Minnesota Center for Book Arts Announces 2025 McKnight Book Fellows

MCBA's new McKnight Book Artist Fellows are Ellen Mueller, an interdisciplinary artist who examines how capitalist systems affect everyday life with a particular focus on environmental issues, and Sarah Evenson, a gay, transgender artist whose work highlights themes of resistance and creative potential of the transgender body.

The new Fellows will both be awarded $25,000 in unrestricted funds to explore and deepen their art practices thanks to the MCBA's 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, travel/education stipends, residency opportunity, and a group exhibition in MCBA’s Main Gallery.

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 said. “Using this approach, I challenge the binaries humans continually construct, and hope to disrupt seemingly infinite cycles.” 

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 screenprinting practice 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.”

The finalists were selected by jurors Helen Hiebert, Sarah Matthews, and Catherine Alice Michaelis.. They shared their impressions of the artists and their work following virtual studio visits with the finalists. “Sarah Evenson's innovative book work incorporating illustration, animation and printing excites me,” said Helen Hiebert. Catherine Alice Michaelis added: “Ellen Mueller's work engages the broader community as well as the artist, leaving me energized and hopeful.”