Main Gallery
January 23, 2020 – April 19, 2020
This exhibition includes photographs that document expressions of dignity, honor, hope, and love in the African American community by two towering photographers. Featured works include Gordon Parks’s astonishing images from the Jim Crow-era through the civil rights movement, and photographs by Brooklyn artist Jamel Shabazz, who has followed in Parks’s footsteps from the 1980s to the present day. A Choice of Weapons, Honor and Dignity explores how Parks and Shabazz have both used photography to empower communities and lift up Black voices. The exhibition is curated by Robin Hickman-Winfield, CEO and Executive Producer of SoulTouch Productions and a great-niece of Gordon Parks. She first collaborated with the M in 1998 on the landmark traveling exhibition Half Past Autumn: The Life and Works of Gordon Parks, helping to bring the show to St. Paul.
Henrietta Schmoll Rauenhorst Court
October 3, 2019 – February 23, 2020
Building on her longtime interest in mining lost histories, Sherin Guirguis, an Egypt-born, L.A.-based artist, will fill the museum’s two-story Rauenhorst Court with an installation of hand-cut works on paper and sculpture, inspired by a largely forgotten writer and leader of the Egyptian feminist movement, Doria Shafik (1908-1975). These new works merge several broad themes and interests evident in Guirguis’s body of work, including architectural design, craft traditions, language, and poetry.