Sculptures in this exhibition are made from sixteen wood species sourced with care for ethical treatment of people and ecological sustainability. Species native to Minnesota are sourced from local retailers and producers when possible. Much of the wood used was certified by the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) or by the Sustainable Forestry Initiative (SFI). FSC is identified by major environmental organizations as taking a more rigorous, outcomes-based approach to human and environmental health. SFI was founded by wood producers and has been criticized for industry capture. Both have been blamed for “greenwashing” – signaling sustainability while obscuring negative practices and consequences. Navigating these certifications to source ethical wood is a challenge. 

I avoid using “exotic” or international wood species that have a long history of over-extraction and damage to ecosystems and labor, such as ebony and rosewood. Instead, I turn to available alternatives that are certified as sustainably harvested. In some cases, such as wenge from West Africa, I could not find documented certifications, only suggestions by suppliers that it was ethically sourced. Where possible, I also sought out remnant/scrap wood, or reclaimed, returned, repurposed wood. Given that Littorally is literally about defending water and nature, I made sincere attempts to source wood ethically while encountering a national and global supply chain that was more about obfuscation than transparency. So, if the wood itself is of various and questionable origin, I offer this brief description to encourage critical questions about these systems of production we rely on for construction materials, paper, and the ubiquitous wood products that fill our homes, our lives, and these galleries.

No stains, paints, or colorants are used on the woods in this exhibition with a few exceptions. Most of the work is finished with raw linseed oil.

Domestic sustainably harvested, some select cut:

• Curly Maple, MN (Siwek)

• Black Walnut, Southern MN river bottoms (Forest Products)

• Red Oak, MN (Siwek)

• Spalted White Oak, MN (Siwek) 

• Birch, MN (Siwek)

• Aspen, MN (Menards)

• Alder, Pacific NW US (Siwek)

• Hickory, Southern US (Forest Products)

• Redwood, California (Siwek)

• Cedar (Western Red), Western US (Menards returns)

• Douglas Fir, Western US (Menards scrap wood)

Sustainably harvested, select cut logging alternatives to threatened species:

• Katalox, Central and South America (Forest Products)

• Leopardwood, Central America (Siwek)

• Cumaru, South America (Forest Products)

• Purpleheart, Central America (Forest Products)

• Wenge, West Africa (Forest Products,  questionable provenance)

Mike Klein

Ark of the Ordovician, 2026

Cedar, fir, maple, red oak, black walnut, birch, felt, brachiopod fossils (Ordivician period, 450 million years ago, used with permission of St. Paul Department of Parks and Recreation)

How do you wrap your head around 450 million years in the past, a time when no land mass existed in this place, only ancient seas? The brachiopods in this sculpture lived before land animals, dinosaurs, and most of what we know as life on Earth. They are preserved here as fossils, living tissue replaced by minerals, and released from the cliff face of Shadow Falls/Mnisina by rains and erosion after half a billion years of captivity. They are incorporated into the artwork to remind us of the vast timeline in which we exist, and of the landscape that water has formed and reformed over geologic time. The water that exists on Earth now existed then. How will we see water for its importance to human life – to all life – and for its rare uniqueness that sustains life on this planet and in this place?

Mike Klein

Bdote/Confluence, 2026

Black walnut

“Bdewakantuwan Dakota elders tell of the actual creation of humans occurring in our homeland of Minisota Makoce, but specifically at the place called Maka Cokaya Kin, or the Center of the Earth. This place is at Bdote, which means the joining or juncture of two bodies of water and in this instance refers to the area where the Minnesota River joins the Mississippi. Minnesotans have retained this word as Mendota and it is located in the midst of the Twin Cities, with Fort Snelling overlooking the sacred juncture of Bdote.” 

Waziyatawin. (2008). What does justice look like?: the struggle for liberation in Dakota homeland (First edition). Living Justice Press.

• How does water shape our sacred spaces and our sacred experiences? 

• What is unique to a people and place, and what common currents weave between our traditions and beliefs?

• How will we honor the sacred across times and traditions to seek the spiritual in our natural world?

Mike Klein

Steamboat Northerner, 2026

Wenge (West African), cedar, aspen, black and red granite, compass, wool

What did it mean to be a “northerner” in 1863, five years after statehood, at the conclusion of a genocidal campaign against the Dakota people, at the moment of the Emancipation Proclamation, and in the midst of the U.S. Civil War? The steamboat Northerner symbolizes the contradictions of that year, towing a raft of people escaping slavery to St. Paul, where they were denied landing by Irish immigrant workers. They disembarked instead at Fort Snelling, where, soon after, 547 Dakota people were crowded aboard the same boat, bound for exile after the Dakota-US War and a devastating winter in the concentration camp below the fort, on their sacred land of Bdote. 

• How do stories like that of the Northerner help us grapple with the complexity and contradictions of history? 

• What does it mean now to be a northerner, living on this land and with that legacy? 

• How do the descendants of enslaved, immigrant, and Indigenous peoples engage in truth-telling, relationship-building, and justice-doing to find a way forward together?

“On May 4, 1863 the steamboat Northerner pushed up the Mississippi River from St. Louis, bound for Fort Snelling, a military outpost north of St. Paul, Minnesota. Captained by Alfred J. Woods, the steamboat encountered a large handmade raft. Aboard were seventy-six Blacks: forty men, ten women, and twenty-six children. Robert Hickman, who was from enslavement on a plantation in Boone County, Missouri, was the leader. A preacher who could read and write had seen newspaper accounts of President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation.

On May 5, the Northerner approached the Lowertown, St. Paul levee. As local dock workers, mostly Irish, caught sight of the Blacks (commonly referred to as “contraband” by whites) on the trailing raft, they saw them as competition for jobs. As word spread, the commotion was so great that St. Paul police arrived and sided with the mob. Captain Woods ordered the boat and its raft to steam onto the fort. There, the Africans came ashore without incident and encountered hundreds of abused Native Americans huddled together, forcibly assembled near the docks.

The Dakota were part of an original group numbering more than 1,600, mostly women, children, and elders who had been held under armed guard all winter following the Dakota War of the year before in a miserable encampment in a lowland area below Fort Snelling. Minnesota government officials and military leaders were awaiting the spring thaw that would allow for their mass deportation downriver to a reservation in the Nebraska Territory. When the ice finally melted and river levels rose, hundreds died. 770 Dakota people were shipped off the day before on another steamer, the Davenport.

Having set the Hickman party ashore and unloaded the wagons and supplies for the military fort, Captain Woods ordered preparations to receive his next ‘cargo’: 547 Dakota people, whom he was transporting for the fee of $25 per head plus 10 cents a day for sustenance. Soldiers from Fort Snelling herded the Dakota aboard the Northerner ‘like so many cattle,’ as one observer put it. As they pulled away, a local minister’s wife remarked, ‘May God have mercy on them, for they can expect none from man.’

Neither the African(-American) nor the Native people were aware that just five months earlier, President Lincoln was simultaneously considering two documents that would dramatically change the fates of each group: a warrant for the mass execution of thirty-eight Dakota men and the Emancipation Proclamation.”

Source: https://aaregistry.org/story/african-and-native-americans-at-fort-snelling-minnesota-a-story/

Mike Klein

White, 1863, 2026

Aspen, bone, brachiopod fossil (Ordivician period, 450 million years ago, used with permission of St. Paul Department of Parks and Recreation)

One of my ancestors arrived in Minnesota in 1861 as a lumberman. Abner Spencer enlisted in the army just one week before the Dakota-U.S. War of 1862. After years of displacement, broken promises, and finally starvation, a large group of Dakota people fought back. My ancestor served as 5th Sergeant in Company A of the 9th Regiment of the Minnesota Infantry. He was part of Henry Sibley’s genocidal campaign against the Dakota people, following Governor Alexander Ramsey’s proclamation to the nascent Minnesota State Legislature that all Dakota people, “…must be exterminated or driven forever beyond the borders of the state.” These lands have been Dakota homelands for thousands of years. In the following year, Ho-Chunk people were targeted by a “secret society in Mankato, Minnesota named Knights of the Forest.”

Sibley, H. H. (1863). Daily journal of the Sibley Expedition, 1863. National Archives.

Coats, C. (2024). To banish forever: A secret society, the Ho-Chunk, and ethnic cleansing in Minnesota. Minnesota Historical Society Press.

• In the context of this history, what did it mean to be white back then? 

• How does that history shape the meaning of what it means to be white now?

• Why is this so difficult to examine and discuss?

• If the color white is the reflection of all colors of the spectrum, does it have its own identity apart from others? 

• Is white about purity and sameness or does it allow for textures and a range of hues? 

• How does white change over time, or when it is in shadow or darkness, or when the light shines on it?

Mike Klein

Autobibliography of Water, 2026

Fir, oak, maple, purpleheart, books

These books form an autobibliography of my evolving understanding of water in social, religious, and cultural contexts. Because I’ve spent thirty-four years of my life at St. Thomas (as a student, staff, and faculty member) my personal autobibliography is shaped by the university and, in some ways, reflects the university, too. I continue to wrestle with challenging ideas like dominion and stewardship, colonialism and indigeneity, people apart from nature, and we-are-nature-defending-itself. 

Leann Betasamosake Simpson describes a theory of water (nibi): 

“The theory of Nibi asks us to think on a scale that is outside the present moment and our own immediate needs. I’m thinking about Nibi as theory here because Nibi offers us an invitation to learn from its embodied practice, a practice of cycling that is global, is permeable and brings about a continuous rebirth on our planet. Nibi asks us to ground ourselves intimately in land and place, and relate that grounding to other movements, geographies, cultures and lands. The shorelines of our lands, shaped by water, teach us about fractals — patterns repeated across scales — and show Nishnaabeg that the same practices we engage in within our family are the practices we engage in as nations and in the larger universe. Nibi teaches us that our thinking is most powerful when it can connect the intimate to the global and move between scales effortlessly. Nibi, water, is iterative, resilient and transformative as it carves out spaces from rock over thousands of years. And water, Nibi, is interdependent and decentralized, a vessel for multitudes of land- and water-based species and communities. And finally, water and Nibi always create more possibilities. Water and Nibi are working within mino-bimaadiziwin to propel a continuous, global rebirth of life. Nibi, like all Nishnaabeg theories, is an emergent theory of internationalism. Nibi’s practices on a small scale are replicated on a larger scale. Nibi works with, and asks us to embrace, uncertainty, multiplicity, adaptation, iteration and decentralization, as forces that create the conditions for life to emerge and continue. Nibi is inside us, and it connects us to all forms of life on the planet. Nibi matters.

Simpson, L. B. (2025). Theory of Water: Nishnaabe Maps to the Times Ahead. (1st ed.). Haymarket Books.

• What books helped form your ideas about water, about what water means to you, to your family, or to your community? 

• Can you trace your understanding like a watercourse over the landscape of your shifting notions? 

• How do the ideas of other peoples and cultures shape your normative assumptions and practical interactions with this elementary chemical compound? 

• If water is so essential to all life, how do we understand it better and why do we treat it like we do?

“In 1887, a swampy area of what is now the lower quad was dredged and a dam was built across a small stream that flowed through the area. Archived records show that early students of the college recalled that the artificial lake was sometimes large enough to take small sailboats out on in warm weather and was a handy skating rink in the winter. The lake covered a portion of the current O’Shaughnessy-Frey Library site, as well as part of O’Shaughnessy Educational Center, some of Murray-Herrick Campus Center and the portion of the quad east of the main north-south sidewalk.

The lake was named in honor of Bishop Thomas Langdon Grace, the third bishop of the Diocese of Saint Paul. Upon his retirement, Grace was conferred by the Vatican the honorary title of Bishop of the Titular See of Mennith. Bishop Grace lived on the campus of the College of St. Thomas from 1890 until his death in 1897.  According to Joseph Connors in the book Journey Toward Fulfillment, Grace was remembered by faculty and students as a grandfatherly figure who would often be seen taking his daily constitutional around the shores of the artificial lake on campus named in his honor.

In 1909, the city of St. Paul built a massive sewer line under Summit Avenue. The sewer drained away much of the stormwater that filled the lake. The small stream soon dried up, and Lake Mennith quickly lost its charming quality. In 1911, the college finally drained what had become a muddy spot in the landscape. While the rush of water sometimes heard from a pump in the sublevel of the O’Shaughnessy-Frey Library is one of the only reminders of this former campus landmark.”

Anne Kenne, Head of Special Collections & University Archivist. https://news.stthomas.edu/lake-mennith-and-mennith-hall/

Mike Klein

Manifest Sovereignty? (Amber Waves), 2026

Fir, pine, birchbark, copper, stone (jasper), iron

Winona LaDuke describes extractive industrial exploitation of natural resources with the term, “Wiindigo Economy, invoking the cannibal monster of Anishinaabe legend that ‘symbolizes the potentially addictive part of the human condition—when certain desires are indulged,’ stimulating ‘more indulgence until all reason and control are lost’ (L. Simpson 2011: 70). In Anishinaabe prophecy, this is the moment of choice, when two paths open before us. We are told there is one path that is well worn but scorched, the second green. The question is how to move off the scorched path… choosing a good path requires the revolutionary but also profoundly practical work of infrastructure. At the center of the Wiindigo’s violence and destruction is infrastructure’s seemingly banal and technical world. Wiindigo infrastructure has worked to carve up Turtle Island, or North America, into preserves of settler jurisdiction, while entrenching and hardening the very means of settler economy and sociality into tangible material structures. We see this in sharp relief today, with pipelines and dams and roads and prisons and toxic water infrastructures… And we feel it across the whole length of the national border, and at the detention camps assembled in its name. The transformation of ecologies of the many into systems of circulation and accumulation to serve the few is the project of settler colonial infrastructure. Infrastructure is the how of settler colonialism, and the settler colony is where the Wiindigo runs free. Yet, infrastructure is not inherently colonial—it is also essential for transformation; a pipe can carry fresh water as well as toxic sludge. We suggest that effective initiatives for justice, decolonization, and planetary survival must center infrastructure in their efforts, and we highlight alimentary infrastructure—infrastructure that is life-giving in its design, finance, and effects. Drawing on our distinct work in communities, classrooms, courthouses, and city streets, we insist that our collective futures hinge on remaking socio-technical systems—on building beyond Wiindigo infrastructure.”

Cowen, D.; LaDuke, W. (2020) Beyond Wiindigo Infrastructure. South Atlantic Quarterly, 119 (2): 243–268.

Mike Klein

Monkeywrench , 2026

Fir, oak, leopardwood, hickory, aspen, wenge, spalted white oak, cedar, stone (agates), sea glass, vintage monkey wrench

Edward Abbey wrote a novel in 1975 about a group of four people – The Monkey Wrench Gang – who decide to use sabotage to address the destruction of water ecosystems in the desert Southwest of the U.S. 

• If the water you depend on – to drink, to grow, to cook, to clean, to recreate – is threatened, how far would you go to protect it? 

• In these times of extraction, exploitation, degradation, and the privatization of water, with threats from pipelines and mines, industry and agriculture, or AI data centers, will you vote, advocate, volunteer, educate, raise funds, protest, organize? 

• When you are confronted with threats to water quality and access, or with the externalization of costs to the many in order to benefit a few, what will move you to action, or to defense, or to destruction in order protect the water you and your community needs to live and to flourish? 

• How far would you go? Where do you draw the line?

Mike Klein

E Pluribus, 2026

Fir, purple heart, leopardwood, cedar, maple, aspen, cumaru, stone (jasper)

Our informal national motto was for most of our history, E Pluribus, Unum, “Out of many, one.” We struggle in contemporary politics – as we have in different and conflicting ways throughout our history – to articulate our national identity. This sculpture is intended as a touchstone for so many questions:

• To be a U.S. Citizen is a technical and legal status, but what does it mean to be an American? 

• Does “American” reference this country or all the countries of the Americas?

• What are our normative assumptions about belonging in the United States of America? 

• Are we a melting pot of assimilation, an integrated collection of sustained sub-cultures, a potluck/potlatch/fiesta/smorgasbord of different colors and textures and tastes? 

• Are we a nation of immigrants historically? Now? Where does that leave Indigenous peoples or those who were brought here enslaved?

• How do we differently treat immigrants, refugees, asylees based on wealth, power, status, documentation?

• How are we one out of many and what of the many-ness do we need to give up to find one-ness?

• Is our strength in unity, plurality, diversity?

Mike Klein

Seed, 2026

Redwood, hickory, wenge, purpleheart, cedar, aspen, oak, stone (porphyritic diabase)

Seeds send down roots to anchor in the ground and to bring water and nutrients to new growth. Seeds send up shoots to bring water and nutrients together with sunlight for photosynthesis. When we know the roots of our family, ancestors, and communities we can be nourished by the stories and culture that have formed us. We may not be determined by our past, but we are shaped by it. The light of education can transform these stories into something like wisdom to inform our present and guide our future.

• What images and stories from this exhibition will you carry with you, either as a seed of a new idea, or as a seed of annoyance for something bothering you? 

• What do you know of your own family roots, the stories of your ancestors, that may form you without your knowledge?

• How will you be a good ancestor to your descendants, sending new growth and nourishment into the future?