I’m Just An Artist!
Interact Center provides a venue for disabled artists

by Ed Felien in
collaboration with Clea Felien

“They all come in with labels. ‘I’m the guy with X, Y, Z.’ So we give them the label of artist. Some of the staff have disabilities. But they’re all artists, even the financial people,” said Jeanne Calvit, the founder and ex-director of the Inside Out Gallery at the Interact Center for the Visual and Performing Arts.

Interact has an adult day care license. People eligible for their programs have either traumatic brain injury; mental retardation and related conditions; physical disability or mental illness.

But this is no ordinary adult day care for the disabled. These people are serious. They are not patients or clients. They are artists!

The staff realizes that the stakes are just too high to not treat the art seriously. They have seen autistic people come out of their shell. They have watched in awe as an emotion that has been suppressed for twenty years come tumbling out with fierce expression.

The performing half of Interact has workshops where actors write and rehearse scripts for two original fully staged performances a year. Their “Take No Prisoners Cabaret” was about the number of developmentally disabled on death row in the U.S.

The visual arts studio is staffed by formally trained artists who offer instruction in painting, drawing, sculpture, clay and textile work. The studio artists have group critiques and weekly seminars in life drawing, mosaics, watercolor technique or art history. They also go out to museums, galleries and artist studios.
One of their more dramatic and unique group exhibitions was an installation at Powderhorn Park during the May Day Festival. They painted umbrellas with all sorts of interesting designs, stuck them in flower pots and called it “Rain or Shine Blossoms.”

Their Inside Out Gallery at the Interact Center has continual shows. The current show, “Feature Four: Bill Borden, Paul Jagolino, Sue Stuewer and Tim Traver,” runs through June 28. The gallery notes to this exhibit describe Sue as a “visionary, a philosopher and a poet, delving deeply into the journey of Self discovery. Her paintings are often figurative and semi-autobiographical. Her idiosyncratic brushmarks and glowing palette reveal a radiant energy in her work. Stuewer’s focus is a directed passion that embraces positive action while acknowledging travail. Much of Steuwer’s work evokes spiritual archetypes with an edge of zealotry and the language of devotion.”

Bill Borden’s work is described as “simplified still lifes and architectural portraits” that “achieve visual impact comparable to the most effective graphic design. His signature text style, used to patently label his images, has the consistency and flair of the best modern fonts. Each image is a direct reflection of Borden’s world, an inventory of significant objects, commercial products and personal landmarks.
“Paul Jagolino deftly combines planes of vibrant color with dynamic composition, isolating elements of popular culture and information-age iconography in fields of layered texture. Jagolino’s drawings are as much about the background as the subject, addressing every inch of the drawing surface. Heavily influenced by print media and the visual language of film and photo, Jagolino’s style departs from Bill Borden’s more conservative approach through the artist’s avid study of pop imagery.

“Tim Traver is a self-published author and a painter of lyrical beauty. His works reach out to the larger world around him with the same unreserved appreciation wielded by Stuewer as she peers within. Scenes from the mountains of the Southwest combined with figurative works and other landscapes celebrate the diversity and complexity of organic forms. Traver’s facility with color and symbolic marks render his landscapes comparable with those of Australian Aboriginal painters, or the scroll-type images once commonly used by the Chinese in place of traditional maps.”

Jennifer Schultz is the new Gallery Director at Inside Out. She returns to Minneapolis after four years as the Exhibition Director of the very large Clayton Street Gallery in Athens, Georgia.

We know that under great pressure and enough time, coal turns into diamonds. Is it possible that through great struggle and enough support and time, the spirit could free itself and shows us the face of hope and joy?

From their mission statement: “At Interact, the focus is on creative strength rather than disability.”

Interact Center for the Visual and Performing Arts is located at 212 Third Avenue North, Suite 140, Minneapolis. Call 612-339-5145 for more information.