Exhibition Highlights FY20

Jonathan Herrera Soto: In Between / Underneath (Entremedio / Por Debajo)

Jonathan Herrera Soto will create a new rendition of his installation “In Between / Underneath (Entremedio / Por Debajo).” The work will depict recently murdered and missing Mexican journalists, highlighting the record number of journalists killed.

The Sabbath Now

Artist Norma Minkowitz is best known for establishing crochet as a fine art technique. Minkowitz learned crochet from her mother as a young girl and quickly started making clothes for her dolls. Today, she still crochets over objects, using them to support her creations. After Minkowitz stiffens the fibers with resins, she removes the completed textile from its form, transforming her work into a hollow, transparent sculpture.

Graciela Iturbide’s Mexico

Graciela Iturbide is one of Latin America’s most influential photographers. Since the late 1970s, her vivid photographs have captured everyday life in Mexico, creating a powerful visual record of its diverse cultures, rituals, and religions, especially those of indigenous people.

Strong Women, Full of Love: The Photography of Meadow Muska

This exhibition is the first to present the work of documentary photographer Carolyn “Meadow” Muska. Born and raised in Minnesota, Muska came out as a lesbian at age 20. After earning a BFA at Ohio University, she used photography to record her community of “beautiful, strong women, full of love and joy.”

Rethinking Histories: Works from Mia’s Collection

The exhibition Rethinking Histories, is a survey of Mia’s contemporary collection. Told through quotes and video interviews, the exhibition takes a step back and explains why artists create works about history. In rethinking how we shape historical narratives and artifacts, the exhibition provides an accessible entry point to the contemporary collection and ignites the viewer to carry this line of investigation as they view other collections at the museum.

Joe Horton: Vessel

Vessel, an experimental film directed by Joe Horton, follows a hero on a journey through death, decay, and transcendence. Referencing the alchemical vessel, an object of transformation and a symbol for the soul, the film’s lyrical plot recalls classical storytelling forms such as opera and ballet and is infused with Afrofuturism and surrealism.

World in Miniature: Chinese Snuff Bottles from the Minneapolis Institute of Art

Snuff is powdered tobacco, which users inhale up their noses. It was introduced to China from Europe in the early 1700s and became widely popular. Storage bottles, often with stoppers ending with spoons to extract the snuff within, soon caught on throughout Chinese society.

Color Woodcuts in the Arts and Crafts Era

Color woodcuts reveal the artist’s hand directly—and endearingly. Carved, inked, and printed by hand, they fit the spirit of the Arts and Crafts movement, which reacted to the Industrial Revolution by pushing for a return to traditional craft.

Artists Respond: American Art and the Vietnam War, 1965-1975

How do artists respond to war? What makes effective protest art? Does art change in times of crisis?
Organized by the Smithsonian American Art Museum, “Artists Respond: American Art and the Vietnam War, 1965­–1975” shows the innovative ways artists talked back, often in the streets and other public venues.

Artists Reflect: Contemporary Views on the American War

Mia’s companion exhibition to “Artists Respond: American Art and the Vietnam War, 1965-1975” features drawings, textiles, video, photography, and installations made by artists from the Southeast Asian diaspora who have been deeply engaged with the impact and legacy of the American War in Vietnam.

Nguyen Trinh Thi: Fifth Cinema

Drawing on personal accounts, popular movies, government films, found footage, archival images, home movies, and YouTube videos, artist Nguyen Trinh Thi explores her homeland, Vietnam, in Fifth Cinema.

The Enduring Soul

A collaboration between the Minneapolis Institute of Art and the Cultural Wellness Center, The Enduring Soul presents artwork by African and African American artists that honor the connection between ancestors and the living and between what is seen and the invisible. The artworks on view hold historical, personal, and community memory.

Alyssa Baguss: You Were Never Here

Alyssa Baguss will construct three distinct artworks that explore how we experience the outdoors as mediated technology. This exhibition will consider nature as scenery, our persistent longing to be elsewhere, and our perception of place through secondary experiences.

Storytelling: Julie Buffalohead

Julie Buffalohead creates visual narratives told by animal characters filled with personhood, agency, and individuality. Like all great storytellers, Buffalohead connects the mythical with the ordinary, the imaginary and the real, and offers a space in which viewers can bring their own experiences. As we enter her worlds, she coaxes us to discover additional layers of meaning—social, historical, political, personal—using metaphor, wisdom, and wit.

Winterlights at the Purcell-Cutts House 2019

Designed by William Purcell and George Elmslie in 1913, the Prairie School–style Purcell-Cutts House will be decorated for the holidays to reflect the upper-middle-class “progressive” lifestyle of the Purcells around 1915. Forty-five-minute tours led by costumed docents will emphasize the gifts, toys, food, and social traditions of the period that the Purcells might have enjoyed.

Recent Acquisitions: Fiber Art at Mia

Showcased here is a selection of fiber artworks acquired over the past five years by Mia’s Department of Decorative Arts, Textiles, and Sculpture. Since “fiber art” embraces a wide range of media, techniques, and fields of influence, the artforms vary widely.

Frosty Weather, Snowy Weather

Artists across the world have found inspiration in snowy landscapes. This installation draws on works from Mia’s collection and several on loan from the Kunin Collection just in time for Winter. Featuring gorgeous scenes in nature, images of how we play and work in the cold, and a few surprising interpretations of winter’s atmospheric effects, this little gallery will delight the senses.

Captive Beauties: Depictions of Women in Late Imperial China

Beautiful yet lonely and melancholy—women from imperial China were often depicted in terms of their highly circumscribed lives, which were entirely dependent upon men. In some paintings, women engage in duties appropriate to their stations in life, according to patriarchal Confucian principles.

Abstract Prints by Hagiwara Hideo

Beautiful yet lonely and melancholy—women from imperial China were often depicted in terms of their highly circumscribed lives, which were entirely dependent upon men. In some paintings, women engage in duties appropriate to their stations in life, according to patriarchal Confucian principles.

Just Kids

Perhaps no other subject has been so well documented as the lives of children. The first text message to include a photographic image was a birth announcement; today, snapshots of children, teens, and young adults are among the most widely shared images across digital platforms. Photographic images of children have sparked some of the most contentious conversations in contemporary times and raise new and pressing concerns regarding privacy in the age of social media.

Vision 2020: Contemporary Photographic Portraits at Mia

“Vision 2020” presents contemporary photographic portraits created by three groundbreaking photographers from Africa: Samuel Fosso, of Cameroon, Nigeria, and the Central African Republic; Zanele Muholi, of South Africa; and Omar Victor Diop, of Senegal.

Yoshitoshi: Master Draftsman Transformed

Tsukioka Yoshitoshi (1839–1892) is considered the last major artist of classical Japanese woodblock prints, known as ukiyo-e. His career spanned Japan’s transformation from feudal backwater to modern nation state, largely during the Meiji period (1868–1912), when he was the undisputed leader of his field.

Harriet Bart: Artist Books + Works on Paper

I believe in the alchemy of the word, the iconography of the text, the labyrinth of the book. — Harriet Bart
Harriet Bart is a nationally prominent conceptual artist whose multidisciplinary work explores themes of commemoration, remembrance, and loss. Books and language lie at the heart of her practice, one informed by an abiding fascination with the personal and collective expression of memory.

When Home Won’t Let You Stay: Art and Migration

By choice or by force. With great success or great struggle. People move or are uprooted, for many reasons. The world is currently witness to the highest levels of movement on record; the United Nations estimates that one out of every seven people is an international or internal migrant or refugee.