MINNEAPOLIS INSTITUTE OF ART
FALL SPECIAL EXHIBITIONS
Artists Respond, American Art and the Vietnam War, 1965-1975
September 29, 2019–January 5, 2020 General admission: $20
Artists Reflect: Contemporary Views on the American War
September 29, 2019–January 5, 2020
Organized by the Smithsonian American Art Museum, “Artists Respond: American Art and the Vietnam War, 1965–1975” is the most comprehensive exhibition to examine the contemporary impact of the Vietnam War on American art and is unprecedented in its historical scale and depth. The exhibition presents nearly 100 works by 58 of the period’s most visionary, provocative artists. The war’s escalation coincided with the rise of feminism and the Black Arts Movement, broadening the artists’ critique. Mia’s installation also spotlights protest exhibitions organized in the wake of violence against demonstrators during the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago.
A companion exhibition, Mia-organized “Artists Reflect: Contemporary Views on the American War” features works by Southeast Asian diaspora artists, each of whom explores the impact and legacy of the war. Drawings, textiles, video, photography, and installation work by Tiffany Chung, Pao Houa Her, An-My Lê, Dinh Q. Lê, Hương Ngô 吳玉香, Teo Nguyen, Tuan Andrew Nguyen, Pipo Nguyen-duy, Cy Thao, Hồng-An Trương, and Thi Bui reflect on migration, memory, the effect of violence on the landscape and on communities, healing, and trauma and bring important attention to the war’s living effects on the population most affected by its long history (predating and postdating U.S. involvement).
FALL EXHIBITIONS
México de Graciela Iturbide
August 17–December 15, 2019
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. Organized by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, “Graciela Iturbide’s Mexico” presents 125 photographs drawn from over four decades. This groundbreaking career survey explores the complexity of contemporary Mexican society through Iturbide’s striking photographs of its landscapes and people.
Strong Women, Full of Love: The Photography of Meadow Muska
August 17–December 15, 2019
This exhibition is the first to present the work of documentary photographer Carolyn “Meadow” Muska. Born and raised in Minnesota, Meadow came out as a lesbian at age 20. After earning a BFA at Ohio University, she used photography to record “beautiful, strong women, full of love and joy.” In an era of persistent legal and cultural prejudice against LGBTQ individuals, documenting her community was a radical act. Because her photographs could expose her subjects to significant risks, including the loss of employment, child custody, or housing, she developed her own film in a basement darkroom. The extraordinary photographic record she produced as a part of the “women’s land” movement in both Minnesota and Oregon, as well as her work as a labor and women’s rights activist, illuminates a new and vital chapter in American history.
Rethinking Histories
August 24, 2019–January 19, 2020
“Rethinking Histories” is a survey of Mia’s contemporary collection. Told through quotations 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. Artworks by Pao Houa Her, Chihiro Mori, Siah Armajani, Stan Douglas, Mickalene Thomas, Pushpamala N., Sadie Benning, Kota Ezawa, and Willie Cole are featured.
Joe Horton: Vessel
September 11–September 22, 2019
Mia’s artist-in-residence Joe Horton premiers his experimental film Vessel (2019). Horton’s 30-minute film follows a main character as he travels through a spiritual journey of the afterlife and, with the help of an ancestral spirit and a strange disc, finally transcends the physical world. The poetic plot combines performance, stop-motion animation, and an ambient soundtrack that recalls classical storytelling forms like the opera or ballet, updated with heavy infusions of science fiction and Afrofuturism. Print works and sculpture will be displayed alongside the film.
Nguyen Trinh Thi: Fifth Cinema
September 29, 2019–February 17, 2020
Mia presents the first U.S. solo museum exhibition of work by artist Nguyen Trinh Thi (b. 1973, Vietnamese). “Nguyen Trinh Thi: Fifth Cinema” is the U.S. premiere of Nguyen’s hybrid essay film Fifth Cinema (2018), a single-channel installation that examines the power of film to reclaim Indigenous history and land from colonization and Western influences. Drawing on personal accounts, popular movies, government films, news footage, documentary material, home movies sold on eBay, and YouTube videos, she interweaves these with her own material in order to consider how the camera mediates understanding of the artist’s homeland, Vietnam.
Alyssa Baguss
November 21, 2019–March 1, 2020
Artist Alyssa Baguss will construct three distinct large-scale artworks that explore how we experience the outdoors as mediated technology in this new Minnesota Artists Exhibition Program (MAEP) exhibition. The exhibition will consider nature as scenery, our persistent longing to be elsewhere, and our perception of place through secondary experiences.
SUMMER EXHIBITIONS/NOW ON VIEW
Turkish Rugs on Tudor Walls: 16th-Century Trade between England and the Islamic World
June 8, 2019–June 7, 2020
This project is the latest installment of Living Rooms, an initiative to present Mia’s historic interiors and decorative arts collections in new ways. “Turkish Rugs on Tudor Walls” examines the fundamental attraction and ambivalence between England and the Islamic world in the 16th century. During that time period, the Islamic world ruled much of North Africa, Persia, and Eastern Europe. Protestant Christian England, newly estranged from Catholic Europe, forged lucrative trade, diplomatic, and cultural relations with these Muslim global powers. By the late 1500s, few prosperous English homes lacked a Turkey carpet, silks, ceramics, or tapestries. These goods, as well as domestically produced versions of them, later found their way into English daily life. Yet, as much as the English admired the sumptuous wares, the tiny, isolated island nation wrestled over doing business with a people it deemed “heathen.”
A Weakness for French Prints: The Harry Drake Collection
June 22, 2019–March 8, 2020
Stroll the streets of Paris and explore the French countryside in a time before cars clogged the lanes and boulevards. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, printmakers found inspiration along riverbanks, in narrow alleyways, and down back roads. They observed the lives of the haves and the have-nots. They recorded celebration and desperation. Thanks to the collecting interests and generosity of the late St. Paul native and Mia trustee Harry Drake, visitors can enter this beautiful, moody time machine through 24 prints by artists such as Félix Buhot, Edgar Chahine, Auguste Louis Lepére, and Henri Riviére.
Jonathan Herrera Soto: In Between / Underneath (Entremedio / Por Debajo)
July 19–November 3, 2019
This new Minnesota Artists Exhibition Program (MAEP) exhibition by artist Jonathan Herrera Soto explores freedom of the press, both in the United States and abroad, in the age of fake news and contends that the security of journalists is vital to the maintenance of human rights. The focal point of the show is a new rendition of Herrera Soto’s installation “In Between / Underneath (Entremedio / Por Debajo).” The work features portraits of more than 170 journalists—including reporters originally from the United States—who were murdered or have gone missing in the State of Mexico from the mid-1950s to 2019. Using a mud mixture made from unfired clay, charcoal, soil, and ashes, Herrera Soto will stencil prints of his subjects’ faces onto the floor. The images are designed to be stepped on and walked across, gradually wearing away and fading over time.
The Sabbath Now
July 20, 2019–June 7, 2020
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 removing the completed textile from its form, Minkowitz stiffens the cloth with resins, transforming her crocheted creation into a hollow, transparent sculpture. She employs this technique in “The Sabbath Now,” a fiber sculpture which depicts elements common to a family’s weekly celebration of the Jewish Sabbath (Shabbat in Hebrew) at home on Friday evenings.