A Bank For Everyone

Would you like to invest in the Bank of Our Common Wealth? Rachel Breen wants to know.  

She asks the question while seated at a treadle sewing machine, foot on the pedal, hands pushing a dollar bill under the needle, connecting it end to end with a length of others. 

In its most basic sense, sewing connects two objects together, and Breen frequently uses this metaphore for connection in her work. In her earlier work, Breen used a sewing machine to stitch fabric onto paper. More recently, she used an unthreaded sewing machine to draw on paper with tiny holes.

She calls it experimental drawing. It’s a method Breen, who lives in the Kingfield neighborhood, developed accidentally in graduate school at the University of Minnesota. She was sewing on paper and when the machine ran out of thread, she kept going for a moment, noticing how interesting the mark was that the needle made on the paper.

Sometimes Breen uses the holes as a stencil, shaking powdered charcoal through them to make a print. When the exhibit or work space allows for it, she prefers to work directly on a wall instead of paper, creating a temporary art piece that is a conscious reference to both graffiti and cave drawings. 

“It’s not about creating an object,” Breen said. “It’s about creating an experience.”

This latest experience, which Breen calls the “Bank of Our Common Wealth,” is an experimental public art project done as part of a Field Office Fellowship with the Walker Art Center. Connected to the Walker’s Open Field, Breen is one of eight artists asked to complete a project that both engages the public and addresses questions relevant to his or her own work. 

Holding the first of a series of open hours at the Walker on Thursday, July 14, Breen was seated next to a sandwich board advertising the Bank of Our Common Wealth. “Invest in All of Us Today,” it said. 

Breen asked passing museum-goers if they would like to make a deposit into the Bank of Our Common Wealth by investing a dollar. Those who agreed had their dollars sewed to the chain of all the other dollar bills, filled out an entry on Breen’s log of investments and received a decorative deposit note.

“The idea,” Breen said, “is to really play with the notion that wealth is based on our interdependence.”

It’s an idea directly connected to Breen’s involvement with On the Commons, a nonprofit that works to draw attention to the importance of the commons and address environmental and social issues with commons-based solutions. Breen, who teaches drawing and painting at Anoka Ramsey Community College, has been involved with the organization for some time. Through On the Commons, she started a collaboration with In the Heart of the Beast Puppet and Mask Theater, a partnership that resulted in performances celebrating water as a commons. 

But it’s not just natural resources like water that are a common right, Breen explained. It’s things like medical research, the internet and art. With her Bank of Our Common Wealth project, Breen explores the questions of how we decide how wealth is shared, who gets to keep the money, and the idea of taxation.  

Shanai Matteson of Works Progress is helping to coordinate the Field Office Fellowships with the Walker. She was happy to see Breen turn this philosophical idea into a tangible work of art.

“She’s really familiar with this whole conversation about the cultural commons,” Matteson said. “It’s great to see her realize that with a physical project.” 

Breen, who said she is “less concerned about making something that’s going to last forever than something that’s going to have an impact,” seemed also less interested in her own performative participation in the project than in people’s reactions to it. She’s not just sewing together dollar bills–an act that could elicit a variety of reactions on its own–she’s sewing together dollar bills that people have given to her as an investment in the concept of common wealth. Breen wants to see if the public is willing to take that leap with her. 

Breen will be taking her sewing machine and the growing chain of dollar bills around city, planning to set up the Bank of Our Common Wealth in places like Powderhorn Park or Lake Harriet, maybe even on a street corner downtown or in Uptown. Search “Bank of Our Common Wealth” on Facebook for updates. 

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