Mia is Community

 

When Casey Riley decided to organize the “Just Kids” photography show, asking kids to choose and reflect on images of other kids, she had no idea how it would go. That was largely the point: to learn how younger people are responding to a medium as powerful in their lives as it is ubiquitous.

“Photography is vital to young people,” says Riley, curator and head of the Department of Photography and New Media at Mia. “In many cases, it is central to their self-presentation and navigation of the world. They are represented in millions of images, they communicate in images, and they care about photography. They have broad expertise in the field and deserve to share it.”

The museum recruited 11 students from Twin Cities area schools to be guest curators. With help from Mia’s teen Art Team, they selected a diverse array of youth-centered photos from Mia’s collection, wrote labels about 75 of them, and co-created an experience in the galleries that resonated with them. Art hung low for small children. No selfie stations. No hashtags.

When the exhibition opened in early 2020, it was clear the kids relished the opportunity to speak for themselves. Kajsa Schultz-Bakke, then a freshman at Roosevelt High School in Minneapolis, said she thought it was important to understand “how children see the world” through photography. Lucille Cawthra, then an eighth-grader at Anoka Middle School, said it was time to “take children seriously” in the art world, to “acknowledge children’s voices.”

Their labels are telling: they see themselves in these photos, whether taken more than a century ago in factories filled with child labor or more recently, halfway across the world. Writing about a 1940s image of children at a Swiss school for the deaf and mute, one young curator offered that he could relate to the sense of not having a say, noting that “everyone’s voice deserves to be heard.”