Photo show at Minneapolis Institute of Art puts the focus on women

Mpls. Institute of Art focuses on recent photos by women.

By Alicia Eler Star Tribune

July 1, 2021 — 10:46am

At the entrance of "In Her View," visitors will spot either a blue circle or a camera lens, depending on how you perceive it. Regardless, what's inside is clear: an exhibition of more than 30 photographic works created by women and women-identifying artists, acquired by the Minneapolis Institute of Art in the past five years.

"It's been really important to me since I started here — what it means to be the first woman in charge of this collection, and thinking about what kinds of knowledge and experience need to be brought into the collection," said Casey Riley, who became Mia's curator of photography nearly three years ago. "It's not an easy endeavor to go back into time and think what we should have collected in 1970 or 1985."

Riley thinks the museum has made inroads. She has added 257 photos to a collection numbering around 13,000. Although that number makes just a dent, it feels like a good start. Most of them are by women and artists of color. Works by women account for less than 9% of the museum's photo collection.

The images in this exhibit deal with questions of national identity and belonging, cycles of trauma and healing, and visualizing a world beyond our current one rife with racial inequity. With a mix of local, emerging and internationally renowned artists, "In Her View" feels like a step toward making that vision a reality. Each piece will ask you to stop and think for a while, so come with an open mind.

Nona Faustine's performative photograph "Isabelle, Lefferts House, Brooklyn (Self-Portrait)" portrays the artist looking straight at the camera, topless, wearing a white skirt with two pairs of white shoes tied to her waistband and a frying pan in her hand. In the background is an 18th-century farmhouse, Lefferts Historic House, which has become a museum focused on the lives of the Lenape, Dutch and enslaved African people who worked there.

"She's channeling ancestors, communing with the experience of Black women and their domestic servitude at these sites," said Riley. "You can see different tokens of her acknowledgment of the kind of labor that's happened on this site."

Minneapolis-based artist Jovan Speller's "I Just Came Across the River," made with a historic brown-print method that gives the photo an ethereal quality, portrays a Black woman in white, standing on the shore; she is a spirit of sorts, an ancestral connection to the past.

"The river has great significance in African American history, slavery and freedom, but also of connections with family," said Riley.

The show features several series by significant American artists, including Vietnam-born artist An-My Lê, who investigates histories of racism and wartime trauma, particularly in the South, as well as the American landscape.

Deana Lawson, winner of the prestigious Hugo Boss Prize in 2020 for her complex photos featuring people who exist both in everyday reality and in spiritual realm, has three gold-framed pictures in the show. The most striking is "Nation," which shows two Black men — hip-hop artists, actually — lounging on a couch. One wears a gold orthodontic device that looks like a medieval torture technique but is actually a prop the artist brought. On the right side of the photo, a shirtless Black man stands, his head obscured by a photo of George Washington's dentures, made from slaves' teeth.

The haunting connections that ensue require one to reflect on national mythologies and the process of Black embodiment/disembodiment through histories of oppression and reclamation.

Three performative images from interdisciplinary artist Martine Gutierrez's series "Indigenous Woman" channel magazine editorial styles. Gutierrez critiques them all through the lens of trans femininity, indigeneity and Latinx identity, unpacking standards of beauty and reworking them.

While much of the show can feel intense, there's also a range of quieter, more subtle works. St. Paul-based Mexican photographer Selma Fernández Richter documents the domestic solitude of various Minnesota immigrant communities, including the Karen people. The work offers a sense of care, respect and experience of dislocation, "of being away and what it means to be in the U.S. at the same time," said Riley.

The show is powerfully relevant in these complicated times, but it's also a pleasure to contemplate.

"It's kind of a mic drop of splendor," said Riley.

@AliciaEler • 612-673-4437