Announcing Our 2025 McKnight Artist Fellows
Congratulations to the 2025 McKnight Book Artist Fellows, Ellen Mueller and Sarah Evenson! Ellen Mueller is an interdisciplinary artist who examines how capitalist systems affect everyday life, with a particular focus on environmental issues. Sarah Evenson is a gay, transgender artist whose work highlights themes of resistance, queer joy, and the strength and creative potential of the transgender body.
Ellen and Sarah will both be awarded $25,000 in unrestricted funds to explore and deepen their art practices thanks to our partnership with the McKnight Foundation, which annually supports two exceptional Minnesota-based book artists. The pair will also receive a range of professional benefits through MCBA, including studio visits from a national critic/curator; a travel stipend, residency opportunity, and educational stipend; the opportunity to participate in an artist panel at Open Book; 24/7 studio access for two years; and a group exhibition in MCBA’s Main Gallery.
Ellen Mueller explores themes of capitalism, environmentalism, place, health, and interpersonal communication through visual and conceptual contrasts in her zines, drawing, fibers, and writing. “My work is inspired by several events and phenomena at once, and often hinges on a bizarre juxtaposition of two or more seemingly unrelated influences,” she states. “Using this approach, I challenge the binaries humans continually construct, and hope to disrupt seemingly infinite cycles.”
In Mueller’s soft books and zines, she uses self-produced or online imagery in her compositions to reflect her stance on late-stage capitalism and its effects on humanity. “I mine the ways capitalism is integral to all aspects of everyday living and decision making, from food and shelter, to clothing and energy. Absurdity and humor address this creeping influence, even if such gestures are largely symbolic.” She looks forward to deepening her connection to her practice through conversations with peers during the McKnight Fellowship.
With an emphasis on queer and transgender identity, Sarah Evenson creates hand-printed artist’s books, DIY print media, and new media. Evenson’s work reflects the physical relationship between their artistic practice—screenprinting—and their body. “It is a medium in which the pressure needed to create a print comes from the same areas of the body that were most affected by my gender-confirming mastectomy: the chest, arm, and upper back muscles. This connection between my physicality and my craft results in indexical images, works that testify to the strength of my transgender body.”
Evenson uses their work to promote accessible and community-driven book arts within its creation and distribution. They will use the McKnight Fellowship resources to develop their practice and further their reach in hopes of engaging with a larger audiences of queer and trans people across the country. “Subject-wise, my work celebrates the tenderness of human connection and positions Queerness as a practice of transformational love,” shared Evenson.
The finalists were selected by esteemed jurors Helen Hiebert, Sarah Matthews, and Catherine Alice Michaelis (bios below). They shared their impressions of the artists and their work following virtual studio visits with the finalists.
“Sarah Evenson's innovative book work—incorporating the hand (illustration) and technology (animation and printing)—excites me,” shared Helen Hiebert. “Their poignant insights about the body, encapsulated in bright colors, bring queer joy to light.”
Catherine Alice Michaelis noted, “Ellen Mueller's work engages the broader community as well as the artist, leaving me energized and hopeful.”
Explore the work by the 2025 McKnight Book Artist Fellows below by viewing their winning portfolios and full artist statements. Beneath that, you can also find biographical information about our jurors.
Congratulations to our 2025 fellows!
Ellen Mueller
Ellen Mueller (she/her) has exhibited nationally and internationally as an interdisciplinary artist who examines how capitalist systems affect everyday life, with a particular focus on environmental issues.
She received her MFA from University of South Florida and is currently the Director of Programs at Arts Midwest. Selected artist residencies include Ox-Bow, Ucross Foundation, Nes Artist Residency (Iceland), and Künstlerhaus Lukas (Germany). Mueller lives and works in Minneapolis, MN and has authored multiple zines, artist books, and textbooks.
Work
Artist Statement
I explore issues related to late-stage capitalism as it affects daily life in the United States, with special interest in the environment, health, and interpersonal communication. Within my work, I strive to create experiences that activate curiosity in the audience, using compelling visual material to draw interested parties deeper into engagement. Recently, my materials include zines, drawing, fibers, and writing. I see all of these working modes as part of the expanded field of book arts. I use the intimate, hand-held nature of zines and artist books to create personal connections. The low-cost materials make these interactive objects less precious and more welcoming to a wide audience. Venues for my work range from zine and book festivals to galleries, boats, or walking events.
Visually and conceptually, I am interested in strong contrast, especially as it relates to contemporary anxieties and ideals. This preference is visible in all of my highly saturated color choices across my zines and books. Conceptually, this focus on contrast is apparent in work like Selected Prairie Grasses, which addresses climate change concerns through the juxtaposition of beautiful cardstock cut-outs of easy-to-grow prairie grasses for urban spaces, monochromatic photography of those same grasses, and concise planting notes for each type of grass.
I also enjoy pushing the boundaries of various art worlds. Through specific formal choices, such as alternative zine shapes and forms utilized in Art Sprawl, an arts writing website and zine collection I have created, I invite closer examination of systems of artist-to-artist support. By creating portable experiences, such as the Walking Workbook zines, I challenge participants to think in expanded ways about categories of art, such as what counts as art, and how and when we think about the act of walking. Similarly, Forbs documents a selection of plant-engaged artists for those who may be unfamiliar with this type of socially engaged art-making outdoors, thereby creating a more welcoming entry-point to this particular art world.
The McKnight Fellowship for Book Artists is critical to my practice as I am at a point of transition, having completed a large project of publishing the book, Walking as Artistic Practice, and its accompanying zines. Over the past year, through a deep investigation of native plant gardening, I have begun building my next project focused on plants and art. I plan to utilize my successful approach to book writing by creating a zine series, which acts as the base for a larger book project. Having tested a few zines, pictured in my work samples, I am ready to launch this new project focused on the intersection of plants and art. I will use the time and resources of the fellowship to begin laying the foundation for zines focused on subtopics such as climate change, urban landscaping, public versus private space, and food sovereignty, to name a few. Having the opportunity to challenge my development on this project with a national critic/curator, in addition to the other programmatic elements, will provide a great structure and system of support for pursuing this new book project. Additionally, I will invest in improved sewing equipment for larger production of fabric books. In particular, I am looking forward to increasing my quilting ability with a new machine.
Sarah evenson
Sarah Evenson (they/them/theirs) is a gay, transgender artist-at-large living and working
with various forms of printed ephemera in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
Their bright and colorful zines, artist books, prints, and animations center play as resistance, celebrate queer joy, and testify to the strength and creative potential of the transgender body. Their artworks are included in the collections of more than 50 institutions internationally, including the libraries of the Walker Art Center, the MoMA, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Tate Britain, as well as numerous publicly accessible high school and community libraries.
Work
Artist Statement
I am a gay, transgender book and print media artist. My practice envisions book art as a socially involved, accessible, and flexible mode that intentionally includes both the creation and the distribution of narrative artworks. Within this framework, I view the book as a conceptual tool of disseminating text-and-image-based information that encapsulates fine craft, hand-printed artist’s books, DIY print media, and new media such as video and projection.
I am interested in the book as a democratic object: a portable, accessible technology that can travel amongst the people it is meant for. Queer print history has taught me that the power of the book as a form comes from being read. As such, I have developed a large distribution network that allows my work to reach queer and trans people across the English-speaking world. This network includes partnerships at zine distros, festivals, direct mailing, and placements in more than fifty collections ranging from the MoMA to high school libraries. I work with an audience of future queer and trans people in mind, both young people and those coming out later in life.
Each body of work I create has multiple entrance points, most of which can be accessed free of charge. I create and distribute zines, artist books, animations, posters, and other forms of ephemera. I root these various outputs in screenprinting because it is a medium in which the pressure needed to create a print comes from the same areas of the body that were most affected by my gender-confirming mastectomy: the chest, arm, and upper back muscles. This connection between my physicality and my craft results in indexical images, works that testify to and bear the direct mark of the strength of my transgender body. In this way, my work is a record and an assertion of transgender existence in the face of an erasure-driven political climate. Subject-wise, my work celebrates the tenderness of human connection and positions Queerness as a practice of transformational love.
Ultimately, I create this work because I know my Queerness and Transness are essential not just to my personal identity but to my humanity. This truth—and all other aspects of queer life, love, family structure, and connection that this truth has gifted to me and others—can and should be represented in the public record.
Jurors
Helen Hiebert is a Colorado artist who constructs installations, sculptures, films, artists’ books, and works in paper using handmade paper as her primary medium. She teaches, lectures and exhibits her work internationally and online, and is the author of several how-to books about papermaking and papercrafts. Helen has an extensive network of paper colleagues around the world and her interest in how things are made (from paper) keeps her up-to-date on current paper trends, which she writes about in her weekly blog called The Sunday Paper. She interviews papermakers and paper artists on her podcast Paper Talk, and she holds an annual paper retreat and papermaking master classes in her Red Cliff studio.
Sarah Matthews is a highly skilled printmaker and book artist with a background in art and business. Her work reflects her commitment to exploring the complex issues of race, equality, and gender while shining a light on social injustice. She holds an MA in Art & the Book from the Corcoran College of Arts and Design at George Washington University, an MBA with a Marketing Concentration, and a BS in Sociology from Bowie State University. Her works have been exhibited internationally and are part of prestigious collections at institutions such as the National Museum of African American History & Culture Library, Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, George Washington University’s Gelman Library, University of Puget Sound, and Samford University. Mrs. Matthews is also a dedicated educator, teaching Artist Books at the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) and bookbinding and printmaking classes at various art centers and platforms. She currently serves as President of the College Book Art Association (CBAA): The Association for Book Art Education.
Catherine Alice Michaelis is a bi|queer artist and curator. Her entry into artists’ books began in 1989 when learning letterpress printing. She works around themes of plants, gender, feminism, and hormonal life stages. She makes both unique and multiples, often using hand stitching and cloth fabric in her work. Her artists’ books are in over 100 public collections, and she has exhibited widely. Catherine has a B.A. in creative non-fiction and media studies from the Evergreen State College in Washington State. Currently, Catherine is the curator of the Cynthia Sears Artists’ Books Collection at the Bainbridge Island Museum of Art and the project manager for Artists’ Books UnShelved, a twice-monthly episode sharing artists’ books from the Cynthia Sears Collection and about the artists who made them.
About the McKnight Artist & Culture Bearers Fellowship Program
Founded on the belief that Minnesota thrives when its artists thrive, the McKnight Foundation’s arts program is one of the oldest and largest of its kind in the country. Support for individual working Minnesota artists has been a cornerstone of the program since it began in 1982. The McKnight Artist & Culture Bearers Fellowships Program provides annual, unrestricted cash awards to outstanding mid-career Minnesota artists and culture bearers in 15 different creative disciplines. Program partner organizations administer the fellowships and structure them to respond to the unique challenges of different disciplines. Currently the foundation contributes about $2.8 million per year to its statewide fellowships. For more information, visit mcknight.org/artistfellowships.
About the McKnight Foundation
The McKnight Foundation, a Minnesota-based family foundation, advances a more just, creative, and abundant future where people and planet thrive. Established in 1953, the McKnight Foundation is deeply committed to advancing climate solutions in the Midwest; building an equitable and inclusive Minnesota; and supporting the arts in Minnesota, neuroscience, and international crop research.
Related News
