Weisman Art Museum
FOUNDLING: 100 DAYS
Foundling: 100 Days
The Weisman Art Museum at the University of Minnesota reopened its doors last week after a months-long closure for renovations. With its reopening comes two new exhibits, both of which will be on display until May.
Foundling: 100 Days
The exhibit Foundling: 100 Days by Megan Rye is composed of one hundred painted and photographed portraits based on international adoptee’s referral photos, including Rye’s, depicting each waiting child in a transitional moment in time.
The images show children waiting with direct stares and bear witness to who they were as they waited to be given names, families and “forever homes.”
The photographs act as source and companion to the 12” x 19” oil paintings on paper bags. The goal is to promote empathetic consideration of the diverse and rich lives celebrated in the portraits. “Foundling: 100 Days” sheds light to a specific and complicated form of the immigration experience with international adoption.
Both the title of the project and the use of one hundred paired images refers to Baek-il, which is a Korean practice to celebrate and give thanks for an infant on the 100th day after the child is born. The tradition has endured as the importance of the number 100 stands for personhood and responsibility.
Rye, born in Seoul, South Korea in 1975, is a visual artist and teacher that uses visual storytelling to explore themes in migration, democracy, citizenship, war and more.
The exhibit will be on display in the Carlson Gallery January 19-May 22, 2022.
The Nature of Shoreham Yards
The Nature of Shoreham Yards is an art installation envisioned by the artist Gudrun Lock. The installation in the Target Studio for Creative Collaboration shares the in-process work, research, and restoration in the form of objects, documents, data sets, maps, photographs, illustrations and other visuals from Shoreham Yards, an active 230-acre train and trucking facility in Northeast Minneapolis.
The collaboration at Shoreham Yards continues to explore the marginalized ecology and imagine new ways of understanding “waste places.”
The exhibit will change over the course of the runtime and visitors are encouraged to incorporate feedback through comments and questions.
Currently, collaborators include “bird specialist Dave Zumeta, arborist Chad Giblin, professor of Anthropology at the University of Minnesota Stuart McLean, multimedia artist Jeffery Skemp, artist and designer Janet Lobbercht, musician Stefon Alexander, writer Miranda Trimmier, community activist Jewell Arcoren, artist Hallie Bahn, naturalist Greg Feinberg,” students from Minneapolis College of Design, and more according to the Weisman Art Museum website.
The exhibit is about re-imagining society's “relationship to colonist expansion, historical pollution, contemporary consumption, and wildness,” and will be on display from January 19-May 15, 2022.
Entry to the Weisman is free. Masks are required in all indoor spaces and guests are asked to keep a 6-foot distance from other visiting parties when visiting, when possible.
