Preorders ship the week of April 20th, 2026

Book Description

PAPA documents the first four years of PAPA Projects, an artist-run exhibition space founded by artists Jaysen Hohlen and Wyatt Lasky in St. Paul, Minnesota. Established during the uncertainty of the COVID-19 pandemic, the space began as a simple intervention: transforming a room on their communal studio floor into a gallery. What began as a short-term response quickly developed into an ongoing exhibition program well beyond the pandemic.

This richly illustrated volume brings together essays and visual documentation tracing the development of the space between 2021 and 2024. Essays by Jaysen Hohlen, Taylor Jasper, Matthew Villar Miranda, and Laurel Rand-Lewis consider artist-run initiatives, the role of independent exhibition spaces, and the challenges of documenting the ephemeral nature of exhibitions.

The book includes artworks, installation views, and materials from seventeen exhibitions presented at PAPA Projects. These exhibitions feature artists working across painting, sculpture, photography, installation, and time-based media. The publication also reproduces exhibition statements and short written texts that accompanied select exhibitions, preserving the context that originally framed the works when they were exhibited.

Produced alongside the book is a companion artist project, White Cube, an editioned box collection of small artworks contributed by artists who exhibited at PAPA and others involved in artist-run initiatives in the Twin Cities. Together, the book and box extend and preserve the ethos and artistic labor of PAPA Projects while gesturing toward the futures artists can create for themselves.

Part record and part reflection, PAPA documents the work, ideas, and collaborations that emerged from PAPA’s fourth-floor gallery. The publication traces how small, artist-built exhibition spaces can become platforms for artists to organize, exhibit, and shape their own conditions for making and exhibiting work.

Contributing Author Biographies

Jaysen Hohlen (b. 1995) is a Minneapolis-based artist and writer. He grew up in Central Minnesota where his father has worked as a builder for over forty years. His current work engages historic gay bars and cruising spaces in the Twin Cities and the corporations that now inhabit their sites. 

Hohlen graduated in 2019 from the University of Minnesota with a BFA in Studio Arts. He has received support from the McKnight Foundation, the Minnesota State Arts Board, the Metropolitan Regional Arts Council, Midway Contemporary Art and the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. His work has been featured in various venues and publications including at The Centre for the Periphery (Bavaria, DE), Waiting Room (Minneapolis, MN), and the Walker Art Center’s Walker Reader (Minneapolis, MN). He co-founded and is the current Director of PAPA.

Taylor Jasper is the Susan and Rob White Assistant Curator of Visual Arts at the Walker Art Center. Since joining the Walker in 2023, her curatorial projects and exhibitions have included This Must Be the Place (2024), a reinstallation of the Walker’s permanent collection; Sadie Barnette: The New Eagle Creek Saloon (2024); Kandis Williams: A Surface (2025); Suzanne Jackson: What Is Love (co-curator, 2026); and Olalekan Jeyifous: The Road Became a River (2026). Between 2020 and 2023, Jasper was the Curatorial Associate for Visual and Performing Arts at the Momentary, affiliated with Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, where she supported several exhibitions including Yvette Mayorga: What a Time to be (2022); Cauleen Smith: Space Station: Radiant Behind the Sun (2021); Diana Al-Hadid: Ash in the Trade Winds (2021); and Garrett Bradley: American Rhapsody (2021). Prior to the Momentary, Jasper was a Curatorial Research Assistant at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, where she was an integral part of the curatorial and editorial teams for the exhibition and catalogue The Dirty South: Contemporary Art, Material Culture, and the Sonic Impulse. Jasper was born and raised in Richmond, VA and received her BA in Black Studies and Art History from the College of William & Mary in 2018. 

Matthew Villar Miranda is Curatorial Associate at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, where they curated solo exhibitions featuring artists Stephanie Syjuco and Sky Hopinka. Previously as Visual Arts Curatorial Fellow at the Walker Art Center, they contributed to exhibitions by Julie Mehretu, Paul Chan, Pao Houa Her, and Pacita Abad. Matthew serves on the Board of Stakeholders for Museums Moving Forward (MMF), a Ford and Mellon Foundation-funded initiative comprised of a cross-institutional coalition dedicated to advancing equity within art museums. In 2021, they co-curated "Undoing Time: Art and Histories of Incarceration," an exhibition at the Arizona State University Art Museum supported by the Art for Justice Fund. Matthew earned their BA in Art History from the University of California, Berkeley, and their MA as a Los Angeles County Museum of Art-ASU Fellow. Currently, they are pursuing a PhD in Art History at Stanford University, where their research explores queer intimacies, Indigenous knowledge systems, and decolonial interventions by artists of the imagined and material tropics, with particular attention to the Austronesian Pacific and its diaspora.

Laurel Rand-Lewis is the Curatorial Fellow, Visual Arts at the Walker Art Center. Her work centers explorations of institutional critique and research-based practice. She is the curator of Collection in Focus: Banu Cennetoğlu (2024-25), and has been the curatorial assistant on many Walker exhibitions including Jessi Reaves: process invented the mirror (2025-26), Kandis Williams: A Surface (2025), Stanley Whitney: How High the Moon (2024-25), This Must be the Place: Inside the Walker’s Collection (2024), Collection in Focus: Mungo Thompson (2024), Tetsuya Yamada: Listening (2024), and Multiple Realities: Experimental Art in the Eastern Bloc, 1960s-1980s (2023-24). She holds a Master of Studies in Art History in Visual Culture from the University of Oxford and a Bachelor of Arts in History of Art and Architecture – Museum Studies from Middlebury College.

White Cube Artists

Aaron Van Dyke, Bade Turgut, Briar Marsh Pine, Candice Davis, Casey Deming, Chase Barney, Emma Beatrez, Erika Terwilliger, Jay Heikes, Jaysen Hohlen, Jonathon Rosemond, Kathryn Kerr, Kristina Johnson, Lee Noble, Leslie Grant, Lucas Page, Maddie Butler, Michael Caudo, Patrick Keville, R Yun Matea, Sarah Sampedro, Wyatt Lasky, and Xavier Tavera.

Title: PAPA

Editor: Jaysen Hohlen

Contributors: Jaysen Hohlen, Taylor Jasper, Matthew Villar Miranda, Laurel Rand-Lewis

Graphic Designer: Matthew Rezac

Publisher: PAPA Projects

Publication Year: 2026

Format: Softcover

Dimensions: 9 × 6 in

Pages: 230

Binding: Otabind

Process: Offset

Illustrations: Full color

Edition: First edition

Print Run: 200 copies