The Southeast Asian Diaspora Project (SEAD) in partnership with Minnesota Museum of American Art (the M) is proud to present 1.5: A Southeast Asian Diaspora Remix.
The exhibition showcases work by Southeast Asian diaspora artists. As part of reimagining the 45th anniversary of the diaspora, SEAD has gathered stories from the community and worked with artists to respond to stories with visual artworks.
Have you lost track of time since that day back in March when Minnesota Governor Tim Walz declared a stay-at-home order in response to the COVID-19 pandemic sweeping the United States? Do the days run together while also feeling like they each mark an extreme historical event?
On March 24, artist and teacher Piotr Szyhalski found himself confined at home, reflecting on the role of the artist in processing this dizzying reality. He discovered seven sheets of paper in his basement and was drawn back to memories of growing up during a time of political strife in Poland. Art supplies could not be squandered.
On that day, and every day since, Szyhalski created a stark black-and-white drawing that attempts to unpack the impact of these extreme historical events on the fabric of our daily lives, in real time. Numbering 105 on this writing, each includes the number of known Coronavirus cases and deaths on that day.
The German word “Zeitzeuge” captures the essence of what Szyhalski understands his role as an artist to be. Sometimes translated as “contemporary witness” or “eyewitness,” there isn’t an equivalent in English that expresses the word’s dual relationship to witnessing and time. If translated directly, we might call Szyhalski a “Time Witness.”
You too are a Time Witness. Stop back by these windows on 4th Street every week (until September 1) to see the next seven “Labor Camp Reports.”
Gordon Parks: A Homecoming pairs works from Parks’s years in the Twin Cities with pictures inspired by them. Some of these pictures are the latest iteration of Lovin’ The Skin I’m In, an initiative that Robin Hickman-Winfield founded in 2004. For this exhibition, Hickman-Winfield collaborated with students at Gordon Parks High School, Frank Murphy’s Fashions, and the Saint Paul Hotel to stage photographs inspired by Parks’s time in the Twin Cities and his interest in capturing beauty and fostering self-esteem.
This installation was organized in collaboration with Robin Hickman-Winfield, Hallie Q. Brown Community Center, and the Minnesota Spokesman-Recorder. Special thanks to Phoebe McGowan, Dawn Selle, Dr. Catherine Squires, and Tracey Williams-Dillard.
In partnership with SoulTouch Productions, the M will opened A Choice of Weapons, Honor and Dignity: The Visions of Gordon Parks and Jamel Shabazz.The exhibition included 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-based artist Jamel Shabazz, who has followed in Parks’s footsteps from the 1980s to the present. The exhibition’s title comes from Parks’s autobiography (published in 1966), which chronicles his use of the camera to effect social change—an approach to photography that inspired Shabazz to begin taking pictures and one that continues to guide his prolific career.
A Choice of Weapons, Honor and Dignity is curated by Robin Hickman-Winfield, CEO and Executive Producer of SoulTouch Productions and a great-niece of Gordon Parks, with the help of four Gordon Parks High School Scholars and curatorial advisors, Travell Williams, Andrew Shorty, Amelia Pharmer, and Tyrell Horton, CHOICE of Weapons Fellow and Gordon Parks Legacy Movement Program Assistant. Key components of the communications and marketing strategies for the exhibition were designed by the BrandLab interns Elijah Buchanan, Waylon Rembert Jr., and Charvaye Williams. Hickman-Winfield (with the help of M Trustee Nathan Johnson) will also be assembling a Vision Council of distinguished black men in the Twin Cities. This transgenerational group will meet at the M to discuss how this exhibition can serve as a platform for healing and for lifting up black voices.
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.
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.
This exhibition is the culmination of a months-long creative partnership of the M with several local organizations and their communities, working with M teaching artists Witt Siasoco (at Createch, a program offered by St. Paul Public Libraries), Nicole M. Smith and Larry Waddell (at Hallie Q. Brown Community Center), and Hlee Lee-Kron (with Hmong Museum at Hmong Elders Center).
Inspired by countless rides and visual journeys, Dietrich Sieling’s site-responsive installation at the M reflected his longtime love for the interior rectangular world of the city bus: the green exit door lights, the seated and standing passengers, the windows, the brilliant sun, the weather, the rolling spectacle of day-to-night, the avenues and streets. Turning an ordinary experience like taking public transportation into a fantastical burst of dynamic shapes and colors, Sieling’s art reminds us to find wonder in the everyday. The artist’s passionate and joyful engagement with this subject matter inspires his labor-intensive practice of creating elaborate colored-pencil drawings on yards and yards of paper and plexiglass. Sieling lives and works in Minneapolis. His art has been featured in solo exhibitions at Bockley Gallery and Forage Modern Workshop in Minneapolis, Kabinett & Kammer and Governors Island, both in New York City. His work has also been included in group exhibitions at the Plains Art Museum in Fargo, ND, and Honeycomb Salon and Intermedia Arts in Minneapolis.
Minnesota Museum of American Art is proud to present A Nation of One, a survey exhibition of work by New York-based multimedia artist Brad Kahlhamer. His large-scale paintings, drawings, and works on paper map the sprawling complexities and contradictions of American culture and identity, with influences ranging from Abstract Expressionism to the artist’s personal Native American, but “tribally ambiguous” heritage. A Nation of One charts Kahlhamer’s evolution of styles across American and Native identities, raising questions about cultural appropriation, confluence, and representation.
During its nearly 40 years in print, Craft Horizons documented the craft movement, as it happened. The Good Making of Good Things pairs works by makers, most of which are drawn from the M’s collection, which were featured in the magazine, alongside articles, reviews, and letters from readers to illustrate the essential role the magazine played in the development of craft and its cultural connections. In a pre-Internet era, Craft Horizons was the field’s tutorial guide, its social network, and its image-sharing database. It gave the artist, enthusiast, scholar, and casual hobbyist access to all that occurred in craft. The magazine began as a humble, unnamed newsletter in 1941, bringing together a like-minded community that had yet to connect nationally. By the 1970s Craft Horizons had grown into the field’s leading voice. In 1979, its publisher, the American Craft Council (now based in Minneapolis), rebranded the magazine as American Craft, which is still in print today. Using original imagery, selected articles, viewpoints from artists, makers, and critics, along with representative period objects, The Good Making of Good Things: Craft Horizons Magazine, 1941-1979 provides audiences with a rich, first-hand account of the history of craft in America, alongside a contemporary selection of makers pushing the field forward today.
New York-based artist and educator Sheila Pepe is known for her monumental, ephemeral works, made from industrial and domestic materials through a process she calls “improvisational crochet.” Softly…Before the Supreme Court is a reference to architect Cass Gilbert, the St. Paul architect who designed the 1890 Endicott building which houses the M, as well as the United States Supreme Court in Washington DC, the Minnesota State Capitol, and other nationally significant buildings. Sheila Pepe’s looping, drooping lines and woven shapes reaching high into the M’s two-story Rauenhorst Court offered a response to the gravity and hard geometry of the room—a soft, gestural rejoinder to two landmark buildings by one of America’s most famous architects. This newly commissioned installation is especially timely, given renewed attention to the importance of the Supreme Court and treading lightly before that foundational institution.
100 Years and Counting is one of three inaugural exhibitions in the Minnesota Museum of American Art’s new facility in the Pioneer Endicott building, opening in December 2018. The exhibition features approximately 45 works from the M’s remarkable collection of American art, from 100 years ago to today. It invites a tumble into the depth and breadth of the M’s collection: early 20th century paintings, photographs, sculptures by Paul Manship and George Morrison, incredible ink and pastel drawings, mid-century studio craft, sculpture, prints, contemporary Native American art, and up-to-the-minute recent acquisitions by outstanding American artists. This exhibition proves the point that Minnesota Museum of American Art has been around awhile—over 100 years, in fact—and that its American art collection reflects that visual trajectory. It also shows that the new M, in this stunning new building and home, is likewise continuing to grow, to thrive, to build—indeed, counting our years and our way into a new era of significance, art, and visual engagement.
In 2017, the M commissioned guest artist Vanghoua Anthony Vue (Brisbane, Australia) and five local artist-partners to create three new works commemorating the Hmong diaspora. The resulting murals appear on the 4th Street façade of the Jackson Street Parking ramp and in the windows of the Historic Pioneer Endicott, which is home to the Minnesota Museum of American Art; a third large work was created on canvas and exhibited at the Asian Economic Development Association (AEDA) in St. Paul’s Little Mekong neighborhood.
The murals followed an intensive month of workshops and conversations the M and Vue held in March 2017 with local Hmong elders, families, artists, and organizational partners. Vue returned to St. Paul in September 2017 to lead creation of the commissioned works with a team of local artists: Xee Reiter, Christina Vang, Melissa Vang, Nicollazzi Xiong, and Shoua Yang.
The Historic Pioneer Endicott | 141 East 4th Street, St. Paul
Jackson Street Parking Ramp | 345 Jackson Street, St. Paul
Four curators—Christopher Harrison, Maggie Thompson, Mary Anne Quiroz, and Johnnay Leenay—consider the question: Who are “we the people”? The resulting exhibition presents an eclectic array of artwork with disparate cultural points of view. Artists include Star Wallowing Bull, Zackary Drucker, Rico Gatson, Susan Hauptman, Nooshin Hakim Javadi, Steve Ozone, and others.
The M kicks off the summer arts season with a thought-provoking, sometimes whimsical exhibition of work by Good Thunder, Minnesota-based artist David Hamlow. This massive installation includes watercolors, drawings, found-object sculptures, and geodesic structures made of upcycled paper and plastics, some of which have been donated by residents of Lowertown St. Paul’s Pioneer Endicott building. Mirror Stage is an ongoing body of work which scrutinizes our collective impact on the environment by making visible the vast amounts of waste we produce each day.
Presented by the Minnesota Museum of American Art, Saint Paul Public Schools, and Ordway Center for the Performing Arts, this special exhibition features the art of approximately 50 high school Honors art students, plus the work of elementary students in the M’s arts education program, CreatorKids. The works on view demonstrate myriad pathways to artistic self-discovery—from technically disciplined to playful, from globally-minded to highly personal.
Ken Gonzales-Day is an internationally renowned artist, based in Los Angeles, whose award-winning photographs and research are helping transform understanding of the history of racialized violence in the United States. This exhibition at the Minnesota Museum of American Art will be his first one-person museum exhibition in the Upper Midwest.
Brick x Brick is a group exhibition that foregrounds the slow and deliberate process of building as a way to understand the social and cultural topographies of cities and the built environment. Artists in the exhibition work across media—including photography, painting, sculpture, and drawing—to show how construction contributes to and disrupts the features of local, national, and international urban landscapes. Architecture is a fascinating lens through which to observe dramatic changes in the history and personality of contemporary cities—buildings reflect the history, evolution, and adaptability of communities. Artists in the exhibition also use building blocks of form and color to comment on the formal and conceptual construction of art itself. Each work reveals how art and architecture share the same reflex—to construct a new relationship to the world around us. The majority of works come from the M’s permanent collection and are complemented with generous loans from nationally recognized artists and prominent private collections.
Coyote Dreams is the first major museum exhibition of Julie Buffalohead’s paintings and works on paper. Buffalohead, who was born in 1972, is an enrolled member of the Ponca Tribe of Oklahoma and has enjoyed both critical and popular success for her playful yet provocative drawings and paintings. This mid-career survey presents a selection of 24 artworks that chart the artist’s development with works that challenge stereotypes of American Indians and women using narrative imagery drawn from myths and fairytales, Native history and culture, and personal experience. The familiar cast of characters—like the Big Bad Wolf, Trickster Coyote, and the Lone Ranger—is the reason why her works feel immediately accessible. Yet upon a closer look, the viewer realizes these characters aren’t simply rehearsing their usual roles, but have been reconfigured to deconstruct the narratives from which they are drawn.
Material Mythologies brings together 19 works in textile, beading, metal, ceramic, and glass by five artists from around the country, all of whom are working at the edge of contemporary craft and sculpture. The artists in Material Mythologies (Sonya Clark, Mary Giles, Teri Greeves, Helen Lee, Jae Won Lee) build upon the traditions of craft techniques and materials while imbuing their work with poignant personal histories and cultural mythologies. With their innovative use of functional and non-functional forms, some of which included thousands of intricately assembled pieces, these artists and their works decode some of the entrenched assumptions about craft as they relate to gender, labor, history, and what is considered fine art. Together, they each find fascinating ways to tell stories, putting special emphasis on the power of language, mythology, and embedded narratives. It is these narratives, specifically those that address bicultural and bilingual identity, that are a significant focus of this exhibition.
Minnesota Museum of American Art
350 Robert Street North
St. Paul, MN 55101
Located in the Historic Pioneer Endicott
Office: 651.797.2571
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