Thrilled to share that Mesquite Migration is part of Forest Hope Through Innovation, an interdisciplinary art-forest-science experience exploring how creativity, research, and community action can shape a sustainable future for the forests we rely on.
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!
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.
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).
Flourishing Los Angeles: Activists reclaim urban spaces through guerrilla gardening written by Brandelyn Clark for the Cronkite News.
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.
In June, we completed Interlude, a month long family residency in Hudson, NY, along with artist Brandon Ng and his family. During this time, we engaged with local artists and enjoyed Art Omi, DIA Beacon, MASS Moca, and explored new project concepts and opportunities related to the material and narrative potential of soil.
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.
In August 2024, Commonstudio participated in a group show at CYNK Studios (Ypsilanti Michigan), along with Sally Clegg, Erin McKenna, Abhishek Narula. The show’s theme centered around the function and meaning of fountains, and the piece is titled “ Fulfillment (Field Study No. 2)”. The piece consists of 10lbs of replenished chocolate rocks, resupplied as consumed.
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.
Commonstudio’s collaborative work featured in a group exhibition APPROXIMATING THESE ARID LANDS, which opened on March 28, 2022, and ran through May 2, 2022.