Rhonda Dass

Born and raised near the Laurentian Divide in northern Minnesota, water has always been at the center of my work. Its shifting formations in the atmosphere, the way that sunlight bounces off it in its many forms, and always how it changes the colors of the world around me.

I bounced back and forth between academics and working until I finally found my path into academia. I was fortunate to have the opportunity to work with the creative faculty at the University of Wisconsin, Superior art department, finishing my bachelor’s degree in 2002. I was recruited to graduate school and found myself following a different path to creativity, as a McNair Fellow at Indiana University, Bloomington’s top rated Folklore program. I finished my Master’s with a thesis on how female tattoo artists negotiate their identity as artists in a male dominated field in 2005. I would finish my dual PhDS in American Studies and Folklore while starting my own career as faculty at Minnesota State University, Mankato in 2009.

My artwork takes many forms – I paint with oils and watercolors, I draw with pen and ink, charcoal, and pencil, I also weave working both on large multi-harness floor looms, tapestry looms, small inkle looms, and even off loom, I design and sew clothing from my own patterns, and do beadwork and leather crafts. I make paper and then draw on it. At the base of all of these art forms is my understanding of water and what it can do and how it shapes our world and who we are in that world. I see it in the landscapes and cloudscapes around me each day and find beauty in how it piles into thunderheads that rampage across that landscape, both threatening and nourishing our world with its presence. I would start a Masters in Art shortly after gaining the position of full professor and as the Covid pandemic started in 2019. I completed my MFA one month after beginning work in New Mexico.

The landscapes of New Mexico drew me to the Mesilla Valley where I find inspiration in the grandeur of the diverse mountain ranges and the evidence of ancient water ways. This continues to inspire my work in the many mediums I participate in, but most evident in the oil paintings in my most current body of work titled “Turbulence” focusing on the dynamics between the mountains and sky of the southwest desert.