Walking through the "State of the Art" exhibit feels like going on a cross-country road trip where every pit stop involves a chat with a uniquely interesting stranger.
The engaging show, which opened this weekend at the Minneapolis Institute of Art and runs through May, features 135 works by 51 contemporary artists from across the country, many of them largely unrecognized outside their own communities.
Funded by Wal-Mart heir Alice Walton, the show broke attendance records at the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art she founded in Bentonville, Ark., when it opened there in August 2014. The works were chosen by a curatorial team that logged more than 100,000 miles visiting 1,000 studios in cities, small towns and rural areas in search of artists making pieces that speak to our times.
Paintings and drawings, sculptures, photographs, videos and performance art — including three works by Minnesotans — together constitute a sort of scrapbook of the issues on Americans' minds, with clever, expressive and often surprising use of materials. All were made within the past five years and thus "capture the current moment" of American life and culture, said institute curator Dennis Michael Jon, acting as tour guide.
Vanessa German's "White Naphtha Soap, or Contemporary Lessons in Shapeshifting" is named for the vintage soapbox on which two dolls bearing weapons stand like miniature sentries. Symbolizing the protection of children, the dolls are made of shells, an old flip-style mobile phone, baby shoes, porcelain figurines and other found objects, some brought to her by neighbors and friends.
Pam Longobardi's "Ghosts of Consumption (for Piet M.)" is made entirely of small pieces of refuse culled from the ocean — so threatening to marine ecology, yet so entrancing when pieced together like a Mondrian grid.
"All the work in the show is really accessible," Jon said. "There's a real blurring of the lines between fine art, folk art and home crafts."
Several pieces use beauty to communicate loss or tragedy, such as a giant quilt made of nonwinning lottery tickets by Adam Eckstrom and Lauren Was, or Kirk Crippens' starkly devastating series of photographs depicting foreclosed homes and businesses in Stockton, Calif.
