NOTE: This post is to introduce you to the 55th episode of François Matarasso’s and my monthly podcast, “A Culture of Possibility.” It will be available starting 18 July 2025. You can find it and all episodes at Stitcher, iTunes, and wherever you get your podcasts, along with miaaw.net‘s other podcasts by Owen Kelly, Sophie Hope, and many guests, focusing on cultural democracy and related topics. You can also listen on Soundcloud and find links to accompany the podcasts.
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François and I were thrilled to have South Dakota-based artists Amber Hansen and Reyna Hernandez back on the podcast, especially because they were the first people we interviewed as we started “A Culture of Possibility,” on episode two, which aired in February 2021, more than four years ago.
Back then, we talked about their work on community murals in the context of a world coping with COVID, exploring the challenges and rewards of the work (and including a lot of great photos). Episode 55 follows on our interview last month with author Jeff Chang about the censorship of his work by the Department of Defense. The most extreme forms of censorship involve the heavy hand of the state attempting to crush free expression. But in the community-level work Reyna and Amber do, the limits on expression are more likely to be negotiated with a funder, property owner, or public official—plus the artists’ own sense of ethical representation in relation to the folks they’re working with to create the mural.
We started with introductions. Amber described growing up on a small family farm, studying painting, and discovering that community-based art work led her to find a creative home in collaborative process. Reyna is an enrolled member of the Yankton Sioux Tribe of South Dakota who grew up in a household of artists. Her mother “is a star quilter, and she’s the biggest influence for all of my work, her use of pattern and color and design in her quilts is unrivaled by any other quilter I’ve ever seen.” You’ll want to start this episode at the beginning to listen to each of them talk about their formative influences and the power of public art. And follow their project, Mural On The Wall on Instagram to see some amazing images. You’ll find other links in the show notes on miaaw.net.
We’d asked Reyna and Amber to listen to episode 54 before our conversation to see one way free expression is being limited by the MAGA regime. I explained that “Francois and I wanted to have you talk about that on this episode because I know that you’ve run up against practically every variety of ‘is this expression truly free? Or does it need to go some other way here?’ We’d love to hear you talk about those instances that stand out for you as instructive for people, or that were instructive for yourselves. So where do you want to start?”
Both artists thought describing their process would create a context for this question. Amber explained that “it will give a glimpse into the landscape that we’re painting in, but also how we navigate challenges, and also how we haven’t been able to navigate those challenges when we’re not using this process. When we’re painting either in our community or we’re being invited to paint somewhere else, we begin by introducing the project and inviting people to participate in helping us imagine the themes and content that will be portrayed within the mural. We conduct our own research. Sonia [Reyna’s sister and a core member of the team] has been a really integral part of this process, as she has a degree in history and research.
“We’re conducting research and sharing that at the meetings, and asking others to share poems and stories and drawings. Through this process, we are learning more about that place, learning what people care about. It also helps us to share the design process with people who are participating. We may begin with very concrete images and ideas, and then we’re working to allow those ideas to evolve and change and become more abstract or to represent larger metaphors or themes. This is often a part of the creative process that people are not able to witness in public art, so it’s really important that our design team knows how we got to the images that we land on, and that we have conversations about how that’s resonating. Essentially, we want to create something that is new, that has never been seen before in that place, but also resonates with the people who came together to create it. And we’re presenting that design back to the design team for approval—that’s the approving body.”
This kind of collaboration is often new for participants, Amber explained. “In a lot of the places we’re making work, there is no public art process, so we’re introducing a way of creating work and sharing that. At times, we do have to present that design concept to a major funder or a building owner. Often this person may not be familiar with public art and with the process of approving it. But in those community-based processes, we’re joined by our design team, so in a way the design has already been supported and vetted by the people we are working with. That can also make the approval process easier for that person who has to decide. So that’s the structure that we work in most of the time and I think it’s allowed us to create new work that perhaps wouldn’t be approved without those deep conversations with the people participating.”
We asked how the design team is assembled. “In many projects,” Amber said, “anybody can be a part of the design team. It’s open to anyone in the community. We encourage and invite anyone who’s interested in being a part of that conversation. And in some projects, we are working with specific groups of people—sometimes working with high school students or another specific group who has come to us to make work. If there are voices missing at the table, we might go out and talk to those people individually or conduct our own research to try to bring perspectives in. But it’s the best when people are at the table, representing themselves in those conversations.”
“The more diverse voices at the table,” Reyna told us, “the more complex the imagery can become. So that is something that is very integral to what we do and what we want to make. But there are times when we’ve been asked or commissioned to make a piece of artwork for a public building, or where we’ve applied for a request for proposals from a city that’s working with an arts council, where there isn’t that community component to it, so it’s just us working with boards or councils or city governments.
“That typically doesn’t work out for us. So there is something to be said about the importance of the community-based process and its ability to get these projects moved forward. We do have that network of people who have been a part of this process from the beginning, who are seeing what we’re doing, and they’re understanding and learning more about art and communicating through visual language and making connections to one another through images, so they are supportive of what we’re doing. It’s easy to tell two women no, but it’s not as easy to tell a whole group of people no and to also explain why. What we’ve found in a lot of those situations is there’s this deep-seated racism that exists, and people have these myopic views of what people outside of white culture are and what they represent, but they don’t want to say that in front of a bunch of people. Having that web of people on the design team who are showing up to advocate for what we’re doing, I think that scares people into into realizing what they’re going to say is probably really problematic. It’s like either expose yourself as a racist, or understand that maybe your views are myopic.”
Several situations are discussed in the episode. Here’s one to whet your appetite.
Reyna explained that “In 2022, we applied for mural project with the city of Sioux Falls, and they worked with the Sioux Falls Arts Council and the Visual Arts Commission to create the request for proposals and to have a mural painted on this big, unsightly parking garage that was built in the heart of downtown Sioux Falls, the biggest city in South Dakota. The parking garage was connected to a failed mega super mall they wanted to build, and it never got done. So they just got a really ugly parking garage, and they wanted people to not think about the parking garage. So they’re like, ‘Okay, well, we’ll put a mural on it.’ We applied for that, and we were chosen unanimously by the Sioux Falls Arts Council and the Visual Arts Commission. Then it had to go to the mayor for the final decision, but before they presented the design to the mayor, we were informed that our application was the one chosen. The mayor ultimately rejected the design and wanted to go with a different artist who was out of state. But the reason he didn’t choose our piece was because it was an image of an Indigenous person. You’re viewing them from the back, and they’re laying down, wearing basketball shorts and sneakers and positioned in the reclining nude kind of position, but wearing shorts and shoes. He said that it would remind people of the drunk, homeless Native population in Sioux Falls, and he just didn’t want that. He didn’t want it to be controversial.
“That ignited so many conversations around if that’s what comes to your mind when you look at this image of this brown body in a state of rest, that’s a conversation worth having. Also, the artist that he went on to try and choose was out of state, non-Native, and submitted a design that was celebrating Lakota hoop dancers. So there were also conversations surrounding cultural appropriation, how Native culture is a lot of times defined in these spaces through a white lens. It also brings up conversations about monuments and who’s making them, who’s making the things that are representing diverse cultures. It was just so loaded. There wasn’t a lot that we could do about changing the decision, because he refused to meet with us, and he refused to even tell us why he rejected it. We had just heard from people who were in the meeting that he had said the thing about the drunk, homeless, Native population. The only thing we were able to do is respond to the the lack of transparency of process. That was a good opportunity to let people know what we do, why it’s important to have community voices involved, and to also think about the lack of transparency within our leadership.
“The arts community in Sioux Falls really responded to that. I was kind of surprised, honestly, because they were pretty upset about the whole situation. And that was a situation where we didn’t have community members involved, and it failed to launch. So I can’t say it enough how important it is to involve people who are living with these images that we’re putting up.”
This was a really rich and textured conversation of keen interest to anyone who cares about public art, representation, and cultural policy. Amber and Reyna shared other situations as we moved from censorship to questions of representation, the impact of social media, the importance of joy and laughter, the way community public art has evolved over the decades, and the good news that so far, that this locally based work in their region hasn’t been infected by the censorious impulses of the MAGA regime. I know you’ll want to tune in and hear it all.
The Cowboy Junkies, “Hard to Build, Easy to Break.”