residency
Flaten Art Museum | St. Olaf College (March 3-6, 2025)
“Wealth is in relationships.” - Holly Ajala -
SOUDIO is a collective of six Black femme ARTISTS working together to investigate future models of personal financial stability while interrogating gendered administrative labor. Dispersed across the United States in cities large and small, the ARTISTS are connected primarily through social media. Using live-streamed broadcasts, memes, timeline posts, and direct messaging, as virtual gathering spaces, they communicate conceptual modalities, exhibition schedules, material explorations, and updated accolades. Their artistic practices are multimodal - spanning sculpture, dance, time-based media, and digitized forms.
The collective’s name “SOUDIO” comes from the term sou-sou/susu, an informal loan club that originates in West Africa and the Caribbean. Central to SOUDIO’s practice is the commitment to contribute to a communal account as an exercise in personal/collective investment. These habits of shared accountability confront the individualistic practices encouraged by American consumerist economies. PATRONS are held to the same contribution schedule as the ARTISTS, voluntarily opting out of the quarterly payouts, as an investment in the ARTISTS themselves. Each PATRON receives a print portfolio, a physical return on their investment that emphatically responds to inequitable socioeconomic systems – employment, real estate, lending practices, the art market – that have historically disadvantaged and intentionally exploited the labor of Black women and femme-identified people. Their alternative investment model, like the Art Markets that inspired it, is unregulated. Trust, integrity, and mutual aid are central to the collective’s practice.
The SOUDIO’s residency at St. Olaf College serves as an incubator for the collective’s creative expression, providing the artists time to interface and push their practice in person, engage and collaborate with St. Olaf students, faculty, and staff, and build bridges with like-minded cultural producers in the Twin Cities. Students in Anda Tanaka’s Printmaking 226 Relief and Lithography course will collaborate with the SOUDIO artists to produce a limited edition print portfolio. The portfolio will be acquired by the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem and other collecting institutions.
The SOUDIO members are self-identified Black femmes, whose works are part of the permanent collections of El Museo del Barrio, The Studio Museum of Harlem, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, The Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, RISD Museum, and the Deutsche Bank Collection of Works on Paper. This residency is generously supported by the Glen H. and Shirley Beito Gronlund Annual Exhibition Series Fund at St. Olaf College.