Two Shows at Mia, September 2023

It's good to spend time with your adult child, especially at an art museum. 

Daughter Number Three-Point-One and I spent a few hours last week at the Minneapolis Institute of Art, which prefers to be called "mia" these days, seeing the current traveling exhibit, ReVisión: Art in the America, and the retrospective of the late Jim Denomie. 

ReVisión is a traveling exhibit from the Denver Art Museum's Ancient and Latin American collection, combining historical and contemporary pieces with some from mia's collection.

The first thing you see as you enter is a large vertical textile naming many of the peoples of the two continents. I thought it was printed in some way, but slowly realized it is embroidered:

Across the way was a huge vase from an island in the Amazon delta, created to hold the bones of a deceased person. I assume the face I see in it is intentional but I'm not sure.

 

I generally found myself drawn to the functional but decorative ceramics, like this 3rd to 5th century bottle from what is now Peru showing a fisherman with a net:

And this spouted vessel of a figure with what I think is a jaguar (?) on his head, standing between two mountains:

The first room is dominated by a two-part piece by contemporary Brazilian artist Clarissa Tossin. One part is a large woven version of the Amazon River, set in the middle of the room.

The other is in the corner nearby: a net, tangled with terracotta junk (Coke bottles, tires, parts of computers).

Up close, you can see that many of them are sitting in baskets woven from Amazon.com boxes:

There's much more in the exhibit, including a fair amount of Spanish conquest-era artwork that I found less interesting, except from a historical perspective.

There is a great video, worth watching in its entirety, about analyzing a 15th century painting to learn about the history and reality of a silver-mining town in the Andes. 

The last photo I took was in a section of the exhibit called called "Colors That Fly: Feathers." I had no idea feathers became a valuable export from South America, to the point where they rivaled precious metals. 

This tunic fragment, feathers woven into a cotton backing, is from before the conquest:

It was created by an Ica [sic] or Chincha artisan in the Ica Valley. 

After ReVisión, we found the Jim Denomie retrospective. I've written about his work a little bit before. Denomie died in March 2022 at age 67, and was creating paintings and other works until just before he died.

I find many of his paintings grimly funny. These are the ones that made me laugh out loud:

"Standing Rock — Cop with a Social Disease," 2019.

"Toast," 2014. While I was looking at this painting, I wondered what the people who were so upset by Serrano's "Piss Christ" would think of "Toast."

"Attack on Fort Snelling Bar and Grill," 2007. Denomie uses the image of Fort Snelling as a White Castle in other paintings; I'm not sure if this is the first one. This painting is set at the convergence of the Mississippi and Minnesota rivers, the sacred Bdote that the U.S. Army turned into Fort Snelling by somehow buying the sacred land for a small amount of money. Denomie gives a call out to Hopper's "Nighthawks" on the left side of the bar and grill, and critiques photographer Edward S. Curtis, seen with his camera at lower left.

According to the exhibit notes, Denomie was fascinated with imagery from the Wizard of Oz. One example is in this painting, called "Toppled Monuments":

He frequently made references to his own paintings in other paintings, and in this case, he made a sculpture related to a painting:

The found objects reward a close look:

Denomie's use of color and his large canvases particularly left me stunned and sitting quietly for a while before I left the museum.