Brooks Turner is an artist, writer, and educator based in Minneapolis. Through diverse methodologies that include archival research, collage, digital drawing, film, and installation, Turner engages the history of fascism in Minnesota as a synecdoche for understanding and challenging the aesthetics of US History. Recent solo exhibitions include Legends and Myths of Ancient Minnesota at the Weisman Art Museum, Uncanny Familiarities of Scenes and People at St. Cloud State University, and Order and Discipline at Ridgewater College. His work has been supported by the Minnesota State Arts Board, the Minnesota Humanities Center, Rimon: The Minnesota Jewish Federation, the Minnesota State Inter-Faculty Organization, and the Jerome Foundation. Turner received a BA from Amherst College and MFA from the University of California, Los Angeles. He is currently Chair of Visual Art at St. Paul Conservatory for Performing Artists and a lecturer at both St. Cloud State University and the University of Minnesota.

FELLOWSHIP STATEMENT

I use digital processes to recontextualize text and images extracted from physical archives as a means of identifying American Fascism and exposing its aesthetic continuity from past to present. Recently, I have shifted to consider the aesthetics of anti-fascist resistance by examining a moment in 1938 when Minnesota union organizers traveled to Mexico to study with Leon Trotsky, then living with Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo. At Trotsky’s advice, the organizers created the militant Union Defense Guard, which was successfully deployed to intimidate a mob of fascists and their leader. I am fascinated by this confluence of revolutionaries. How would their conversation flow between politics, place, art, and labor? Can we trace an aesthetic language through these individuals? What can we learn of anti-fascist resistance (and fascism’s response) from this meeting? I am currently materializing my digital and archival processes as a series of woven tapestries and an experimental documentary.

Photo by Rik Sferra.