John Schuerman - Walking at the Speed of Site

John Schuerman in his Minneapolis studio

In his missives to Minneapolis, John Schuerman indicates an unwillingness to take things sitting down. 

He is a man of action, primarily a man of movement, walking actually. A long-time visual artist, John decided 5 or 6 years ago to give himself over entirely to drawing.  As soon as he did, he says he had a “visceral response.” “Oh man,” he thought, “I do not want to be confined to making marks on paper.” 

And so, he walks.

Walking is now integral to the art he produces. His daily ambulations around Minneapolis are assignments he gives himself to measure and record his – and our – world. 2020 and 2021 were hard years for all of us, and John’s artistic evolution and output reflect that reality. “The shit hit the fan with the pandemic and George Floyd and all the ensuing political stuff,” he notes. “The Walking Projects are me reckoning with the world. [By walking], you come face to face with something, and you get your mind around the possibilities or the potential future that might unfold.” 

John walks to contemplate the societal challenges and uncertainties of his home place while also considering the power of art to ignite change. “A walk is an artwork, just like a drawing or painting,” he asserts. John’s walks, then, are both medium and subject matter, and his documentation – via photograph, drawings, written word – interprets the walking experience so others may examine and consider, be moved to action, or empathize. “Walking suits me,” says the lanky artist. “I like the speed of walking. It’s fast enough that I don’t feel like I’m doing nothing; it’s slow enough that I can observe what is happening.”

An early walk put John in two of Minneapolis’ neighborhoods:  one of the city’s wealthiest and one of its poorest. He carried an audio recorder with him. One neighborhood sounded of water, the other of the highway. “I walked around the two neighborhoods, a mile apart. I could walk between them,” he says of their physical proximity. Questions sparked as he walked:  What might a unifying step be between these two communities? How do we talk about wealth and poverty?  What neutral space would it require for that conversation to happen? 

“I Walked There and Back” by John Schuerman

Questions have continued for John with each mile covered. He isn’t seeking answers, per se, but wrestles with - and creates from - the tension that springs from inquiry and discovery. “I have to somehow face it,” John says, referring to gun violence and the political volatility that surround him, a divided populace, rising crime, homelessness, care for community, and the limitations of art to solve anything. “What is the power of a symbolic act?” John asks. His personal practice may lead to a broader reckoning; and, he notes, it may not. “When I do these walks, on a bad day,” he acknowledges, “I feel the heaviness of ‘no consequence’ of the work.”  As an artist and human being, he says he is changed by his walking experiences. But, he adds, those moments have “very little impact unless it ripples out into community”    

Page from “Unstillness” - Walking Until 6 Feet Apart

And so: he faces and invites community when he walks. Between the vernal equinoxes of 2020 and 2021 (bookmarking spring’s annual return to the northern hemisphere), John walked. Emphasizing the importance of a daily practice, his “Walking Projects” took him out into his world each day and back to his home studio. His walks, both intense and intentional, ranged from 2 to 20-plus miles. He has captured 25 of his most notable walks from that year in his self-published collection, Unstillness. 

Unstillness starts simply, stealthily. Pressed by isolation and contagion, John followed solitary walks others told him they had taken during lockdown, with John thinking about each person while he re-traced their steps. Then, he and a friend agreed to walk toward each other, from their separate home starting points, until they were 6 feet apart. At their encounter, each man bowed and returned wordlessly home. After Covid closed our city, John walked from his Powerhorn Park neighborhood to the eerily empty (and silent) First Avenue in downtown Minneapolis. With a quick sketch and a selfie, John captured his own aloneness and the shuttered space: so much for humans congregating; so much for live music, for revelry, for joy.

In mid-July, 2020, responding to weeks of chaos and curfews, John walked the 20+ mile perimeter of Minneapolis’ Third Precinct, from the urban heart to the farthest, almost-suburban reaches, those areas he calls “the edge lands.” The artist describes the 24 hours he was away from his home as a “walking meditation on our community’s pain and roiling,” less than 2 months after the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officer, Derek Chauvin.

“The Cauldron” by John Schuerman

One artifact arising from the “Precinct Perimeter Walk” is “The Cauldron.” Made of “arsonist ashes and ink on paper,” the images float within the hand-drawn boundaries of a Third Precinct map, and bleed past them into a blurry, almost sub-conscious territory beyond. John writes that the piece captures “the George Floyd murder site, ground-zero for the mass property destruction (Lake and Minnehaha), the two largest homeless encampments (Powderhorn and Minnehaha) and the soaring crime rates, free food stations, protests, street art, and more” that griped the city, and the nation, at that moment in time. Photographs, more drawings, and numbered written entries detail John’s mindset as he contemplated the city’s collective darkness, the pressing shortages of clean water and safe housing after the rioting and fires, the unnerving portions of his walk (sleeping in a park overnight; overheard conversations recounting violence and death; gunshots in the night), graffiti tributes to the fallen, and the demonizing of police. By walk’s end, John questions his ability to rise above self-interest and personal comfort; he strides again the next day heeding poet Robert Frost’s words: “I can see no way out but through.”  

John says he was on “a pretty steady diet of dark” while he walked the city between March of 2020 and the fall months of that year. For balance, he spent the Winter Solstice following the arc of the sun for 8 hours and 46 minutes, from sun-up to sun-down. He walked all day “against the grain of the city” for, as he noticed, there is no path in our geographic grid that abides “a reference point that is 91.4 million miles away.” At day’s end, he found himself in Apple Valley, directly south of where he started, having walked half his time in a crescent roughly eastward, and half roughly westward.  At last: the days would be getting longer.

The blue door of John’s backyard studio reads “Possibilities.” It is a short walk from his home’s back door, and not many steps from sites of his city’s trauma and transition. There are days his walks feel heavy. Some days he wonders about his assignment, “Oh, man!  Do I have to do it?” He walks through the doorway and out into the world anyway: “It feels like I am where I am supposed to be.”    

Resources:

Photos by Tracy Nordstrom and John Schuerman

All art work by John Schuerman

John Schuerman:  https://www.schuermanfineart.com/