Interact Center for the Visual and Performing Arts. Photo-Liam James
Momentum taps nine new voices to expand their Digital Art Library
The paintings and drawings of nine artists from a studio in St. Paul, Minnesota, are heading for the walls of hotels, offices, hospitals and schools. Momentum, the largest US supplier of contract textiles and wallcoverings, has partnered with the Interact Center for the Visual and Performing Arts to turn original artworks into custom digital wallcoverings, now part of the company’s Digital Art Library.
Announced on 13 October 2026, the collection places Interact’s artists alongside earlier Momentum collaborators such as Michael Ford, Yinka Ilori, Shantell Martin and 13&9 Design – a product design studio founded in Graz, Austria. For Interact, which turns 30 this year, the timing matters.
“As Interact celebrates its 30th anniversary, we want to emphasize that Interact artists continue to break down barriers through high-profile collaborations like this, to showcase their undeniable talent,” says Brittany Kieler, Gallery Director at Interact. “The art world has made strides in recent years to increase the recognition of artists with diverse lived experiences and identities, but, despite a wealth of incredible work and creative achievement, artists with disabilities are still underrepresented in major institutions. This collaboration with Momentum translates the artists’ work into large-scale, immersive formats, showcasing their truly singular perspectives on a premier commercial stage.”
A studio with no entry requirements
Founded in 1996, Interact is a nonprofit visual art studio and theatre company that works with professional artists with disabilities, alongside artists without disabilities. Anyone can join. Members work in an open studio, guided by staff who are practising artists themselves.
Interact Gallery represents the 73 artists who currently practise at the studio, as well as many alumni. Its theatre company has staged original productions and run workshops in North America, Asia, Europe and Africa. In 2025 the studio made its debut at the Outsider Art Fair in New York and at Open Invitational Miami.
AJ Paron, whose son Devin Wildes has been part of Interact for about nine years, describes what that means at home: “It is a place where labels aren’t relevant and where the artists are being celebrated for their creative value.”
The artists and their work
David Bauman – Menagerie. Bauman (1969–2019) was part of Interact from 1997 to 2014, both as a visual artist and as a gifted comic performer in its theatre cast. Animals were his lifelong subject. Early studies of big cats, raccoons and dinosaurs gave way to a long series on sharks and whales after a family trip to Hawaii in 2005. Taken with the island’s clouds, craters, waves and volcanoes, he made Hawaii the centre of his work. In 2014 his sister helped him move to the Big Island, where he spent the rest of his life.
Menagerie gathers his line drawings of creatures, handwritten labels and all, into a spare, playful graphic. Interact still represents his work in close partnership with his mother, Margaret Bauman. In 2023 they developed an exhibition that showed David’s work beside that of Eric Sherarts, a lifelong friend and fellow Interact artist.
Sarah Armstrong – Mushrooms. Armstrong grew up in Duluth and spent summers camping with her family in state parks along Lake Superior. Those years still shape her paintings of Minnesota’s North Shore, built from rich swathes of pigment and loose but measured strokes. Her process is calm and leaves room for discovery. “You have to be patient,” she says. “If something doesn’t look right, you keep trying and paint over, paint over, paint over, until you find what you were looking for.”
Mushrooms gathers watercolour fungi of several kinds, painted at different scales and arranged with a light touch. Armstrong has sung since childhood, studied music education at college and is a member of the Oratorio Society of Minnesota. She began painting about six years ago, joined Interact in 2022 and has since led public painting workshops through the studio. Her work has been shown at the Minnesota Landscape Arboretum and the Diana E. Murphy Federal Courthouse.
Katie Bretzman – Rainbow Patchwork. Bretzman describes her quilt-like drawings as aerial views of living spaces and scenes from home. Each is about the size of a blueprint and is made by repeating vertical marks, rotating the same set of markers through the whole piece. The drawings become quiet reflections on her own experience of domestic spaces and the built environment.
Rainbow Patchwork carries that method into blocks of lime, magenta and deep blue that invite the eye to wander. Bretzman has practised at Interact since 2018. In 2024 she showed alongside fellow Interact artist HML in a two-person exhibition at Gallery 120, Inver Hills Community College. In 2025 she was one of 13 Interact artists in Something there in the woods…, curated by Robert Cozzolino.
Kaia Burg – Color Studies. Kaia Kathleen Burg’s drawings are full of energy: expressive marks, charged colour and simple shapes pushed right to the edges of the page. People, butterflies and other animals appear, usually smiling. An oblong might be a tree, a flower or a figure; a triangle might be a mountain. Asked where the images come from, she says simply: “It’s in my head.”
Color Studies brings her bold shapes and saturated hues together in repeating forms. Burg has always made art and joined Interact in 2021. Since then her work has been shown at Minneapolis Central Library’s Cargill Gallery, University of Iowa Healthcare and the Minnesota Landscape Arboretum. In 2025 she presented her first solo exhibition, Snake Snake Snake Butterfly, at Interact Gallery.
Carl Clark – Snow Capped Mountains. Asked what he would like people to know about his work, Clark replied: “I wanted to pass time.” He paints wide spaces such as skies, fields, mountains and seas with steady, unhurried strokes, and every so often something strange slips in. A small town in transparent colour fades into a mountain. Ships on grey water seem to move, freeze and sink all at once. Tiny houses sit on looming hills, their windows painted in a few light touches.
Snow Capped Mountains reduces a winter landscape to simple forms and a cool palette, suited to rooms that call for calm. Clark (b. 1965) has practised at Interact since 2016. In 2021 he shared WILD GOOSE, a two-person exhibition at Interact Gallery, with New York-based artist Jack Arthur Wood, Jr. His work appeared in Interact’s booths at the Outsider Art Fair in New York in 2025 and 2026, and at the Creativity Explored x Open Invitational Art Fair in San Francisco this year.
Bill Crane – Tulips. Over more than 20 years Crane has built a large body of ink drawings and acrylic paintings: crowded pages, bursts of colour and loosely drawn figures that show his love of nature, animals and friends. A keen observer of everyday life, he often draws scenes from the Interact studio, where he has practised since 2000.
Tulips layers bright pinks, pale yellows and sharp whites in pastel, giving the flowers texture and movement. Crane has exhibited at the Minnesota Museum of American Art, the Diana E. Murphy Federal Courthouse and Art Enables in Washington, DC, and took part in a 2005 exhibition hosted by Sense Scotland. In summer 2024 he was artist in residence at Interact Gallery, where he built an immersive installation. A solo exhibition followed later that year, together with a book on his work published by Interact.
Michael Engebretson – Cosmic. Engebretson’s kaleidoscopic drawings and paintings imagine a utopian civilisation beyond Earth that he calls “Class Seven”. Its people, he says, are “open to any possibility, any idea, any conversation, any scenario”. They also enjoy better healthcare and support systems, including care designed for human-alien hybrids, cyborgs and robots with disabilities.
Cosmic draws on that world through muted tones and overlapping hand-painted lines. Engebretson (b. 1994) has practised at Interact since 2016 and in 2022 became Interact Gallery’s first artist in residence. He has been featured by MPR News, the Star Tribune and White Bear Press, and was a guest artist at the Creative Enterprise Zone’s 2023 Mural & Art Festival. That year he also worked with coffeeware company notNeutral and letterpress studio Studio On Fire. In 2026 he was one of five artists in Interact’s booth at the Outsider Art Fair in New York.
Andrew “Andy” Seymour – Summer. Almost everything Seymour has made in the past decade is titled Summer, after summers at his mother’s lake cabin in northern Minnesota. The circles that fill his work are people: sometimes family at the lake, sometimes fellow artists in the studio. He starts each piece with a circle in the top-left corner and works across the page, much as one writes.
Seymour (b. 1968) has practised at Interact since 2002. His work has been shown at the Minnesota Museum of American Art, Orchestra Hall, HGA Architects & Engineers and The White Page, and is held in the collection of Macalester College. In 2023 one of his drawings appeared on a line of mugs by notNeutral, and in 2025 he presented Summer, a solo exhibition at Interact Gallery.
Devin Wildes – DC Metro Walls. Wildes works in drawing, painting and mixed-media sculpture, moving between natural landscapes, cartoons, anime and famous landmarks. His recent works on paper begin with photographs sent by friends and family. Through flat patches of bright colour and tight cropping, he turns rural and urban scenes from the US and abroad into calm arrangements of shape and pattern, sometimes close to abstraction.
DC Metro Walls reworks the architecture of Union Station in Washington, DC, through bright colour and strong structural lines. Wildes has won several first-place awards at DaVinci Fest in Stillwater, Minnesota, and has been featured by PBS, the Pioneer Press, the Star Tribune and Architectural Digest. This autumn he represents Interact in Outside Forces at Art Enables in Washington, DC, a show of progressive art studios from across the United States. He also speaks publicly as an advocate for the rights of people with autism.
From studio to room
Designers can adjust each wallcovering by scale, colour and application, using the work to set the tone of a reception area, mark out a quiet corner or lift a shared lounge.
“The design industry has the unique capability and responsibility to shape the built environments where people work, learn, gather, and connect. This new collaboration with Interact artists gives architects, designers, and their clients a meaningful opportunity to foster greater neurodiversity and disability inclusion through the spaces they are creating,” notes Sarah Nelson, Creative Director at Momentum.
A portion of sales from the collection will go to Interact, and Versa, Momentum’s manufacturing partner, is providing complimentary memos to showcase the designs. For the nine artists, it means their work will reach people who may never set foot in a gallery.
