collage of artwork
Courtesy of the Weisman Art Museum
State Your Intentions: New Works in the WAM Collection
State Your Intentions: New Works in the WAM Collection
July 20–Feb 16, Weisman Art Museum
Since 1981, the Weisman has steadily—and somewhat quietly—devoted its resources to collecting the work of women artists. This exhibition draws on that mission while displaying some of the museum’s more recent acquisitions, which range in origin from Zimbabwe to far-off St. Paul.
Courtesy of Rebuild Foundation/Walker Art Center
Theaster Gates: Assembly Hall
Theaster Gates: Assembly Hall
Sept. 5–Jan. 12, Walker Art Center
Chicago-based multimedia artist Theaster Gates has found his new canvas in the Walker Art Center itself. For the exhibition, the Walker’s galleries will become what the museum calls “Gesamtkunstwerk,” or a total work of art. Look for installations, found objects, performance pieces, and sculpture—which sounds like…art.
Courtesy of All My Relations Arts
Changing Horizons
Changing Horizons
Sept. 9–Nov. 1, All My Relations Arts
Sept. 20–Nov. 8, Two Rivers Gallery
Acclaimed abstract expressionist George Morrison was born September 30, 1919, in Chippewa City, Minnesota, and this two-gallery show hopes to wish him a happy 100th. (The artist died almost 20 years ago.) To do this, they’re pushing back on an idea Morrison resisted his entire career: that Native American ancestry makes one’s work “Native American Art”—a box never imposed on his white contemporaries like Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning.
Courtesy of the Minnesota Museum of American Art
History Is Not Here: Art and the Arab Imaginary
History Is Not Here: Art and the Arab Imaginary
Sept 12–Jan 5, Minnesota Museum of American Art
The Minnesota Museum of American Art is co-presenting this show with St. Paul-based Mizna, in honor of the Arab American arts organization’s 20th anniversary. The retrospective includes 15 artists who have appeared on the pages of Mizna’s art and literary journal over the years, and explores how their work uproots the notion of history as a fixed concept.
Courtesy of the Northern Clay Center
Horror Vacui: Across the Margins
Horror Vacui: Across the Margins
Sept. 20–Nov. 3, Northern Clay Center
For Italian art critic Mario Praz, the visual clutter of Victorian art was offensive enough to demand a mocking term: “Horror Vacui,” or the fear of emptiness. A century-plus later, artists still grapple with the virtues and vices of visual excess—in our culture and politics, too. Not a show for the post-Kondo crowd?
Courtesy of Mia
Artists Respond: American Art and the Vietnam War, 1965–1975
Artists Respond: American Art and the Vietnam War, 1965–1975
Sept. 29–Jan. 5, Mia
Organized by the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Mia’s latest exhibition looks at the role of the artist in the decade of an unraveling America. (No, we don’t mean the 2010s.) The show’s 100-some pieces (by 58 prolific artists of the period) comment on the Vietnam War, the rise of feminism, the Black Arts Movement, and the fall of a president (no, we don’t mean the one elected in 2016).
Courtesy of Groveland Gallery
Rod Massey and Carol Lee Chase
Rod Massey and Carol Lee Chase
Oct. 26–Nov. 30, Groveland Gallery
These coinciding gallery shows juxtapose the realistic oil paintings of urban decay by Minneapolis-based Rod Massey with the slightly more ethereal light studies of Carol Lee Chase, who works in St. Paul. An epic battle between light and dark?
