The Nature of Shoreham Yards is an installation envisioned by artist Gudrun Lock featuring the in process work, research, and explorations of a motley collective of thinkers and makers presented at the Weisman Art Museum, spring semester, 2022. The focus are the buffers of an active 230-acre train and trucking facility in Northeast Minneapolis, called Shoreham Yards. Both polluted and full of life, the buffers interface in dynamic ways with the neighborhood surrounding them and are potent sites of potential transformation. Mundane, all but invisible territories of the city, the areas are central to the Mississippi Watershed and rich for re-imagining our relationship to colonialist expansion, historical pollution, contemporary consumption, and wildness. The installation in the Target Studio for Creative Collaboration shows in-process research in the form of documents, data sets, visualizations, maps, illustrations, photographs, found objects, and specimens on loan from the University of Minnesota’s Bell Museum of Natural History.
Current collaborators include bird specialist DAVE ZUMETA, arborist CHAD GIBLIN, Professor of Anthropology at University of Minnesota STUART MCLEAN, multimedia artist JEFFREY SKEMP, artist/designer JANET LOBBERECHT, musician STEFON ALEXANDER, writer MIRANDA TRIMMIER, artist LESLIE GRANT, community activist JEWELL ARCOREN, artist HALLIE BAHN, naturalist GREG FEINBERG, projection designer MAXWELL COLLYARD, and others.
ARTIST TALK / TOUR
BLOG POST by Miranda Trimmier
This project is supported by the Weisman Art Museum, the University of Minnesota’s Institute for Advanced Study, their Institute on the Environment, and the Minneapolis College of Art and Design
The Nature of Shoreham Yards, Weisman Museum, 2022
Aerial maps (right to left): Shoreham Yards facility, proximity to the Mississippi River, west side buffer. Commissioned photographs by Jeffrey Skemp, commissioned model of the Soo-Line Dump by Hallie Bahn; collected found objects, organic matter, and snapshots of Shoreham’s surroundings.
The Nature of Shoreham Yards, Weisman Museum, 2022
On loan from the Bell Museum of Natural History, specimens of animals seen in Shoreham Yards’s Soo-Line Dump are displayed with the man-made and organic objects scavenged from the same area. Seeds, coyote scat, chunks of concrete and brick from old streets, as well as a child’s ball, beer cans and vape canisters are some of the contemporary and historical detritus that coalesce at the 140 year old dump site.
The Nature of Shoreham Yards, Weisman Museum, 2022
Data from explorations of the Soo-Line Dump include pressed invasives (historically brought in by Europeans), handwritten bird notes of 81 species sighted during 14 outings, commissioned bird paintings by Lux Fabre, and degraded underpants, results of a citizen science soil test.
The Nature of Shoreham Yards, Weisman Museum, 2022
On the left, an aerial map of the Soo-Line Dump buffer of Shoreham Yards, used for over 100 years as a dumpsite for industries, now capped and mostly contained and part of a living system of peat bog, plants, and animal species. The collage element in the corner focuses on the chaos and necessity of ground dwelling mammals and fungal networks that make the dump site their home. On the right the aerial map of the East Side delineates where volatile organic compound mitigation efforts affecting the entire Northeast Minneapolis groundwater system are in progress. Found objects, snapshots, and commissioned photographs layer the interests of the many stakeholders, human and other-than-human, active in this area.
The Nature of Shoreham Yards, Weisman Museum, 2022
70 photographs of men’s medium Fruit of the Loom briefs hang floor to ceiling. They were buried 3 inches deep for two months around the perimeter of Shoreham Yards as part of a soil vitality experiment visualizing the activity of soil bacteria and fungi who eat the cotton. Friends, researchers, and other artists volunteered to first bury, then dig up these items as a playful way to begin a conversation about our living soil. The speed at which degradation occurred in some of the more industrial sections of the buffers surprised the scientists I am working with.
The Nature of Shoreham Yards, Weisman Museum, 2022
Found objects from the Southern buffer: a Reader’s Digest anthology titled, Getting the Most Out of Life, an empty vodka bottle, and taconite pellets from the Iron Range that regularly fall off the train on their way to being processed into steel. Not only do these buffers function as industrial dump zones, but also as collection sites for people and things disregarded by the status quo. They leave the traces of desires, extraction processes, and inebriation that are part and parcel to the push for progress.
The Nature of Shoreham Yards, Weisman Museum, 2022
Aerial shot of the Souther buffer where industry butts up against residential streets. Community garden plots and snapshots of flowers and pollinators can be seen in the upper left section. The middle depicts a large animal hole made along the fence in industrial soil. The upper right shows labeling from an arborist’s tree survey of the diverse species that survive in this marginal landscape. A pair of degraded underpants dyed purple as a result of being buried near the roots of a crabapple tree sits in the lower right section of this image.
The Nature of Shoreham Yards, Weisman Museum, 2022
Commissioned tree portraits are framed and collaged onto a larger aerial map of the West Side buffer. Seed pods, industrial debris, and plastic bags containing rocks and animal scat found on site litter the wall. Snapshots of small mammal and plant species sit on the bottom right near a chunk of found concrete mimicking a wasps’ nest. A small archival aerial image shows industrial activities at the site between 1915 and 1972, uncovered at the University of Minnesota’s Borchert Map Library.