The Locksmithing Institute of the Bunnell Street Arts Center, Homer, Alaska, 2025
From November 29-December 13, 2025, I was an invited artist in residence at the Bunnell Street Arts Center in Homer, Alaska. During my first week I met the community, gathered material, and planned out a new iteration of The Locksmithing Institute. During the second week I worked with community members in the gallery from about 3-5 hours each day and together we activated the project. The Bunnell Street Arts Center artist-in-residence program is supported by the National Endowment for the Arts, The Rural Cap Foundation, and the generous support of donors. Special thanks to the entire staff of Bunnell for making my experience so positive and to the community of Homer for granting me this huge honor. Full description of the project is below:
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Lesson #16: Tangled/Entangled/Untangled
The faculty and staff of The Locksmithing Institute are pleased to celebrate our 20th anniversary! Our first lesson was taught on February 5, 2005, at 826 Valencia in San Francisco, California and to mark this milestone we’ll be offering a new class—Lesson #16—at the Bunnell Street Arts Center in Homer, Alaska. In this lesson, students will learn to entangle themselves in order to untangle ropes that have become tangled.
The curriculum of The Locksmithing Institute has always encouraged students to examine their relationship to access, agency, and power. Many lessons were introspective, asking students to experience private moments in public spaces. Other classes required entangled collaboration amongst students, though often silently and across vast distances—reflecting on an ethos of: alone, but together.
Lesson #16 introduces a new challenge. We usually think of locks as simply “locked” or “unlocked,” with nothing in between. Similarly, our world increasingly leaves people divided into binaries with no way to find common ground. We don’t claim to have a solution to this cultural problem—after all we are only locksmiths—however, we believe in trying. This lesson invites participants to sit together, entangled, while untangling rope salvaged from the shoreline of their community. As students untangle, we invite them to discuss questions such as: What memories arise? What does this process feel like in the body? What smells, sensations, or emotions come up? What possibilities might exist between the states of locked/unlocked or tangled/untangled? How do we take on a tedious, seemingly impossible task alongside people we may not agree with? How can we allow ourselves to perhaps “fail” at the task of untangling rope yet “succeed” at entangling ourselves as a group?
As always, the class is free and open to students of all ages, abilities, documentation statuses, and backgrounds. Lunch will be moose-fat and halibut-roe pâté on locally sourced kelp. Lastly, the faculty and staff of The Locksmithing Institute would like to dedicate Lesson #16 to the memory of Helen Murgida, Joyce Sampson, and Margaret Tedesco— all steadfast allies to students and artists everywhere.
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