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A NATION TAKES PLACE exhibition reception and book launch event at Minnesota Marine Art Museum
August 22 @ 5:00 pm – 8:00 pm CST
Tia Simone Gardner and Shana M. griffin will join the Minnesota Marine Art Museum on Thursday, August 22 to celebrate the launch of their book A Nation Takes Place: Navigating Race and Water in Contemporary Art and the exhibition of the same name on Thursday, August 22. Doors open at 5:00 p.m.; convocation by Seitu Jones at 6:00; performance by Li(sa E.) Harris at 6:30, and live gallery chat with the curators at 6:45.
This event is free with MMAM admission (free for students on this day), but advance registration is requested. A live remote broadcast will be available for the gallery chat at 6:45 p.m.
A companion to the exhibition A Nation Takes Place at the Minnesota Marine Art Museum, this catalog situates archival images, artworks, and texts within the visual convention of maritime art. Pairing contemporary artworks with their historical antecedents, this collection interrogates ways that the imaginaries of seafaring are tethered to the lethal technologies of enslavement, colonialism, genocide, dispossession, and extraction.
Tia-Simone Gardner is an interdisciplinary artist, educator, and undisciplined Black feminist geographer, committed to understanding relationships between Blackness and landscape. She is a 2023–24 McKnight Visual Artist Fellow. Her work has shown both nationally and internationally, and her writing has appeared in Georgia, an independently published arts writing journal, and New Suns, a journal published by USA Artists. Gardner is an assistant professor of media and cultural studies at Macalester College in St. Paul, MN.
Shana M. griffin is a Black feminist activist, researcher, geographer, sociologist, abolitionist, and artist. Her practice is interdisciplinary, research-based, and decolonial, existing across the fields of sociology, geography, Black feminist thought, and land-use planning and within movements challenging displace- ment, carcerality, reproductive control, climate impacts, and gender-based violence. She is the recipient of several awards, including a 2025 Loeb/ArtLab Fellow at Harvard University Graduate School of Design, 2022 Andy Warhol Curatorial Research Fellow, and 2021 Creative Capital Awardee.
