Why do we go out to see and experience art? For me the answer may be a physical one. When I really connect with something, I find that my heart starts beating faster and my breath changes. When I encounter something that truly fills me with awe, my physical system takes note.
One of those moments was visiting the Minnesota Museum of American Art’s glorious “Here, Now,” exhibition, marking the opening of the museum’s new wing. In the old arcade lit by the shimmering yellow light of Cass Gilbert’s stained glass and other gallery spaces, the curation highlighted artists important to Minnesota and to the museum itself, unsung artists from underrepresented groups, and connections between land, community, and the cosmos.
Another was experiencing Oanh Vu’s “Phantom Loss” at In the Heart of the Beast’s Avalon Theatre. This puppetry performance was exquisitely created and executed by a team of four puppeteers, and blended heartfelt writing with humor.
I found myself drawn to smaller, more intimate gallery exhibitions Leslie Smith II & Dyani White Hawk’s exhibition at Bockley Gallery. In the show, White Hawk along with a team of beaders made an incredibly complex monument-like work called “Visiting” that I was so glad to see in person. Another quiet moment of wonder came for me when I saw “Foreign Bodies,” a body of work by Kate Casanova at Kolman & Reeb Gallery.
Casanova’s alien-like creations were disturbing and stunning at the same time. I wrote a short blurb about the show here.
I also enjoyed Blended Harmony: The Kim Loo Sisters at the History Theatre, and The Lehman Trilogy at the Guthrie Theater. PJ Harvey’s show at the Palace Theatre was transformational, and Gao Hong’s pipa performance at the Landmark Center made me realize why the virtuosic musician has become a local treasure. I also was thrilled to see the brilliant Pekka Kuusisto and Gabriel Kahane come together for a show at the Parkway presented by Schubert Club Mix.
Ralph Lemon and Kevin Beasley’s multi-channel video installation, “Rant Redux,” at the Walker Art Center, mesmerized me when I visited it earlier this fall, which I saw after watching the live performance of Lemon’s “Tell It Anyway, 2024.” While I appreciated both forms of a similar inquiry, I think the video installation hit me more deeply.
I went to see a different exhibition at the Walker, “Sophie Calle: Overshare” multiple times, and I think I might have gotten a little obsessed with the work. Deceptively, it’s personal work about emotion, the self, and relationships, but Calle’s approach has a distanced approach I found extremely compelling.
I was also lucky enough to experience “TRACES (after Sophie Calle),” a piece by Brooklyn-based theater artist Ivan Talijancic and Minnesota-based playwright Rachel Jendrzejewski. My assignment was to meet at the downtown Minneapolis library and await instructions, and what followed was a kind of experiential spy thriller where I was the only audience member. I travelled to various spaces in the library before visiting other spots in downtown like the Hewing Hotel, Spyhouse coffee and a random alley, and all the while, the “performance” engaged with many of the themes in the exhibition— including voyeurism, memory, and human connection. I can’t even imagine the feat of logistics it was for the artists to make the multi-site specific performance work so smoothly. The show served up surprises, thrilling moments of intimacy and a dose of improv.
Another surprisingly joyful evening happened as part of the Cedar Cultural Center’s 35th Anniversary celebration. It was a live soundtrack to the silent films of Georges Méliès, a French magician turned film director who was at the cutting edge of special effects in early cinema. Jean-François Alcoléa created the music, performed by three musicians playing multiple instruments, and I was swept away.
2024 was a presidential year, and while I wouldn’t say there was a huge amount of political art and performance over the year, certain issues that were a part of the national conversation did come up here and there. There was a strong voice in support of Gaza in programming led by Mizna, for example, and several events around that topic presented by both Body Wotani and the sisters leading that company — Leila and Noelle Awadallah.
Other theater events that while maybe not focused on politics itself, certainly took on political issues. Frank Theatre took on abortion in its second run of Trista Baldwin’s “Fetal,” Wonderlust explored caregiving in “Thanks You For Holding: The Caregiver Play Project,” while composer and musician Ritika Ganguly examined environmental themes in the South Asian opera “The Mushroom that Swallowed the Moon Whole.”
In the visual arts world, Piotr Szyhalski temporary mural installed at Northeast Sculpture | Gallery Factory, called “Model Collapse,” encapsulated feelings of doom as we look toward a more violent, destructive world (with some room for hope). Meanwhile, Brooks Turner’s “Voters in Revolt,” exhibition at Hair & Nails gallery was part of the 90th anniversary of the Teamster’s Strike in Minneapolis. The work examines the fascist leanings of anti-union messaging around the time of the strike through Turner’s Tapestry pieces and drawings. While focused on the past, Turner’s work has reverberations to our current world.
One thing I’ve noticed Reflecting on the arts scene of 2024 is that the racial reckoning of 2020 following the murder of George Floyd continues to inform both the artistic output of artists living here in Minnesota and the curatorial decisions of at least for some of our institutions.
Earlier this month, I wrote about writer Shannon Gibney and Leeya Rose Jackson’s beautiful picture book, “We Miss You, George Floyd,” as well as the impactful exhibition at Katherine E. Nash Gallery, “Art and Artifact: Murals from the Minneapolis Uprising,” and its accompanying catalog. It struck me with both the two books and the exhibition how much those events four and half years ago continue to be processed by people most able to help us understand them: BIPOC writers and artists.
Numerous exhibitions in 2024 grappled with the U.S.’ legacy of slavery. “A Nation Takes Place” at the Minnesota Marine Art Museum, curated by Tia-Simone Gardner and Shana M. griffin, examined U.S.’s foundational history of racialized slavery, genocide and colonialism through the lens of historic and contemporary art by Black and Indigenous artists. I found the exhibition compelling, painful, and deeply relevant to today’s ongoing struggles. You can read more about it here.
Over at the Weisman, Kara Walker’s blistering “Harper’s Pictorial History of the Civil War (Annotated)” provoked questions about who is missing from the historical narrative of U.S. slavery. Deconstructing illustrations from the period from Harpers’s Magazine, the work juxtaposes stereotypical silhouette figures that question how we remember the past. You can read that piece here.
Galleries and museums have taken on indigenous histories as well— both here in the U.S. and elsewhere. I was really floored by two companion exhibitions in Minneapolis. One was “Arctic Highways: Unbounded Indigenous People” at the American Swedish Institute and the other was “Okizi (To Heal)” at All My Relations Gallery. Both featured contemporary Indigenous artists across cultures and continents that addressed Indigenous histories and storytelling as well as contemporary issues.
Both of the exhibitions featured a joint project by Sámi artist Tomas Colbengtson and Swedish painter Stina Folkebrant called “Mygrations.” Colbengtson’s primary colored monochrome screen-prints on polycarbonate glass developed from archival photographs of Sámi people from the late 19th century were installed in front of Folkebrant’s mystical paintings of reindeer. The three dimensional installation created a viscerally present experience with history.
The two columns I wrote this year that got the most readership were both about arts institutions leaving. One was about Art Materials LLC, the LynLake art supply store moving to Detroit Lakes, and the other was about Zeitgeist New Music Ensemble moving to Red Wing. It makes sense that these breaking news stories draw a lot of attention, but it does make me a little bit sad as an arts writer that people seem to pay more attention when something bad happens. I’d love it if readers were as engaged with arts reporting that has to do with cool projects that are actually happening as they are with unfortunate news.
Sheila Regan
Sheila Regan is a Twin Cities-based arts journalist. She writes MinnPost’s twice-weekly Artscape column. She can be reached at sregan@minnpost.com.
