FSU Alum Erik Pedersen in Residence at Tessellate

This July, FSU Art MFA ’17 and Adjunct Professor Erik Pedersen will travel to Pontiac, Michigan to participate in a one-month residency at Tessellate. In addition to expanding his current body of work, Pedersen will also be interacting with local and Detroit-based artists and conducting low-tech printmaking workshops out of a garage.

Tessellate is an experimental artist run space dedicated to seeding conversations between communities and imagining new creative, collective urban futures. Tessellate believes in art not as an object but as a vehicle for action and exchange. The project aims to facilitate the work and discourse of emerging artists through exposure, opportunity, and interaction.

Tessellate is located in a suburban garage and backyard apartment in Pontiac, Michigan, a weird and wonderful small city just north of Detroit. The property, after being abandoned for four years, has been renovated to reinvigorate the main house and transform the auxiliary structures into their new lives.

Once a manufacturing powerhouse for the car industry, Pontiac retains a diverse and robust community, nestled in old factory housing and historic neighborhoods, interspersed with green open lots. The walkable downtown boasts cafes and music clubs, a craft brewery and an old gay dive bar, two nationally renowned haunted houses and a massive abandoned parking structure with a rooftop amphitheater. Like its neighbor, Detroit, Pontiac is home to a burgeoning collection of artists and creative people working to rethink a creative way forward in the post-industrial environment. Tessellate believes these eccentricities and charms make Pontiac a field ripe for experimentation.

Photo by Elise DeChard