Today we’d like to introduce you to Dana Mcknight.
Alright, so thank you so much for sharing your story and insight with our readers. To kick things off, can you tell us a bit about how you got started?
My name is Dana Mcknight and I am a total weirdo that is currently running a project in Austin TX called the Tiny Minotaur! It started an immersive micro-theater pop-up project in a back alley during Covid in 2020 and has since expanded into a permanent diy walkthrough Fantasy Installation, private social club, and performance space in a brick & mortar on the East Side.
Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
HAHA
I’ll just speak for the Tiny Minotaur at this time, but it was hard! We run without investors or even bank loans and very few grants— which gives the Tiny Minotaur absolute creative freedom. But it also made buildout extremely time-consuming and difficult because of that.
I think it would have been near impossible if I weren’t a working artist willing to get my hands dirty and didn’t know a bunch of extremely talented fabricators who understood the nature of the project and were extremely patient with our contractor payouts. In the end, we would not have gotten as far as we had/have without the extremely generous nature of our community and their equal understanding of what we were trying to do as well.
Running spaces in 2025, especially art spaces+* is kind of wild. Especially with the state of the world and the weirdly antagonistic cultural response against the arts and artists in this current political climate.
As you know, we’re big fans of you and your work. For our readers who might not be as familiar what can you tell them about what you do?
I’m a multimedia artist and published author with a background in Cultural Anthropology, Sculpture and Blacksmithing and a massive fantasy enthusiast since I was very young. I’ve dabbled in ALOT of mediums (installations, sculpture, blacksmithing, ceramics, wood-block print carvings, writing, poetry, video, experimental music) but in the end the core of my bulk of work revolves around storytelling, creating intense autonomous zones (visually or through sound or both) and concepts of space/time and how we/audience— can occupy them.
I ran a few diy art spaces (I turned my one-bedroom efficiency apartment in Buffalo NY into a DIY art gallery and performance space for jazz, noise and punk shows) and curated a white walled art gallery before i moved to Austin, TX. Alot of my work is untraceable because I spent of good part of my artistic career (lol) making ephemeral works and then refusing documentation but my curatorial work is traceable because of the archival efforts from other people.
I feel like the Tiny Minotaur is my best work in terms of scale, scope and access. It’s entirely derived from a home-brewed fantasy world i created and it leaves tons of space for other folks to utilize it to expand their own artistic projects that are aligned.
You ask what sets me apart from others but I don’t really have an answer for that because I generally only view work from an inward lens and don’t do comparisons?
Do you any memories from childhood that you can share with us?
Sitting in my childhood bedroom at night, looking out the window and listening to Depeche Mode’s 3-cd box singles collection on my overly hot cd walkman. An extremely heavy snow had just finished (like 3 or 4 feet) and everything in Buffalo is quiet and the snow is so thick it covers cars so there’s just these perfect white mounds that are aligned with the snow on the street. When that happens, the streetlights reflecting off of the unmarred snow turn the night sky a weird orange creamsicle color. It’s something that can only happen in an urban setting and it is so weird and a bit unsettling.
This was maybe 1995? or 1996.
It’s a perfect memory for me.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.tinyminotaur.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thetinyminotaur
Image Credits
Erica Rich
