Art Is My Weapon : MN

Pillsbury United Communities presents the local exhibit “Art Is My Weapon” at Gamut Gallery. Inspired by the national traveling exhibition, Guns In The Hands of Artists produced by Jonathan Ferrara Gallery, Art Is My Weapon is an outgrowth of that project that came to the Twin Cities in the summer of 2016.  Guns In the Hands of Artists was first organized in New Orleans in the mid 1990’s by artist Brian Borrello and Jonathan Ferrara to create a conversation about guns and gun violence in our society by bringing the conversation in the realm of art as the language for dialogue. In August of 2016, Pillsbury United Communities – in collaboration with the City of Minneapolis and the Minneapolis Police Department – conducted a gun buyback to remove guns from the street with no questions asked. We collected up to 250 guns that were decommissioned and disseminated to locally recognized artists to use as raw materials in their art.

Painters, glass artists, sculptors, photographers, poets, and other artists used the decommissioned firearms to make works of art that address the issue of guns and gun violence in America. Each artist used the guns in their medium to express a thought, make a statement, open a discussion and stimulate thinking about guns in our culture.

Art is My Weapon is curated locally by Nikki McComb of Pillsbury United Communities and John Schuerman of Instinct Gallery.