Conversations from the Barn

John Noltner is a freelance photographer based in Minneapolis. For 25 years, he has created images at home and around the world for national magazines, Fortune 500 companies and nonprofit organizations.

His images have appeared in National Geographic Traveler, Smithsonian, Forbes, Health, Midwest Living, New York Daily News and more.

He is the author of two award-winning books from his series A Peace of My Mind. His work exhibits regularly across the country and he leads lectures and workshops around the idea that art and storytelling has the ability to transform hearts and communities. www.noltner.com

Darren Garvey is a multi-instrumentalist, songwriter, and record producer best known for his extensive touring and session work as a drummer and percussionist. He has written and released records under his own name (Under A Common Ceiling, Heart Attack Sleeves, Social Distance), co-written with the likes of Daniel Rodriguez (Elephant Revival) and Jimmie Linville (Daniel and the Lion), and appears on 200+ albums as a session musician and sideman in his 25+ year career.

Garvey's latest single No Love Is Wrong is a song of acceptance and possibility inspired by and dedicated to the LGBTQ+ community. Followed up by the release of his cover version of Friday I'm In Love, Garvey is currently putting the finishing touches on his third full-length studio album. A member of Colorado transcendental folk sextet Elephant Revival since 2016, Darren is widely regarded for his creative and collaborative work in the folk and indie music communities as a cross-pollinator. As a drummer Darren has worked with Daniel Rodriguez, Cameron McGill & What Army, Shook Twins, Courtney Hartman, Steve Poltz, John Craigie, Bonnie Paine, Andreas Kapsalis Trio, Danny Barnes, Lindsay Lou, Chicago Farmer, Daniel and the Lion, Miles Nielsen & The Rusted Hearts, Sandra Bernhard, Danny Burns & The Defectors, Ernie Hendrickson, and Cory Chisel and The Wandering Sons. www.darrengarvey.com

Debra J. Stone's poetry, essays and fiction can be found in Brooklyn Review, Under the Gum Tree, Random Sample Review, Green Mountains Review (GMR), About Place Journal, Saint Paul Almanac, Wild Age Press, Gyroscope, Tidal Basin, and forthcoming in other literary journals. She's received residencies at the Vermont Studio Center, Callaloo, The Anderson Center for Interdisciplinary Studies, New York Mills Arts Residency and is a Kimbilio Fellow. Sundress Publishers nominated her essay, Grandma Essie's Vanilla Poundcake, Best of the Net, judged by Hanif Abdurraquib in 2019 and in 2021 her poem, year-of- staying–in place, was nominated Best of Net and Pushcart nominated. www.debrajeannestone.com

Anna Farro Henderson is a scientist and artist. She served as an environmental policy advisor to Minnesota Senator Al Franken and Governor Mark Dayton. Her publications have appeared in Kenyon Review, River Teeth, The Rumpus, The Common, The Doctor T.J. Eckleburg Review, Seneca Review, Water-Stone Review, Cleaver Magazine, Punctuate, The Normal School, Bellingham Review, and Identity Theory. She is a recipient of a Minnesota State Art Board grant, a Nan Snow Emerging Artist Award, an Excellence in Teaching Fellowship at the Madeline Island School of the Arts, and a Loft Literary Center Mentor Award. She founded The Nature Library art installation that was up in the Landmark Center in Saint Paul for several months in 2019. She teaches creative process at the Loft Literary Center. www.eafarro.com

Sam Kalda is an illustrator and artist based in Saint Paul. His commissioned works include editorial, book, advertising and pattern illustration. In 2017, he received a gold medal in book illustration from the Society of Illustrators in New York. His first book, Of Cats and Men: History's Great Cat-loving Artists, Writers, Thinkers and Statesmen, was published by Ten Speed Press in 2017. He recently illustrated his first picture book, When We Walked on the Moon, written by David Long and published by Wide Eyed Press in 2019, as well as the follow-up, When Darwin Sailed the Sea. www.samkalda.com

Matthew Ricketts is a Canadian composer based in New York City. His music moves from extremes of presence and absence, from clamor to quietude, at once reticent and flamboyant. Matthew's music has been called "lyrical, contrapuntal, rhythmically complex and highly nuanced" (The American Academy of Arts and Letters) and is noted for his "effervescent and at times prickly sounds," "hypnotically churning exploration of melody" (ICareIfYouListen) as well as its "tart harmonies and perky sputterings" (The New York Times). He is a 2019 Guggenheim Fellow. www.matthewricketts.com

KRISTI COLE kristicole.com Kristi Cole (she/her) is a Queer, Queens-based performer and choreographer with a Bachelors of Arts in Dance and Political Science from The George Washington University where she received the Elizabeth Burtner Theatre & Dance Award for her excellence as a performer, as well as a Luther Rice Research Fellowship. In 2019, she founded Kristi Cole & Guests with the mission of bringing together artists to create powerful and thought- provoking interdisciplinary work. Her stage and film work has been presented in the tri-state area and Atlanta, Georgia as well as in Toronto, Canada.

MAX COKER Max Coker is a digital audio/visual performer and installation artist based in Brooklyn with a background in radio, sculpture, and software engineering. Education includes media studies, new media art, engineering and computer science from Stony Brook University and Brooklyn College. As an artist's assistant to collaborative duo LoVid based on Long Island, Max gained skills and knowledge of video technology and paradigms of video art performance. Performances fill spaces with improvised sound mixing and real time video composite projections using an amalgamation of custom software and a collection of found sound and video.

In this podcast, we sit down with artists Kim Gordon and Melanie Johnson to hear about their week at the Everwood Artist Retreat.

KIM GORDON www.kimgordonfineart.com "Art has been at the core of my life since early childhood. Making art is as inherent and important to me as speaking, allowing exploration of the exterior/natural world and of my place in it. I work with landscape because it encourages my connection to the world around me."

MELANIE JOHNSON melanielynnjohnson.com "My drawings recall the sensory and emotional connections inherent in my bonds with animals and the natural landscape, and the ways in which animals provide some of my earliest empathetic relationships and routine caregiving experiences."

David Huckfelt has shared stages with a staggering diversity of artists: from Mavis Staples, Emmylou Harris & Greg Brown, to Bon Iver, Arcade Fire & Gregory Alan Isakov, and more recently an impressive array of Native American musicians including John Trudell, Quiltman, Keith Secola, and Annie Humphrey. In thousands of shows across the United States, Canada & overseas, Huckfelt's grassroots following has grown from small-town opera houses, Midwestern barn concerts, and progressive benefit events to national tours and festival stages like Hardly Strictly Bluegrass, Edmonton and Calgary Folk Fests, and the legendary First Avenue club in his beloved Minneapolis home.

Jeremy Ylvisaker is a multi-instrumentalist from Minneapolis, Minnesota. He is a member of the indie rock bands Alpha Consumer along with Michael Lewis and JT Bates, and The Cloak Ox with Andrew Broder of Fog, Mark Erickson and Dosh. He plays guitar in Andrew Bird's touring band alongside Martin Dosh on drums and Michael Lewis on bass.

Bart Buch is a puppet artist, poet and arts educator who focuses on interpreting poetry from written text into puppet performances and looks for the poetic qualities of any story to highlight. He calls his work "puppet poems." In 2016-2018, he conducted a community residency with youth, artists and community members, co-creating several performances about the "helpers" of the Phillips neighborhood. The neighborhood project ended in a main stage production called Make-Believe Neighborhood at In the Heart of the Beast Puppet and Mask Theatre (HOBT), featuring puppets, projections, live music by Martin Dosh with mixed-in covers of Fred Rogers' songs by Sylvan Esso, Andrew Bird, Bonnie Prince Billy, Karen Peris of The Innocence Mission, Jayanthi Kyle, Leslie Ball, and MPLS imPulse Chorus. Make Believe Neighborhood was received warmly by theatre reviewers and audiences and was rated the 3rd best Twin Cities theatre performance in 2018.

Minnesota-based artist, Kristin Dieng, has been developing her skills as a glass artist for the last decade. When a chronic illness forced her to leave her career in international affairs, Kristin sought a new way of interacting with and interpreting the world. She found mosaic art.

Kristin's art explores the way in which colorful light-filled art can serve as a source of healing, both for herself and for those interacting with her art. While Kristin specializes in brightly colored nature-themed work, as well as complex geometric patterns, she takes particular joy in creating artwork that interacts with both its viewer and its environment.

Kerry Alexander is a songwriter and musician, and the front-person of indie rock band, Bad Bad Hats. She was born in the Twin Cities, but grew up in Birmingham, AL. Alexander returned to Minnesota to attend Macalester College, which is where she first started to perform live the songs. She performed at open mic nights at the Dunn Bros on Grand Ave and posted her music to MySpace, eventually meeting Chris Hoge, with whom she started a band in her senior year. A performance at the Macalester Battle of the Bands (they lost) led to a record contract and the start of a now decade-long Bad Had Hats journey. As part of Bad Bad Hats, Alexander has written and released three full-length albums, two EPs, and traveled the country (and Canada!). A lover of radio and making playlists, she has also been a guest DJ on 89.3 The Current.

Feeling detached from her previously released work as years lapsed, Duluth, Minnesota's Sarah Krueger set out to Hive, a small studio nestled near the river in her hometown of Eau Claire, WI. In the course of two separate sessions, (the first on the cusp of a long winter, and the second on the fringe of summer's swell), Krueger assembled a cast of collaborators to help flesh out a collection of songs that would later become the catalyst for Lanue. Culled from the title of a poem that found its way to Krueger from a thrift store shelf, Lanue comes to us as a project that stands firmly in front of a fresh creative backdrop and boasts a more developed taste and sincerity than Krueger's previous releases — both a welcome departure and anticipated return.