Tell Me About Your Sleep

Tell Me About Your Sleep is an evolving archive that navigates the delicate balance between creative practice and maternal experience, featuring the voices of 22 North American mother artists and scholars since its inception in 2022. 

Building on the Tell Me About Your Sleep publication, this exhibition highlights the artists’ experiences of “mothering”—the act of becoming and being a mother—through social, cultural, and political frameworks. This socially engaged art project aims to elevate and legitimize the perspectives of mother artists within contemporary discourse.

The collective’s first theme, “sleep,” is explored through a range of lenses, reflecting how the sleep of mothers and children becomes deeply intertwined—sometimes resulting in exhaustion or disorientation, other times producing surreal and transformative states. Through installation, video, photography, and text-based archives, the exhibition examines how caregiving, creative work, and labor intersect. It will culminate in a roundtable discussion featuring mother artists and scholars currently working in Korea.

• Exhibition Run: Monday, June 2 to Friday, 8 from 1 PM to 6 PM

• Co-curation: Joohee Yoon (ContempoLocal)

• Hosted by: 범일운수종점Tiger1

• Design: Xinalu Yi

• Sponsored by School of Art & Design, University of Arkansas, College of Arts & Letters, California State University, Sacramento

 Artist Mothers: Gali Greenspan, Kim Karlsrud, Elizabeth Donadio, Beki Basch, Katherine Tzu-Lan Mann, Wanda Raimundi Ortiz, and Erin Mckenna, janet e. danridge, Minkyung,  Rachel Debuque and Rey Jeong

Mothersscholar Writers: Vardayani Ratti, Fernanda Araujo Maciel, Erica Orcutt, Alex Morrison, Tasha Souza, and

Joanna Nunez 

Roundtable: This Work Smells Like Mother

• Friday, June 6 from 4 PM to 5 PM

• 범일운수종점Tiger1, 1F, 22 Geumha-ro 29-gil (near Geumcheon-gu Office Station)

• Panelists: Rachel Debuque & Rey Jeong, Juhee Youn (ContempoLocal, Co-curator),  Minkyung (Artist), Seulbi Lee (Critic) + 2 open seats for on-site audience participation

• Children and families are welcome!

Tree People: Climate Garden Symposium

We are thrilled to be a part of the Climate Gardening, the 4th Los Angeles Urban Soil Symposium, presented by TreePeople and Accelerate Resilience LA!

COMMONStudio will be presenting work and a participatory art installation in collaboration with Ken Mori Projects.

TTU Awarded 2025 NEA Grants for Arts Projects - Design for Mesquite Mile

Mesquite Mile, Lubbock Texas

Happily announcing the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) has approved Texas Tech University (TTU) for the Mesquite Mile, a public art project located in Lubbock, TX. Our goal is to foster ecological resilience and an enduring sense of place through socially engaged placemaking.

Mesquite Mile Team: Erin Charpentier, Kim Karlsrud, Travis Neel, Daniel Phillips, and Leehu Loon (Chair of the Department of Landscape Architecture).

Greenaid featured in the Cronkite News

Flourishing Los Angeles: Activists reclaim urban spaces through guerrilla gardening written by Brandelyn Clark for the Cronkite News.

Women's Tree Climbing Workshop

In February 2024, Commonstudio’s Kim Karlsrud had a unique opportunity to attend the Women’s Tree Climbing workshop, founded by the amazing Melissa LeVangie Ingersoll and Bear LeVangie. A thought-provoking  NYT article “New Englands Trees are sick. They Need More Tree Doctors.” inspired a successful scholarship application. This three day event was conducted in the town of Wimberly, TX on a 126-acre hideaway on the scenic Blanco River. The site offered amazing trees, stargazing and sweeping views of the Blanco River. The workshop was attended by a range of seasoned arborists, urban foresters, and municipal employees. 

Commonstudio Returns to the West

We are happy to report that we have begun a new chapter of our academic life with a recent transition to the University of Oregon! 

Daniel will join the Department of Landscape Architecture as an Assistant Professor on the Tenure Track, while Kim will be a visiting assistant professor in the College of Design. We look forward to new collaborative partnerships and projects alone the west coast and beyond.

Mesquite Mile Project featured in Southwest Contemporary

Recently Commonstudio founders Kim and Daniel, along with local collaborators Travis Neel and Erin Charpentier sat down with Natalie Hegert for an interview in Southwest Contemporary Magazine. Please see the full article HERE.

Mesquite Mile featured in Two Regional Exhibitions

Commonstudio’s collaborative urban afforestation project “The Mesquite Mile” was recently exhibited in two gallery shows. The first was the 25th Anniversary celebration of the Louise Hopkins Underwood Center for the Arts (LHUCA) in downtown Lubbock, TX. This eclectic group show focused on the many local, regional, and international artists that have exhibited at LHUCA since its opening in 1997. The show opened on October 7th, 2022 as a part of Lubbock’s first Friday art walk event. The project was also included in the 64th Annual Permian Basin Juried Art Exhibition held at the Ellen Noël Art Museum in Odessa, TX. Both shows featured a 15 minute documentary film depicting the migration of a mature Mesquite tree (Prosopis glandulosa) as it makes a journey from rural to urban context in west Texas. More context on the work, and the film itself can be viewed HERE.

This piece is one part of a larger, long-term project in collaboration with Travis Neel and Erin Charpentier, and is supported in part by an Interchange Grant in 2021. Interchange is a program of the Mid-America Arts Alliance and funded by the Mellon Foundation. In spring of 2022, MAAA held a three day convening in Kansas City, KS which brought us together with other Interchange grantees to discuss the nature of socially-engaged creative practice. We were honored to be a part of it and met some great new friends.

The Mesquite Mile: Building mutual resilience through urban/rural exchange.

The Mesquite Mile is a multi-phase project based in Lubbock, TX. It aims to relocate regionally historic Mesquites (genus Prosopis) from commercial agricultural land (where they are maligned and removed) to Lubbock’s urban core (where they can be properly managed as assets). The project utilizes art as a tool to create a drought resistant shade canopy and public food forest—converting lawns and surplus space into interconnected rainwater harvesting earthworks that reimagine the narrative of this vital keystone species. See more about the work by visiting the Interchange Artist Grant website and our collaborators Travis Neel and Erin Charpentier at workabout.space/

Partners include:

Heart of Lubbock Neighborhood Association—The organization will assist in community outreach and education—helping to locate families and landlord participants. 

Heart of Lubbock Community Gardeners—The Gardeners will donate time and will help with community outreach, education and food forest stewardship. 

Texas Tech University School of Art will provide in-kind volunteer support through service-learning coursework, engaging students with the construction and maintenance of the food forest. 

Texas Tech School of Landscape Architecture will provide in-kind support to the project by providing service-learning coursework, engaging students with the planning and design of food forest plantings. 

See more on our instagram page for the project