'Four at a Time' River North College Exhibition 2025
These paintings were part of the 2025 painting exhibition that capped off my community portrait project of students and workers at Minnesota North College in International Falls.
Show Title: “Community Portraits, Four At A Time”
The unifying theme guiding this exhibition was that everyone pictured had some meaningful relationship to Rainy River Community College or the public schools in Int’l Falls. Often both.
Workers as well as students from the past--as far back as the 1970’s--and present posed for the source photographs.
The idea for the exhibition sprang from a painting of mine the college purchased almost thirty years ago. It's a kind of group portrait done in oil paint on a slab of solid oak of four people very close to me: my brother, one of my cousins and two dear friends. Carol Grim, a former academic advisor at RRCC, saw this painting in a student exhibition at the Tweed Art Museum at UMD (I was a studio art major at the time) and noted that all the people in the portrait had been students at RRCC, and so the college acquired it in keeping with its student centered mission. It has hung in the hallway near the gym ever since.
Long story short, after moving back to International Falls in 2024, I visited the campus and took a look at the painting again and the idea of doing a series of community college based portraits using the same basic idea of a quadruple portrait popped into my head anew. It was not the first time I had thought of this idea, but I had not, until last year, had the space and time to follow through on it.
Another commonality in this exhibition, each painting, save one, was done on large hollow oak doors I bought at a local hardware outlet. These doors turned out to be great for making paintings like these. They are lightweight, sturdy and affordable and allowed enough space to create roughly life sized group portraits of sturdy but flexible people. People flexible enough to say yes to me, a total stranger in many cases, when I approached them out of the blue on campus and asked if I could use their face for a portrait show at the college. I am thankful to all who posed for this show and shared some of their stories with me.
Two loves fueled the making of these portraits.
First, I have always loved trying to convey some bit of the inner life of a person through painting. Toward that goal, I asked each person to make a hand gesture of their choice when they posed that visually symbolized something meaningful in their life. I didn’t ask what any gesture meant, but some told me regardless. This was wonderfully generous of them and a rewarding part of the attempt to faithfully portray them.
Second, I love community colleges. In fact, I think community colleges should be ranked near the top of all human inventions. A place to learn and job train, find a mentor, make all kinds of friends and mistakes and not drown in debt. Hard to top that, and Rainy River fit the bill for me in the early nineties. Accordingly, I wanted these paintings to work not only as individual portraits but to convey a broader sense of a Rainy River-connected community through time. This aim inspired the “four at a time” composition in the work, mixing and matching current and former students and campus employees in each piece.
To me, all successful portraits leave the mystery of a person’s mind, body, and spirit ultimately intact. It’s hard enough to know oneself let alone claim that you can have a deeper understanding of a person merely through the act of painting their face.
My job for this show was just to try and get that feeling of a group presence down, a feeling that you are near a number of other unique human consciousnesses, another set of alternately struggling and triumphant students and workers. I believe-without any proof-that many of our ever changing thoughts, feelings, and ideas interpenetrate in many ways that we are unaware of, especially when we gather to learn and grow in places like schools. I hope these paintings help create the presence of people as individuals in a potential space of growing solidarity with one another. Because that is what I think I potentially saw as I painted them.
Thank you again to everyone that posed for a portrait in this show: Jazz, Michelle, Jessie, Cheyenne, Caleb, Chase, Emerald, Lee, Carol, Shae, Ida, Anna, Christina, Dawnelle, Jairo, Sam, Clint, Matt, and Adam. Thank you to artist Andrea Gohl for supporting and helping to organize the exhibition!