The Exquisite Mile

Artist Name

Sarah Beadle

Installation Date

July 28, 2016

Details

In partnership with Rochester Downtown Alliance (RDA), local artist Sarah Beadle, and the Rochester Art Center’s teen art group Tastes Like Paint (TLP) The Exquisite Mile was a community art-making event inspired by ideas of pollination and artistic research within a one-mile radius of downtown Rochester.

The Exquisite Mile was guided by the goal to connect the Rochester community with a participatory activity within downtown Rochester. After exploring specific areas that could use reactivation or re-contextualization, the project chose to highlight Rochester’s human and natural migratory relationships. Rochester’s main industry revolves around the Mayo Clinic, and is marked by millions of people constantly coming and going, whether employed there or receiving care.

This relationship can be read symbolically as one of pollen and pollinators, and led organizers to consider a central question: how do the migrating pollinators of a place experience it?

The Exquisite Mile evoked the art historical concept of The Exquisite Corpse, a collaborative game associated with the Surrealist art movement in the 1920s. Participants write or draw on a sheet of paper, fold it to hide their contribution, and then pass to the next participant to add to it—resulting in a collectively-created, spontaneous, and surprise work of art.

About the Artist

Sarah Beadle is an artist, curator, and educator who uses photography, architectural intervention, and event production to test everyday experiences of pleasure, power, and consumption. Her work is site focused, process driven, and activated by subjective research. Recent projects examine the cultural regulation of acts of reciprocity, especially around food and service labor.

She co-directs the artist collective Notch with artists Miles Ake and Keith Pasko. Presently, she is Artist in Residence at Bemis Center for Contemporary Art. 

Address

40 Civic Center Dr SE
Rochester, MN 55904

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