About WARM

WARM: Where women artists connect, learn, and thrive.

WARM connects emerging and professional women artists, encouraging them to create and exhibit art and to increase their participation in the art world.

As a catalyst for women artists to assist each other in achieving their goals, WARM promotes and provides advocacy and assistance for its member’s projects. Membership is open to all who support WARM’s mission, whether you are an artist or not.

 

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WARM Board of Directors
History of WARM

WARM Board of Directors

Tara Tieso
President

Tara L Tieso is an abstract artist who calls Saint Paul home and lives in the original Lowertown Artist’s Lofts Cooperative, one of the oldest live/work artist communities in the US.  She works in encaustic, an ancient beeswax and resin medium fused to its substrate with a torch. Her work focuses on translating memory and depth of feeling into color and texture that can be experienced viscerally. Of her medium,Tieso says, “Wax mimics the ebb and flow of our lives, the warming and settling of our passions, the ever new dance of leaving our marks and then going back into the yielding surface of our evolving story again and again. The ability to use fire is not just an obviously primal experience, but a powerful and unpredictable tool to wield creatively.” A 2011 recipient of the McKnight Foundation-funded Metropolitan Regional Arts Council’s Next Step Grant, and 2012 recipient of the Minnesota State Arts Board Artist Initiative Grant, her work hangs in collections in the Twin Cities, greater Minnesota, and Philadelphia.

Layl McDill
Vice-President & Programming Committee Co-Coordinator

Layl McDill creates mixed media sculptures of animals, women, flying machines, and other worlds of wonderment. She is co-owner of Clay Squared to Infinity in the Northeast Arts District where she teaches her millefiore technique in polymer clay. Layl shows her work at art centers, galleries, and arts festivals around the country. Recent awards include “Best of Show” at the Banfill-Locke Center for the Arts Member show and “Best in Sculpture” at the Oconomowoc Festival of Art (2014). Her connection to WARM began in 1994 when she first moved to Minneapolis and was looking to connect to the thriving artist community. She was a protégée working with Mimi Holmes. After years of building her art career, she became a Mentor herself in 2009 and co-chairperson for the WARM programming committee in 2011. She has a passion for bringing women together so their art and creativity can thrive and build from each other’s strengths and experience.

 

Tina Nemetz
Board Member & Mentor Program Co-Coordinator

Tina Nemetz is a mixed media cast iron sculptor, photographer and parade artist. Interpreting both the transitory and enduring emotional and spiritual experiences, Tina explores her life experience through form. She images the fragile, yet enduring, transformation of female energy by combining native materials with the FE-male energy of iron. She holds a BFA from Minneapolis College of Art and Design and a MFA from Maryland Institute College of Art. Tina works with Heart of the Beast Puppet and Mask Theater, Ironhead Sculptural Services and Women’s Art Resources of Minnesota Mentor Program. Tina’s heart belongs to community arts projects and empowering people.

 

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WARM Staff

 

Karen Searle
Mentor Program Co-Coordinator

Karen Searle creates sculptures in fiber and mixed media.  She has exhibited and taught internationally, curated art exhibitions, and served as a juror for international textile design competitions. She has been a WARM mentor since 1991 and has served on the WARM Board and on the Mentor Program Committee.

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History of WARM

by Alis Olsen

WARM was established in 1973 by a group of women artists who found themselves underrepresented in the art world–in gallery exhibitions, as professors in academia, and in art history books. Created as a cooperative, WARM members supported one another in order to bring women to the forefront of their local art community.

The WARM Mentor Program, founded in 1982, is a supportive resource that pairs emerging and professional women artists for two years. WARM also provides the WARM Mentor Intensive Program, a goal- or project-based program open to all artists seeking a one-on-one mentorship for a period lasting one to three months.

In 1976, WARM opened a gallery in the Minneapolis Warehouse District. This gallery space provided opportunities for women artists to exhibit work which explored otherwise taboo subjects around sex and gender. Throughout its existence, the gallery held many highly successful and visible exhibitions of work by WARM artists and nationally recognized women artists. Since then, WARM, with the support of volunteers has continued to offer exhibition and programming to meet the changing needs of women artists.

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