Peninsula State Park Residency
Photo by Kasey and Ben
Program Overview
Beginning in 2024, PenArt and Peninsula State Park partnered to offer a residency experience that puts both art making and the environment at its center. Drawing upon the expertise of both organizations, artists-in-residence are provided with ample studio space and resources, as well as Peninsula State Park’s diverse landscape, unique ecosystems, and knowledgeable staff. Artists are invited to explore the state park through the lens of their individual research; discovering new connections in their practices, creating site-responsive works alongside community members, and gaining a deeper understanding of this particular place and its environmental circumstances.
This program is generously funded by the Friends of Peninsula State Park.
Summer 2026 Artist-in-Residence
Annie Hejny
Annie Hejny is an environmental visual artist and community climate leader rooted in the freshwater landscapes of the Midwest. Her work centers on personal and collective relationships with water in the face of a deepening climate emergency. Annie’s multidisciplinary approach weaves ecological research, material science, artistic improvisation, stewardship practices, and community engagement.
Working across painting, sculpture, installation, and video, she re-situates substances gathered from the environment - water, sediment, road salt, snow, and bark - into visual forms that carry both scientific and emotional meaning. The labor of collecting these materials is intentionally slow and often inconvenient - a contrast to our convenience-driven culture.
Her work has been supported by Minnesota State Arts Board Grants, the Kolman & Reeb Gallery Project Space Grant, and artist residencies including Pine Needles at the St Croix Watershed Research Station with the Science Museum of Minnesota. As a certified Community Climate Leader, Nature and Forest Therapy Guide, and Minnesota Water Steward, her artwork reflects our human connection with nature through freshwater protection and climate action. Annie lives and works between Minneapolis, MN and Brooklyn, NY.
Stay Tuned for 2026 Community Events!
Alumni Artists-in-Residence
Amanda Lovelee
Summer 2025Amanda Lovelee is a civic artist whose work bridges public art, environmental science, and systems change. She creates large-scale, cross-sector projects that use empathy and play to shift conversations about community, equity, and our shared future. Amanda’s practice is rooted in collaboration - with scientists, planners, government agencies, and residents - making the invisible visible and translating between institutional systems and lived experiences. From a city-run popsicle truck gathering urban planning input to love letters that helped change park policy, her work invites people to fall in love with their home. www.AmandaLovelee.com
Tomiko Jones
Tomiko Jones’ photography and multidisciplinary installations explore social, cultural, and geopolitical transitions, considering the twin crises of too much and too little in the age of climate change. Her ongoing project These Grand Places explores public land and constructed national identity; initially prompted by the administration’s list of federally protected public land to be reviewed for de-regulation. Supported with a mobile research studio, a live/work studio using renewable solar as the power source, Tomiko traveled to the most urgent sites under review to gather visual and verbal material. These immersive, temporary residencies are essential to understanding place, people, and the politics of protection.
www.TomikoJonesPhoto.com
Summer 2024
Summer 2024Maysey Craddock
Best known for her visceral gouache paintings of ephemeral landscapes, Maysey Craddock examines the dualities and mysteries of nature and those relationships to space and time. Through saturated earth tones and translucent elemental layers, she depicts the spaces in between, the interactions of nature and architecture, and what happens beyond the grasp of human control. Her imagery is dense and fluid, with trees, watery surfaces, and roots figuring prominently as metaphors of the eternal cycles of death and rebirth, and the inevitability of entropy. www.MayseyCraddock.com
