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Chris Allen will open the community art show “Deep Winter Dreaming” on January 6th at the Johnson Heritage Post. She will also offer a bracelet beading workshop on Saturday, January 7th at 1 p.m. All are welcome.
Chris Allen writes: “An artist and gardener all my life, I love to play in the dirt, growing food and flowers. Moving to Rochester, Minnesota in 2015, I learned about the garden plots of The Village Agricultural Cooperative. The Village is a collaborative of people from all over the world who are growing food together in individual 20’x30’ community gardens, supporting over 200 farmers and their families from over 22 countries with land access and food sovereignty. Many languages are spoken.”
“As an artist, I have focused on beadwork for over 30 years, stitching beads together to make a flexible matrix, mainly around small stones and big rocks. For me, rocks are a metaphor for our soul and the skin of beadwork is a metaphor for our lives.”
“I offered to teach at The Village, receiving a Southeastern Minnesota Arts Council grant, to offer free beading workshops. We learned about each other through our hands and shared laughter and continued open beading every week at The Village in the summer of 2022, with plans to keep it going as a free art experience. In June of 2022, I was hired part time to begin a new Farmers Market at the History Center of Olmsted County, the grounds of one of our largest garden sites.”
Born in New York, Chris Allen earned a BFA at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, in Printmaking and a Master of Fine Art in Fiber from Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan. Allen has exhibited for the past 30 years nationally, winning a Minneapolis College of Art and Design/McKnight Artists Fellowship in 1999/2000.
She lives in Rochester, Minnesota with her two adult daughters.
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