Gallery
September 12, 2019 – January 5, 2020
History Is Not Here presents the work of artists who engage the “Arab imaginary” as a strategy for examining various social, cultural, and political positions. Through painting, drawing, photography, sculpture, book art, installation, and video, these 17 artists, working in the U.S. and abroad, make connections between contemporary geopolitics and the histories that inform them. History Is Not Here rejects the idea of history as a fixed category and looks to alternative imagery and language structures from which new “imaginaries” can be generated. Coinciding with Mizna’s twentieth anniversary and co-presented by Minnesota Museum of American Art, this exhibition’s roster is selected from artists featured in the pages of Mizna’s art and literary journal over the years. History Is Not Here: Art and the Arab Imaginary is curated by Heba Y. Amin and Maymanah Farhat.
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.