Rural. Radical. Resonant.
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A place for work that needs a place.
Grin Cupola is an art gallery, performance space, and project space on a working farm just north of Grinnell, Iowa—where contemporary art meets rural place and experimentation.
Formerly home to Grin City Collective, a long-running artist residency known for bringing artists, writers, performers, and makers together in the context of rural Iowa, Grin Cupola continues that tradition.
The site includes a three-story 1930s corn crib housing exhibition space, a dance hall, reception space, outdoor stage area, event parking, and additional resources including a woodshop, welding shop, ceramics area, art studio, surplus building materials, and outdoor installation space. Site-use fees are negotiable, with additional support available for installation, curation, marketing, and event catering.
We are particularly interested in projects that respond to place, stretch across disciplines, invite participation, challenge conventional exhibition formats, or simply require a setting that isn't a conventional gallery. Recent projects at Grin Cupola have included experimental performance, installation, theater, music, and interdisciplinary work.
Performance: thus speaks, shabab mohammad kabir, with this piece, I trans*cend
AN ART GALLERY IN A BARN
FORMALLY ON VIEW:
On-site, Event & EXHIBITION
Ngeruak: A Plea to Build
ghOstMiSt
ON VIEW: 9/20/25 - 9/30/25
By appointment only.
Contact:
grincupola@gmail.com
Grin Cupola
3635 Hwy 146
Grinnell, IA 50112
Before and after the performance, the installation is interactive. But to respect the instruments and Balinese culture, please do not step over Gamelan instruments or play with your feet. Effects pedals may be touched with feet.
This performance will be sonicly and visually noisy. Although we will never discriminate by age and will always allow for all ages to attend, some material and images may be scary for humans under 18-years-old.
Balinese duo, ghOstMiSt, calls for you to think about how to build culture from ruins and dismemberment. In Bali, Ngeruak, is a ceremony where you ask permission from the land and its stewards to build. To build structures; to build sociality; to build community; to build family; to build a better future. ghOstMiSt seeks to appease doom by basking in slowness and rhythmic subdivision, nesting dynamic beginnings within shifting climates. We are here to bask in schismogenic feminism and elevate the presence of forgotten women.
ghOstMiSt
(Dance: Dewa Ayu Eka Putri; Music: Putu Tangkas Adi Hiranmayena)
ghOstMiSt is a Balinese experimental duo that uses reflexive improvisation as way to interrogate cultural contradiction and reclaim performance place. Dewa Ayu Eka Putri and I started this duo as a critique of traditional frames of value judgement. By enacting performative inquiries of Balinese-ness we question spiritual and cosmological epistemologies of performance. It is important that we teach through community-based methods and engage in diverse participation in efforts to create works of art that promote creativity, while understanding historical privilege to address social and philosophical issues.
More information: www.putuhiranmayena.com
Formerly on View:
A NEW PLAY
BY IOWA PLAYWRIGHT TAYLOR SKLENAR
PRODUCED BY THE ECOTHEATRE LAB:
RESISTANCE
Saturday, March 29, 2025
3:30PM
Grin Cupola
3633 Hwy 146
Grinnell, IA 50112
Cost: Pay What You Can.
Coffee and community conversation will follow the play.
When a new herbicide is introduced into a small Iowa community, a group of neighboring farmers must grapple with their differing perceptions of risk - and even with each other - as they figure out how to move forward together.
Also touring to Audubon, Ruthven, Milford, and Ames
More information: ecotheatrelab.com
