A map of the Twin Cities composed of the words and languages of those who call them home. (Susan Armington)
When Jennifer Young first showed Susan Armington her future studio space at the California Building, she took one look and thought, “Are you kidding me? Is this heaven?”
With its high ceilings, huge windows and light-flooded beauty, she was hooked. She said that, in the two decades since, no matter her mood, she’s suddenly happy when she arrives.
Almost immediately, the space allowed her to expand the ambition of her work. Armington had received her first State Arts Board grant in 2004 to create a map of the Twin Cities composed of the words and languages of all the people who call it home. Her mentor, Joyce Lyon, helped Armington think big; together, they came up with the idea of doing the map in three large panels. The 6’ x 9’ piece was the largest Armington had ever attempted.
Her studio at the California Building, with its high ceilings and lengthy walls, made the scale possible, allowing her to look at the piece from a distance and challenging her to engage the surface differently than she would for up-close viewing. All told, she interviewed 49 people in 29 languages for the project, getting each interviewee to write something in their native language. The piece, titled “Geography of Home,” took a year and a half to complete and opened a 2006 show at the Weisman Art Museum.
Armington said she has Joyce Lyon to thank for another of her most significant works, the Talking Suitcases. Armington was a student in Lyon’s drawing class when she first hit upon the idea for the project. Her father was battling cancer at the time, so she was forever drawing pictures of him in class, but she realized that, to anyone who didn’t know her father as she did, the pictures only showed an old man. Armington began to draw and create handmade things that told his stories instead. She picked up the motif of a suitcase one could open and pull stories out one by one.
“I did that for the final project in [Lyon’s] drawing class,” Armington said. “Which tells you how great [she] is that that could have been a project for the drawing class. It became a fundamental project for me and my life and my work.”
Armington would go on to turn the Talking Suitcases project into a performance art piece, performed in her California Building studio during Art-A-Whirl®. Later, she began hosting workshops in her space to guide others through making their own Talking Suitcases, creating objects imbued with meaning. “Really, it’s not complete until the people who’ve made the suitcase sit in a circle and we share them with each other,” Armington said. “And sometimes you hear the deepest, most beautiful things and their eyes sparkle because they’re talking about things that are in their heart.”
The California Building has been home to some of Armington’s dearest work. At one point, getting a dozen of her “Dreamcarriers”—life-size wooden figures of youth, each with a dream for their future on their back—ready to ship overseas, she asked her studio neighbor, Tom Wolf, to help her load them all into the freight elevator. The image of them all standing there, riding the elevator, was about as memorable as it gets.