Delta Passage: 2024 MFA Thesis Exhibition

The Katherine E. Nash Gallery at the University of Minnesota is proud to present Delta Passage, a thesis exhibition featuring the work of Namir Fearce, Whalen Polikoff, and Calvin Stalvig, all of whom are about to complete their Master of Fine Arts degrees in the Department of Art. Drawing from the exhibition’s title, a delta marks the point of convergence where a river empties into another body of water. In relation to water, deltas signify transition, often a movement into—or merging with—something larger. 

Entering the program together in September of 2021, this trio is now at the precipice of their own delta. Remixing a triad of video, sculpture, and photographic images, Fearce’s work invokes the wisdom of fugitive genealogies to unearth liberated joy from grief. Through large scale painting and video projection, Polikoff pulls at the seams of conservative nationalist desires in order to critique the consequences of state-sanctioned violence. Finding magic in the domestic everyday, Stalvig’s installations gather notions of the sacred, across cultures, to create unworldly encounters with objects. An amalgamation of fertile ideas and approaches spanning the last three years, Delta Passage is an invitation to wade in deep and experience these three distinct, yet overlapping, bodies of work.

Saturday, March 30, 2024
Public Program | 6:00 - 6:30 PM | InFlux Space, E110
Reception | 6:30 - 8:30 PM | Regis East Lobby

That same evening visit Bill Gaskins: Black Mystery Month in the Quarter Gallery and Fresh Works in the Regis West Gallery.

About the Artists:

Namir Fearce

Namir Fearce, photo by Justin Allen

Namir Fearce holds a BFA in Studio Art with a concentration in film and sculpture from the University of Illinois Chicago. His work has been featured in Dazed, Paper, Them, and Office Magazine, in addition to The New York Times. He is a 2020 Walker Arts Fellow and a Black Harvest Film Festival nominated director. Fearce most recently curated, directed, and produced a multi media performance and storytelling festival, Hi Cotton, which has been shown in Minneapolis, Rio De Janeiro, and Berlin.

Artist Statement

Namir Fearce is a North Minneapolis born interdisciplinary artist and cultural worker. His studio practice engages experimental film, assemblage, and music under the moniker Blu Bone. Fearce is informed by a constellation of Black Indigenous histories and sites of memory that weave complex emo-political worldscapes, while conjuring a futurity of pleasure and freedom. The emo-political is the positionality of the fugitive—those who by embracing their Indigenous technologies of survival, somatic, and pleasure based knowledge, agitate and resist the white fascistic cognitive schema and doctrine of domination.

Fearce’s work collapses, samples, and collages these histories and sites of experience to transmute grief as a technology of survival and practice of cultural resistance. Through performance he embodies across species to access an expanded empathy, an understanding of the reversal, and the way of the blues. Across all facets of his practice exist sites of ritual and ceremony that visually, sonically, and somatically converge and reverberate to generate a feedback loop as the blues does—a portal that opens to a collective reimagining.

Whalen Polikoff

Whalen Polikoff, photo by Justin Allen

Whalen Polikoff (b.1996, United States) received his BFA in sculpture from the Lyme Academy College of Fine Arts in 2019. He is an interdisciplinary artist working in painting, drawing, printmaking and sculpture. He navigates the visual, verbal, metaphysical culture that shaped his early childhood growing up in Central New York. As a cancer survivor, his diagnosis in highschool continues to inform the urgency of his practice and his relationship to survival. 

Artist Statement

My work addresses the visual, verbal, and metaphysical culture that shaped my early childhood. At the heart of this culture was a desire for national and social belonging—a promise of safety. We see these same desires made tangible through the conservative nationalism that can be found in america’s mainstream political parties and identities. The biden administration, with backing from the democratic and republican parties, continues to aid the aparthied state of israel in its genocide of the Palestinian people. My work bears witness to the justification of atrocities by the state as a result of nationalist complacency and conditioned ambivalence towards violence. 

Calvin Stalvig

Calvin Stalvig, photo by Justin Allen

Calvin Stalvig creates sculpture, installation, works on paper, digital collage, video, and performance. By approaching artmaking with a child’s curiosity and love for the material world, he alchemizes the everyday ordinary into poetic compositions charged with sacred symbols and relationships. Calvin has exhibited at The Invisible Dog Art Center, Brooklyn, NY; Governors Island, New York, NY; Electronic + Textiles Institute Berlin; and Regis Center for Art, Minneapolis, MN. His work has been included in Issue 2 of the Minneapolis-based publication Scorched Feet / Quemados Pies. He is the former Director of Youth Programs at Beam Center in Brooklyn and holds an M.A. in Youth Development from City University of New York.

Artist Statement
I was born and raised in a family of folk painters, assemblage artists, and stage actors living on the harbor’s edge of Lake Superior Gitchi-gaami—one of Earth’s largest freshwater portals to the underworld. I am a sensualist compelled by a desire to feel, taste, manipulate and co-create with the world around me. To this end, my practice slips between mediums. I cast beeswax in silicone and iron in sand. I stitch industrial felt into rock formations inspired by the Icelandic landscape. I epoxy stacks of glass into trophies while dreaming of future collaborations with glassmakers in Murano.