art of Sean Connaughty, Erica Spitzer Rasmussen, Mayumi Amada, Presley Martin and John Schuerman

Free paper-making workshop from 5:00 to 7:00 pm by Erica Spitzer Rasmussen.

Installation Image by Presley Martin

This Is Ours: Our Park, Our Lake, Our Trash
Visitors to Lake Hiawatha look out over the Lake and enjoy spectacular sunsets, frolicking wildlife, and glistening waves. If however, their eyes wander down to the nearby shoreline they find trash, festering garbage, and dead wildlife in plain view. This is ours: our lake, our park, our pollution. The pollution is ours not just because the lake is public domain, but because if you live in the Lake Hiawatha watershed (from Lake street to Lake Hiawatha and east/west from 28th Ave to Park Ave), some of your trash and toxins have almost certainly been carried down the storm sewers that flow directly (unfiltered) into the lake.
This exhibition is being produced to celebrate the natural beauty of Lake Hiawatha Park and to use contemporary art to raise awareness/stimulate collective action that helps the Lake (call your park board commissioners and ask them to support a pollution mitigation system!). Like many things in life, there is beauty and death. Our idyllic landscape is there but our lake is polluted, no longer safe to swim in.

The artwork and events will all be site-specific responses to both the natural wonders and the trash washing up on the shores. In its broadest form the exhibit is about time and material, the constituents of any landscape. In this specific landscape the artists will install art, perform and guide activities to facilitate relationship with nonhuman nature and reckon with the contaminating shucks of commercial society. You will find contemporary art that looks back from the future to anthropologically predict what our society was like; that juxtaposes the concepts of garden lifetime with plastic lifetime; that decorates the earth with Styrofoam; that engages you in papermaking from park materials; that celebrates the sun the earth and the water; and that that allows you to participate in ritual to affect your appreciation of space and time but leave nature undisturbed.
This project was inspired by the art and activism of Sean Connaughty who for the past 3 years has worked tirelessly to produce art that engages the local community to save Lake Hiawatha.