- [Narrator] On this episode of Postcards - I really feel like painting and art and writing about one story truly does have the power to change the world.

- In a couple of days, we had 200,000 views and 5,000 shares and I thought, oh, maybe we have something here.

- We want to make sure we touch all your senses the moment that you have your first piece in your hands.

(lively music) - [Narrator] Postcards is made possible by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund and the citizens of Minnesota, additional support provided by Margaret A. Cargill Philanthropies, Mark and Margaret Yackel-Juleen on behalf of Shalom Hill Farms, a retreat and conference center in a prairie setting near Windham, Minnesota on the web@shalomhillfarm.org, Alexandria Minnesota, a year-round destination with hundreds of lakes, trails and attractions for memorable vacations and events.

More information at explorealex.com, the Lake Region Arts Council's Arts Calendar, an arts and cultural heritage funded digital calendar showcasing upcoming art events and opportunities for artists in west central Minnesota on the web at lrac4calendar.org, playing today's new music plus your favorite hits, 967Kram online at 967kram.com.

(lively guitar music) - I am a queer Chicana who lives in rural Minnesota.

(lively guitar music) The perspective I like to try to bring to my paintings is exploring color and bringing a vibrant sense of life into my canvases with broad brush strokes and kind of wild, flat color and bright images that are hard to look away from.

That's my goal, it's to draw somebody in and have them want to spend time with my paintings.

(lively guitar music) I just finished this series called Kitchen Saints which are oil on wood that I found.

So I'm really into trying to use whatever materials I have access to.

So some of these are like old palette boards and old boards that I've just kind of found.

And I wanted to focus on this Mexican retablo painting style.

So this history, traditional history of painting saints and instead of saints, I decided to do kitchen saints which to me are hot sauce bottles.

(soft guitar music) I'm working on a series of paintings that I'm loosely titling Roots right now that are exploring the roots of my family's migration story.

So my great-grandparents migrated from Mexico to Kansas at the turn of the 20th century.

And that is an undertold story that I'm really trying to share in multiple ways.

So I used to be a professor and I was an academic for the last 20 years of my life and was working on a really intense book manuscript tracing that history and trying to make visible the invisible stories of the women who migrated with their husbands and partners to work on the railroad.

And so this series of work Roots is exploring that migration story, trying to rewrite Mexican Americans into that narrative of railroad workers of westward expansion of community building and also to highlight women's role in that.

These two paintings are just some small studies that I did when I was at the Tallgrass artist residency in Kansas.

And they are of a renovated Mexican bunk house where railroad laborers used to live, and they were put up by the railroad there just about a hundred feet away from the railroad.

And so this is the only inhabitable space that you can go visit.

And so it's in Matfield Green, Kansas.

If you want to stay there, it's an Airbnb.

So you can book a room and the trains keep you awake as they roll by.

But it was really cool to be in a space kind of similar to what my ancestors must have felt like when they came to work on the railroad.

I'm really interested in that interplay between public and private.

So I'm trying to figure out how can I express and paint the outside and the inside colliding.

So these outside scenes of the legacies of railroad workers are in railroad ties that we might drive by, or they're in the trains that continue to ride the rails and the interior scenes where people make their lives and their homes are the inside part of that public private erosion that I'm really interested in exploring in my broader work.

(upbeat music) I think every geography has obviously challenges related to some of the larger systemic issues that we're engaging with as people trying to figure out how do we live with one another especially as increased diversity, whatever that looks like race or gender, sexuality continues to be our reality.

I have found living in a rural Minnesota environment to be really affirming in terms of a space where I can be free to be whoever I want.

And I really enjoy being in a place where I can really be my fullest self and be unapologetic about who I am in the space of my home and that my rural property allows me to be able to do that.

(soft piano music) The painting behind me is a view from my upstairs, so my little kitchen nook.

And I painted that piece last year.

It's called Tablescape for Two?.

And it is a scene looking out from where I enjoy my breakfast every morning out onto the lake that I live with my wife on.

That gives me a lot of confidence that I'm doing the right thing that I was called to try to figure out how to move mud on a surface, because that's what painting is.

It's simply moving things and countering nothing, something out of nothing, which is like this amazing magical experience that I haven't found in any other medium, including my writing, which also brings me a lot of joy.

But painting for me just it's like a really deep well of obsession.

And I'm really grateful to be on the journey.

(inspiring music) I really feel like painting an art and writing about one story truly does have the power to change the world.

And I hope that my story can be an inspiration to other people who say like, oh, I'm not creative or, oh I'm not an artist because I really truly think everybody is an artist.

And we simply don't have a lot of support around exploring those parts of ourselves.

So if people have even the slightest interest I would say, just go for it because it can truly change your life and put you on a trajectory towards doing something that really makes your heart sing.

And it certainly has for me.

And I would want that for anybody else who wants it.

(inspiring music) (soft piano music) - I think what I like best about the campfire flyers is just watching them work.

It's just pure science and physics interacting with the fire and it's really kind of magical.

- Carl and I were driving across the country on our way to the east coast.

And for some reason I just started thinking about the heat coming off of a campfire.

We came up with these idea of dragons that their wings are powered by the updraft of the flames.

- And when we were thinking about this, it's like, well what can we do with that?

It's like, well, a fire pit.

And of course that fire pit had to be a castle on fire.

(sensational music) - We came up with the idea a couple of years ago and didn't do anything with it.

And then when COVID happened we had some downtime, said, okay I'm gonna play around with it.

And we did a prototype and it worked and we thought, oh my gosh, this is unbelievable.

We put a little 20-second video on my personal website and saying, oh, this is what Carl and I are working on.

In a couple of days we had like 200,000 views and 5,000 shares and I thought, oh, maybe we have something here.

- The first one worked great and the proof of concept was there, and then the next 50 didn't.

And we've been cut and recutting and reforming and hand forming and figuring out all of the details and doing all the social media and the networking and the Kickstarter, the campaign.

And it's been a lot different than what we usually would do.

(soft music) - When I'm building my normal kinetic sculptures, it's all one of a kind.

And I don't have to worry about reproducing things.

When you are making it mass production you have to make it industrial friendly.

You have to think of the types of machines it would take to make certain parts, how they're made, what's an efficient way to have them made.

(machine rumbling) - When we were researching this project and doing the patents and everything, there's nothing really to go with a fire pit other than a fire pit.

So to have something that's purely for beauty and aesthetics to interact with the flames and the fire is pretty unique and pretty new.

(gentle guitar music) - The site where my studio is now used to be an old industrial site.

It overlooks the Ottertail River, just above the Pisca Dam.

So it's a beautiful location.

And my wife and I are trying to figure out what to do with it.

And then a good friend of mine, Scott Wagnal, said my new son-in-law is a good brewer.

Think about doing a brewery?

Sure, why not?

So that's how we ended up with Fergus Brewing here.

(loud rock music) So we cleaned up the old industrial site, put a lot of work into that, put a new roof on the cool building to make it look better, and built a big deck on it.

- The brewery has been a lot more work than I expected but it's also been a lot of fun.

When you step back and look at it and you see how much we've done, it's really quite remarkable.

- The deck on the building is one that Carl and I actually designed and built.

It's a steel deck, so it was kind of pushing the limits for us.

But again, it was fun doing that.

(upbeat music) In the last few years, I've been doing a lot more large-scale stuff.

My son and I together did a really large piece for a candy store in Las Vegas on the Strip.

- I think it's probably been the most fun.

I've had my entire career doing this.

It worked on a scale that was just bigger-than-life.

It produced lots of challenges and I can't wait to do another one.

- When we got it there, we installed it in the middle of the night because it had the least traffic.

They had a gigantic crane that lifted this thing up hundreds of feet in the air.

All of a sudden, you started thinking about welds.

Is that weld good enough?

Is that gonna hold up there, and not gonna cracking to the ground?

And it was fine, but nerve-wracking.

I live in an artist's dream life.

I'm getting calls from all over the world which just surprises me.

In the last month or so, I've gotten calls from a museum in Dubai, a pizza place in India, someone in Hong Kong.

How they find out about me, I'm not even sure because I don't advertise there or anything like that.

They just find it on the internet and say, hey, we want you.

I would say in my career, I'm in my mature phase.

I'm constantly working on things that probably people won't even notice how things are put together, how the machine itself actually works.

But the look of it is something I'm very happy with.

(soft piano music) - I do consider this the family business.

And I can't say whether I'm glad he got me into it or not because it's all I've ever known.

I was raised at the arts festivals that my father and mother went to and my work was heavily influenced by my father early on.

And as time has moved on I have kind of develop my own style and my own voice and my own work.

So this is the endless road trip.

This one's been a lot of fun.

It's a little bit different than my usual stuff but it's one of my favorites.

And this is actually the 70th model piece I've made which is probably why it took nine months is because if it was piece number 68, it wouldn't have worked the same.

(soft music) - I think it's brought us closer together because we're working with each other all the time.

My son is an amazing engineer.

And I don't know if he even knows how amazing he is.

The things he can put together and how they work dovetails well with me and some of the things that I do.

It just makes it more interesting.

- It won't fall if you get it over here because we'll have more pull off.

Okay.

Working with my dad is fun.

We do have our father-son squabbles but I'd be surprised to find a father-son team that doesn't.

I've circled this globe a few times now.

And the number of people I found that think like my father are very few.

It's a lot of fun to be able to work with him, to have him come over and look at ideas and figure things out, and have somebody that thinks like I do.

And that's something really special.

(inspiring music) (soft guitar music) - I definitely call myself the coyote kid.

(soft guitar music) I'm the second generation owner of The Clay Coyote.

It started when I was 14 years old on a farm, just north of where we're sitting right now in Hutchinson, Minnesota.

My folks began it.

It was their full-time jobs.

I thought they were crazy.

I was a teenager and we used to have a little pump house on our farm where people could come pick up a pot.

And it was on the honor system and they could leave us $10.

And that's how we started.

People would just drive down a gravel road and find some really amazing pottery.

And over the last 25 years, we've gotten bigger and created a whole different line of pottery that you can cook with.

And my mom still works here with me today.

(upbeat music) Here at the Clay Coyote, we use a special type of clay called flameware.

It expands and contracts at a different rate than normal pottery.

So it can go on the stove top or on the grill.

It takes the heat.

It's really unique.

Only a handful of potters across the country have access to this kind of clay.

And it's our specialty line.

(lively music) At the Clay Coyote, walk in the front door and it's kind of labyrinth because the first thing you experience is our gallery where we sell all the pieces that we make like the pieces behind me and pieces from artists from all over the country.

But there's a sign over the door to the studio that says, please come in.

And we really want everybody to walk back there and see the potters at work.

Every single day of the week, we have people throwing, trimming, glazing, firing and then, you know what else we do a ton of?

We clean pots.

It seems like the biggest job in pottery is washing pots.

So there's a lot of cleaning dishes here.

(upbeat music) We have a great team here at the Clay Coyote.

It's a family business.

My mother still is our main glazer, and she runs all of our kilns.

We have six other potters who work with us and they are all trained in different styles and techniques.

I'm much more on the front side of it helping to work with customers.

And I knew I was gonna have to bring a lot of artists to our region to become potters of the Clay Coyote.

So we created an emerging artist program where young artists work here and they have a steady stream of income but then they also have access to all of our resources.

So it just helps the artists launch their personal line of pottery sooner.

(lively music) - It was by chance and social media actually, I saw a post from Morgan and Clay Coyote that there was an opening for a studio potter.

You know, I've been doing pottery for a long time and I was looking for an opportunity to get better as a potter.

So I felt like I owed it to myself to come down here and talk to Morgan.

So I reached out to her and came down here and instantly within 30 minutes of us talking, I think both of us knew that it was a really good opportunity and I wanted to take advantage of it, and they wanted to have me.

(lively music) Pottery is process-based, so usually the potters work in series or in a group.

So Morgan will say this week, we need 20 grill baskets which is pretty often because that's our number one seller.

So on Monday she'll say we need 20 grills.

And that's when my process starts.

So with pottery, you begin by throwing the piece and then you let it dry.

You trim and shape the bottom, stamp it and attach the handles and things like that.

So a typical day for me, it depends on what day of the week it is and where I am in that process.

(lively piano music) It's very therapeutic.

I love working with my hands.

I love being able to perfect crafting and creating something that's beautiful and functional.

(lively music) - Our number one product at the Clay Coyote is the grill basket.

No one else in the country makes one.

It's made out of our flameware clay.

It weighs about three pounds, it has 44 holes in it.

You put it on the grill and you throw all the vegetables you want in it.

And there are many commercial grill baskets out there but they're all metal and metal notoriously conducts heat, therefore it burns your food.

The clay actually spreads that heat out so that you don't get burned, grilled vegetables.

- Most of our standard items, we double box to make sure that they're protected when they travel and the fewer breakages that we have, the less things we have to reship and fewer disappointed customers as well.

So kind of have our system for each of the pots that we use.

You know we do our best to use recycled or environmentally friendly items.

All the paper we use to wrap the pots are from our local newspaper that's recycled paper from them.

All these peanuts here are biodegradable ones as well.

And then the bubble wrap I used on here was from the package that we just got today.

- Over the last five years, we've made a lot of changes but one of the best ones is really putting an emphasis on our website and our social media interactions.

We ship out more products to people from coast to coast.

When you come in here, you get to touch the pot you get to see the potters working.

So we really spend a lot of time figuring out how to translate that to the web so that people feel just as connected to us.

(soft music) We ship out the boxes and when they open it there's Clay Coyote paper with our logo on it.

There's a card that tells them how to use the pot.

There's a story card that tells them about us.

And then there's a bar of soap that smells like whatever they're gonna cook first in that piece.

We want to make sure we touch like all your senses the moment that you get to have your first piece in your hands.

And so you've got the touch and you've got the sight and you've got the crinkling, so you can hear it.

And then we were like, well, how do we get smell?

So, we worked with a local soap woman and she made us bread smells, coffee smells, basil for the pizza, charcoal for the grill, lemon for the tagin, so it's the specific smell.

(lively music) When we moved to downtown Hutchinson I brought a lot of the memories from the farm with us.

The sign is made of the barn material from the farm.

There's a sign out in the studio that is the original sign from that pump house where people just left $10 and took a mug back in 1994.

There's a lot of nods to history around here.

Ceramics is kind of ancient.

And even though we only started 30 years ago there's a lot of history in this building.

(soft guitar music) (lively music) - [Narrator] Postcards is made possible by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund and the citizens of of Minnesota, additional support provided by Margaret A. Cargill Philanthropies, Mark and Margaret Yackel-Juleen on behalf of Shalom Hill Farms, a retreat and conference center in a prairie setting near Windham, Minnesota on the web at shalomhillfarm.org, Alexandria Minnesota, a year-round destination with hundreds of lakes, trails and attractions for memorable vacations and events.

More information at explorealex.com, the Lake Region Arts Council's arts calendar, an Arts and Cultural Heritage funded digital calendar showcasing upcoming art events and opportunities for artists in west central Minnesota on the web at lrac4calendar.org, playing today's new music plus your favorite hits 967Kram online at 967kram.com.