Exhibitions

Upcoming Exhibitions

<h1>
 The Contemporary Print:
 
 20 Years at Highpoint Editions
 
 </h1>
 
 <h2>October 8, 2021 - January 8, 2022</h2>

The Japanese archipelago is home to extremely diverse cultures that made clothing and other textile objects in a kaleidoscope of materials and designs. This exhibition will focus on the resourcefulness of humans to create textiles from local materials like fish skin, paper, elm bark, nettle, banana leaf fiber, hemp, wisteria, deerskin, cotton, silk, and wool. It will showcase rare and exceptional examples of robes, coats, jackets, vests, banners, rugs, and mats, made between around 1750 and 1930, including the royal dress of subtropical Okinawa, ceremonial robes of the Ainu from northern Japan and the Russian Far East, and folk traditions from throughout Japan.
Lead Sponsor: Thomson Reuters 
Generous support provided by the Gale Family Endowment
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<a style="color:black" href="https://new.artsmia.org/art-artists/curatorial-departments/japanese-and-korean-art">The collection of Japanese art at Mia includes more than 9,000 works, 
ranging from prehistoric pottery to contemporary photography, and is 
among the top five collections in the United States. </a>
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https://images.artsmia.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/11100616/7505-1200x445.jpg

https://new.artsmia.org/art-artists/curatorial-departments/japanese-and-korean-art

Dressed by Nature: Textiles of Japan

Jovan C. Speller’s MAEP exhibition will aestheticize the security of a community too often targeted, misunderstood, and misrepresented in public spaces. From the creation of a sound installation, to scenes of protection across the gallery walls surrounding the viewer, the artist will depict the story of fear and hope for Black families in every American community. 
Speller is a Minnesota-based artist originally from Los Angeles. She is a recipient of a 2018 McKnight Visual Artist Fellowship, a 2018 Next Step Fund Grant, and a 2016 Jerome Emerging Artist Fellowship. She completed a residency at Second Shift Studio Space in St. Paul and was awarded the Carolyn Glasoe Bailey Foundation Minnesota Art Prize in 2021. Speller is represented by Aspect/Ratio Projects in Chicago. She holds a BFA in photography from Columbia College, Chicago, and studied art at the Maryland Institute College of Art. Her artwork, I Just Came Across the River, 2017, (2020.57) was acquired by Mia in 2020.
This exhibition is part of the <a href="http://new.artsmia.org/exhibitions/maep/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Minnesota Artists Exhibition Program</a>, now located in the U.S. Bank Gallery.
Generous support for MAEP provided by: 
<img loading="lazy" class="alignnone wp-image-69432 " src="https://new.artsmia.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/McKnight_logo_whtonblk_rgb-1.png" alt="" width="300" height="54" srcset="https://images.artsmia.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/01101456/McKnight_logo_whtonblk_rgb-1.png 800w, https://images.artsmia.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/01101456/McKnight_logo_whtonblk_rgb-1-768x138.png 768w" sizes="(max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px" />
Additional support provided by RBC Wealth Management.

Jovan C. Speller: Nurturing, and Other Rituals of Protection

America is haunted. Ghosts from our history are an inescapable and unsettled part of daily life. Not merely the realm of metaphor but present and tangible, urgently calling for contact, these otherworldly visitors have been central to our national identity. They populate our literature, our entertainment, and our art. Through times of mourning and trauma, artists have been integral to visualizing ghosts, whether national or personal, and in doing so have embraced the mysterious and the inexplicable. This exhibition explores the numerous ways that artists in the United States have made sense of their own experiences of the paranormal and the supernatural, developing a rich visual culture of the intangible.
Exhibition Tour:
June 12 &#8211; September 5, 2021: Toledo Museum of Art
October 7, 2021 &#8211; January 2, 2022: Speed Art Museum
February 19 &#8211; May 15, 2022: Minneapolis Institute of Art
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Lead Sponsors: Thomson Reuters, Terra Foundation for American Art, National Endowment for the Humanities
Major Supporters: Art Bridges, National Endowment for the Arts
Generous Supporter: Wyeth Foundation
This exhibition is organized by the Minneapolis Institute of Art. 
Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this exhibition do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities.
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Related Blogs

Supernatural America: The Paranormal in American Art

&#8220;Latitude&#8221; by St. Paul–based artist Aaron Dysart responds to changes in the environment by combining spectacle, artifice, and scientific data in two juxtaposing installations. Both pieces question unseen and overlooked directional flow on this planet and, more subtly, what factors force this movement, which is producing ecological change.
Dysart’s work pairs visual language and spectacle to give hidden stories a broader audience. His environmental interventions showcase his love of color and fog machines, while his objects convey meaning through materiality. The artist will work with researchers at the Woodwell Climate Research Center, formerly known as the Woods Hole Research Center, in Falmouth, Mass., to coordinate the data used in &#8220;Latitude.&#8221;
This exhibition is part of the <a href="http://new.artsmia.org/exhibitions/maep/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Minnesota Artists Exhibition Program</a>, now located in the U.S. Bank Gallery.
Generous support for MAEP provided by: 
<img loading="lazy" class="alignnone wp-image-69432 " src="https://new.artsmia.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/McKnight_logo_whtonblk_rgb-1.png" alt="" width="300" height="54" srcset="https://images.artsmia.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/01101456/McKnight_logo_whtonblk_rgb-1.png 800w, https://images.artsmia.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/01101456/McKnight_logo_whtonblk_rgb-1-768x138.png 768w" sizes="(max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px" />
Additional support provided by RBC Wealth Management.

Aaron Dysart: Latitude

The son of Jewish immigrants in Argentina, Mauricio Lasansky (1914–2012) moved to the United States in 1943. He forged a flourishing career as a printmaker and draftsman, first in New York and then from studios in Iowa and Maine. His work often explored themes of war and violence. In 1961, coinciding with the televised trial of the Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann, he began a series of drawings to grapple with the Holocaust. Confronted with the atrocities, he said, “I was full of hate, poison, and I wanted to spit it out.” The Nazi Drawings are his visceral response to the horrors committed in Nazi concentration camps.
Brutal, haunting, and raw, “Envisioning Evil: The Nazi Drawings by Mauricio Lasansky” features his series of 33 monumental drawings made with pencil, turpentine, and earth colors. The exhibition, over 50 years after the series’ original tour, is its first comprehensive presentation in a generation. At Mia, archival media of the Eichmann trial and a selection of contemporary prints by Lasansky will also be shown. A catalogue examines Lasansky’s series, acquired in its entirety by Richard and Jeanne Levitt for their family foundation.
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“Envisioning Evil: The Nazi Drawings by Mauricio Lasansky” is organized by the Minneapolis Institute of Art and lent by The Levitt Foundation.
Generous support provided by Margaret and Angus Wurtele, Beverly Grossman, John and Ruth Huss Fund, Erwin and Miriam Kelen, John and Nancy Lindahl, Sheila Morgan, Donna and James Pohlad, through the Eloise and Carl Pohlad Family Fund, the Lynne and Andrew Redleaf Foundation, Laurie and Ronald Eibensteiner, Stephen and Sheila Lieberman, Sheldon and Lili Chester, Andrew Grossman, Irving and Marjorie Weiser, and John and Marsha Soucheray.

Envisioning Evil: &#8220;The Nazi Drawings&#8221; by Mauricio Lasansky

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Mia has acquired the complete archive of works by Highpoint Editions, the publishing arm of Highpoint Center for Printmaking, a nonprofit organization established in Minneapolis in 2001 to advance the art of printmaking. The Highpoint Editions Archive comprises more than 300 published prints and multiples, plus hundreds of items of preparatory material from 40 nationally and internationally prominent artists, including Carlos Amorales, Julie Buffalohead, Willie Cole, Sarah Crowner, Jim Hodges, Delita Martin, Julie Mehretu, Todd Norsten, Chloe Piene, David Rathman, Do Ho Suh, and Dyani White Hawk.
“The Contemporary Print: 20 Years at Highpoint Editions” showcases 175 of these artworks in a broad range of printmaking techniques, styles, and subjects. Highlights include Willie Cole’s “The Beauties,” a series of 28 large-scale intaglio prints made from flattened metal ironing boards; a selection of relief and intaglio prints by Carlos Amorales, using imagery from his long-running “Liquid Archive” project; and Dyani White Hawk’s suite of prints inspired by Plains-style women’s dentalium dresses. The exhibition also features ancillary production material—preliminary drawings, trial and working proofs, printing matrices—as well as printmaking demonstrations to enlighten and inspire.
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<img loading="lazy" src="https://new.artsmia.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/HighPoint-LockUp-1.png" alt="" width="1005" height="419" class="alignleft size-full wp-image-96359" srcset="https://new.artsmia.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/HighPoint-LockUp-1.png 1005w, https://new.artsmia.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/HighPoint-LockUp-1-855x356.png 855w, https://new.artsmia.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/HighPoint-LockUp-1-385x161.png 385w, https://new.artsmia.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/HighPoint-LockUp-1-768x320.png 768w" sizes="(max-width: 1005px) 100vw, 1005px" />
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Julie Buffalohead

The Contemporary Print: 20 Years at Highpoint Editions

The 1960s marked a tumultuous period in the social, political, and cultural history of the United States. Amid a generational reckoning with racial injustice, authoritarian patriarchy, and an escalating war in Vietnam, San Francisco emerged as the primary locus for a youth-oriented, anti-establishment counterculture that embraced a progressive idealism, which included broad-minded acceptance of sexual expression and experimentation with mind-altering hallucinogens. Inventive forms of music and art flourished among the movement’s devotees, fueling the rise of what became known as psychedelic rock, a musical genre rooted in early blues, jazz, and folk-based rock. Dance concerts, often accompanied by light shows, became the principal venue for the new sound, while the concert poster was its promotional vehicle.
In 2019, Minneapolis collector Paul Maurer gave more than 200 concert posters to Mia&#8217;s permanent collection. Most of them date to the “golden age” of psychedelic poster design (1966–69) and were commissioned to promote rock acts performing at the leading San Francisco concert venues of the day. In celebration of this generous gift, Mia is presenting a selection of more than 25 eye-dazzling psychedelic posters created by the period’s leading concert-poster designers, including Rick Griffin, Alton Kelley, Victor Moscoso, Stanley Mouse, Wes Wilson, and Bob Fried.

2019.59.27

Sixties Psychedelia: San Francisco Rock Posters from the Paul Maurer Collection

Leslie Barlow’s MAEP exhibition &#8220;Within, Between, and Beyond&#8221; comprises paintings and video interviews that feature 16 subjects who identify as mixed race people or transracial adoptees. The project documents the historically marginalized narratives of mixed race, multiracial, or transracial adoptee identified individuals. By insightfully centering mixed race experiences, Barlow provides a platform for issues of race and identity.
Barlow lives and works in Minneapolis. Primarily an oil painter, she shares stories through figural relationships that explore the politics of representation, identity, otherness, and racial constructs. Barlow is a recipient of the 2019 McKnight Visual Artist Fellowship, the 20/20 Springboard Fellowship, MN State Arts Board Artist Initiative Grant in 2016 and 2018, and was named artist of the year by City Pages in 2016. In 2018, she received the Minnesota Museum of American Art Purchase Award in the Minnesota State Fair Juried Exhibition. Barlow received her BFA in 2011 from the University of Wisconsin-Stout and her MFA in 2016 from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. Interviews were conducted and created in partnership with Lola Osunkoya, MA LPCC, and Ryan Stopera of Free Truth Media.
This exhibition is part of the <a href="http://new.artsmia.org/exhibitions/maep/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Minnesota Artists Exhibition Program</a>, now located in the U.S. Bank Gallery.
Generous support for MAEP provided by: 
<img loading="lazy" class="alignnone wp-image-69432 " src="http://live-artsmia.pantheonsite.io/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/McKnight_logo_whtonblk_rgb-1.png" alt="" width="300" height="54" srcset="https://images.artsmia.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/01101456/McKnight_logo_whtonblk_rgb-1.png 800w, https://images.artsmia.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/01101456/McKnight_logo_whtonblk_rgb-1-768x138.png 768w" sizes="(max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px" />
Additional support provided by RBC Wealth Management.

Leslie Barlow: Within, Between, and Beyond

This exhibition introduces Mia’s groundbreaking acquisition of the Fly Zine Archive, a thematically focused collection of nearly 2,000 zines, comics, and underground publications by a diverse range of punk, anarchist, feminist, and LGBTQ+ artists and writers active in the United States, Europe, and elsewhere. Compiled by the New York–based artist and activist Fly NYC, the archive chronicles the graphic art and printed ephemera connecting the alternative subcultures that flourished in urban centers in the 1980s, 1990s, and early 2000s. The display will feature a selection of punk fanzines, anarchist pamphlets, squatting ephemera, mini-comics distributed at protests, illustrated political booklets, and other counterculture publications. 
The Fly Zine Archive exhibition was organized by Ian Karp, John E. Andrus III Curatorial Fellow in Mia’s Department of Prints and Drawings.

The Fly Zine Archive: A Chronicle of Punk, Queer, and Anarchist Counterculture

This exhibition highlights 50 years of photographic expression by a diverse roster of artists working within, against, and beyond the history of the medium: Nona Faustine, Martine Gutierrez, Deana Lawson, An-My Lê, Rania Matar, Lorraine O’Grady, Adrian Piper, Selma Fernandez Richter, Martha Rosler, Nona Faustine, Mickalene Thomas, Carrie Mae Weems, and Carmen Winant. 
Spanning the past half-century in modern and contemporary photography, these photographs contend with many of the period’s defining issues, especially within the United States. They meditate on the intersection of personal and political histories, freshly interrogate matters of national identity and belonging, reflect on cycles of trauma and healing, and imagine worlds beyond the inequalities of our time.

2019.26

In Her View

Engineered for Domestic Bliss

Nicole Havekost: Chthonic

Captive Beauties: Depictions of Women in Late Imperial China

In the Presence of Our Ancestors: Southern Perspectives in African American Art

An antique gray and gold television with rounded corners and a red speaker.

Nicole Havekost will explore the simultaneous joy, sublime embarrassment, and disorderly beauty of the human body through her anthropomorphic sculptures.
Havekost lives and works in Rochester, Minnesota. She earned a BFA in printmaking from the Rhode Island School of Design and an MFA from the University of New Mexico, also in printmaking. Havekost has exhibited her work in Boston, Dallas; Eureka, California; and Tasmania. She is a 2013 and 2018 recipient of the Minnesota State Arts Board&#8217;s Artist Initiative grant.
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<h2 class="Mia-bold">Artist Talk</h2>
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This exhibition is part of the <a href="http://new.artsmia.org/exhibitions/maep/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Minnesota Artists Exhibition Program</a>, now located in U.S. Bank Gallery.
Generous support for MAEP provided by: 
<img loading="lazy" class="alignnone wp-image-69432 " src="https://new.artsmia.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/McKnight_logo_whtonblk_rgb-1.png" alt="" width="300" height="54" srcset="https://images.artsmia.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/01101456/McKnight_logo_whtonblk_rgb-1.png 800w, https://images.artsmia.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/01101456/McKnight_logo_whtonblk_rgb-1-768x138.png 768w" sizes="(max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px" />
Additional support provided by RBC Wealth Management.
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MAEP; Nicole Havekost; Chthonic

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. Other paintings show women with fanciful coiffures and silk dresses, serving as musicians or courtesans, existing to please men. Literary and visual artists often compared women to flowers: refined and delicate yet fragile, their beauty (meaning marriageability) transient.  
But some artists hinted at suppressed urges and unacknowledged emotions, reflecting a growing interest in the inner lives of their subjects. In their paintings we see the equivalent of the following verses, sung by the female protagonist in the play The Peony Pavilion (1598). Confined to the inner quarters of her home, she laments a brilliantly flowering spring scene in her isolated garden: 
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The flowers in purple and red, 
Scattering here and there, 
Yet only accompanied by 
Dry wells and ruined fence. 
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<a href="https://collections.artsmia.org/exhibitions/2811/captive-beauties-depictions-of-women-in-late-imperial-china" class="button">Explore the art in this exhibition from home.</a>

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<div style="margin-top: 35px;"><a href="https://new.artsmia.org/art-artists/explore/in-the-presence-of-our-ancestors-southern-perspectives-in-african-american-art/"><button class="background-black">Enter the Exhibition</button></a></div>
“We as a people of Africa have a story to tell about a journey of four hundred years here in America.” &#8211; Joe Minter“
In the Presence of Our Ancestors: Southern Perspectives in African American Art” brings together methods of visual storytelling and ancestral memory through the individual practices of artists from the “Black Belt” region of the American South—a term that refers to the region’s black soil, as well as the legacies of African Americans who shaped its social and agrarian culture. Spanning from Louisiana to Florida, and the mid-20th century to the present, the artists highlighted in this exhibition document rural life and traditions of metalwork, funerary and yard art, and quilt making. Here, we witness an evolution of regional artistic practice, as raw materials and found objects related to time, place, and accessibility take center stage.
These artworks are sometimes called &#8220;folk&#8221; or &#8220;vernacular,&#8221; and the artists who made them labeled &#8220;self-taught.&#8221; Within the context of art museums, institutions rooted in colonial endeavors and oppression, such terms diminish the thoughtfulness and creative autonomy of both artwork and artist; for this reason, we do not use them here. The works speak for themselves, centering Black voices, material traditions, and visions.
We invite you to embark on a spiritual journey, experiencing the artworks and lives they connect us with from home.  
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<div style="margin-top: 35px;"><a href="https://new.artsmia.org/art-artists/explore/in-the-presence-of-our-ancestors-southern-perspectives-in-african-american-art/"><button class="background-black">Enter the Exhibition</button></a></div>
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<h3>About the Souls Grown Deep Foundation</h3>
Founded in 2010 by the late collector and art historian William Arnett (1939–2020), the Souls Grown Deep Foundation is dedicated to documenting, preserving, and promoting the contributions of African American artists of the South and the cultural traditions in which they are rooted. Mia acquired 33 works in 2017 as part of the foundation’s initiative to introduce the collection to major museums across the nation. The foundation also collaborates with institutions each year to expand avenues of scholarship and professional development for college students of color. It prioritizes creative communal sustainability through grantmaking, artist’s rights, and more recently, Covid-19 relief and voting rights.
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In honor of the Souls Grown Deep Foundation’s commitment to community, we recognize the contributions made by many to produce this exhibition. It is curated by inaugural Souls Grown Deep Foundation intern, Starasea Nidiala Camara, in collaboration with Mia’s BIPOC Curatorial Advisory Committee—Keisha Williams, Bayou Bay, Anniessa Antar, Tamira Amin, Frederica Simmons, Victoria Myers, Minna Jain, and Jeanine Pollard—with interpretation by visiting local artists through the Transcontinental Dialogue Project. A special thank-you goes to the 2019–2020 Souls Grown Deep Foundation intern cohort, and to the artists and their families who were such gracious hosts.
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Major Sponsor: 
<img loading="lazy" class="alignleft wp-image-91820 " src="https://images.artsmia.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/24155341/BofA_k.png" alt="" width="421" height="47" srcset="https://images.artsmia.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/24155341/BofA_k.png 1520w, https://images.artsmia.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/24155341/BofA_k-768x86.png 768w, https://images.artsmia.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/24155341/BofA_k-1200x134.png 1200w" sizes="(max-width: 421px) 100vw, 421px" />
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2019.16.8

Current Exhibitions

Todd Webb in Africa: Outside the Frame

Abstract Prints by Hagiwara Hideo

To Beautify and Protect: Miao Clothing and Jewelry from China

Vision 2020: Jess T. Dugan

This exhibition presents a recently recovered photographic series taken by American documentary photographer Todd Webb in 1958. Commissioned by the United Nations to document emerging industries and technologies in Ghana, Kenya, Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia), Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), Somalia, Sudan, Togo, and Tanganyika and Zanzibar (both now Tanzania), these early color photographs went largely unused by the U.N.’s publications. Their neglect or suppression by the organization mandates a closer investigation and animates our interpretation of the images, as well as our attempts to understand Webb’s intentions in creating them.
Webb’s photographs present an outsider’s view onto the social, political, and cultural dynamics on the continent at a critical period between colonialism and independence. Resisting stereotypical or exoticizing frameworks, Webb created images of countries on the cusp of change. At the same time, his photographs raise important questions concerning photographic agency and power, racial and national privilege, and the ways in which Euro-Americans conceived of modernization at a crucial period in Africa’s history.
<a href="https://collections.artsmia.org/exhibitions/2830/todd-webb-in-africa"><button class="background-black">View the Online Exhibition</button></a>
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Originally a painter trained in oil, Hagiwara Hideo (1913–2007) became ill with tuberculosis and turned to printmaking in 1954. From the start his prints were of an abstract nature, and for 50 years he was a constant innovator in his choice of motifs, style, and technique. This first major U.S. retrospective exhibition of Hagiwara&#8217;s work showcases his enormous versatility. More than 30 prints span his early work of the 1950s to the Greek Mythology series in 1965, and from his celebrated series of novel views of Mount Fuji in the 1980s and 1990s to his enormously laborious prints of the Face, Memory, and Mandala series.
This exhibition will be presented in two rotations: Rotation 1: December 14, 2019 &#8211; October 25, 2020. Rotation 2: October 31, 2020 &#8211; May 23, 2021.
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L2018.109.8

Miao people comprise one of the largest ethnic minorities in China. Ancestrally, they are related to the Hmong people of Southeast Asia. Miao people consider textiles, clothing, and accessories as expressions of identity. This is especially true at communal festivals, where an individual might wear an elaborate, embroidered costume and intricately worked silver jewelry. In these settings, ceremonial clothing could indicate a wearer’s age and marital status, or mark important rites of passage. Motifs on these garments and silver jewelry can reveal Miao history and beliefs, while decorative techniques, patterning, and stitchwork distinguish one community from another. The silver material and designs also serve a protective function, promoting the health and safety of the wearer, while presenting a dazzling display that delights the eyes. This exhibition showcases only a few exquisite examples drawn from Mia’s large collection of more than 1,200 textiles and 450 pieces of jewelry made by Miao artisans.

Mia’s yearlong exploration of contemporary photographic portraiture continues with the presentation of eight large-format photographs from the series To Survive on This Shore by Jess Dugan. Dugan’s portraits of transgender and gender nonconforming older adults are at once reflective and uplifting, and include intimate first-person narratives by each of the sitters, as told to the artist.
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