Plains Art Museum, May 2021

We continued from Sioux City to Sioux Falls, then on to Fargo, North Dakota and the Plains Art Museum the next day. Both museums had free entry, all the staff and visitors were masked, and we were nearly the only ones there. In North Dakota, everyone asked if this was our 50th state. It was mine. I was amused that the next exhibition at the Plains Museum, Chakaia Booker, completes her mission to exhibit her work in all 50 states. 

The Plains Art Museum's building is completely different from the Sioux City Art Center, in that it is a repurposed turn-of-the-20th century warehouse for International Harvester farm machinery.  While the museum had existed since1965 in Moorhead, Minnesota, it opened in Fargo in 1997. The building is a beautiful adaptation, both contemporary and historic.

Plains Art Museum main lobby

Plains Art Museum upper lobby

The museum announces its intention to address a national audience with a monumental mural by James Rosenquist, the noted Pop artist who, I was surprised to learn, was from North Dakota. The mural celebrates North Dakota with multiple aspects of the state.

James Rosenquist, The North Dakota Mural, 2010

The permanent collection was not on view, but a highlights and recent acquisitions show opens this weekend. We saw the exhibition High Visibility: On Location in Rural America and Indian Country, which one might imagine would be similar to the state parks exhibition at Sioux City. But it was quite different. The works in the exhibition - by Euro-American, Native American, Latinx, and African American artists, most from the upper Midwest - each address individual experiences of life in rural communities and specific issues associated with those communities.

Each artist and each object in the exhibition addresses a specific community, and issue, and it is impossible to generalize about these issues. The first work we saw was Overburden/Overlook, a quilt work by Shanai Matteson, from Hibbing, Minnesota. The quilt suggests the map of a strip mine and consists of fabrics dyed with overburden, the soil removed to get access to mineral deposits in a strip mine.  Among the repeated words/phrases inscribed on the ravaged and patched fabric are "mine, not mine" "we drift dead dive into the deep" and "rise, sink." Matteson and Cannupa Hanska Luger are two artists in the exhibition involved in protesting oil pipelines in North Dakota and Minnesota.

Shanai Matteson, Overburden/Overlook, 2020, quilt

Another artist whose work involves oil is Chris Sauter, whose Family Oil Deposits; West Anderson Family, 2020, depicts the family tree of Muskogee/Creek artist Joe Harjo in the form of a network of oil deposits overlaying a map of Oklahoma river systems. 

Harjo's work in the show, Indian Holding a Weapon, 2019 consists of footprints documenting a performance of the same title.

Xavier Tavera's photographs depict aspects of Latinx migrants who worked on the land in the Red River Valley of northern Minnesota. Two are on view in the exhibition: Quinceanera, 2017, and Eva Mendez with Portrait of her Father, Crookston, 2017; his website has many more.

Jovan O. Speller's Lottie's Living Room, 2020, an installation, is intended to recall her enslaved ancestors in North Carolina, the issues of the last hundred years of Black land ownership, and her own childhood in California. For me it evoked a combination of poverty and family pride.

Jovan Speller, In Lottie's Living Room, 2020, installation

Athena Latocha, a Hunkpapa Laokta/Keweenaw Bay Ojibwe artist from Anchorage, Alaska, but living in New York, displayed an enormous looming dark mural across one entire wall. While I found it a depressing depiction of industrial degradation and destruction of nature, she seems to think it also evokes transformations in nature. I'm surprised that such a heavy, dark, large object can actually be a work on paper.

Athena Latocha, Buffalo Prairie (Slow Burn), 2019, sumi, walnut and powdered inks, shellac, steel belted tire shreds, local earth and grass on paper, Plains Art Museum purchase.

Some of the works in the exhibition revive traditional media: crop artist Lillian Colton's seed painting of Amelia Earhart, Su Legatt's screenprints with crocheted borders, Bruce Engebretson's woven tapestry All Water Holy Water, and Sabrina Hornung's cut-paper silhouette, Jackalope Valentine. All four connect to the cultural heritage of the Northern Plains and European immigrants there. 

Finally, as I was leaving, I realized that the large stained glass and metal sculpture actually depicted a discarded and crushed Busch Light beer can, an emblem of the rural road. I loved that artist Karl Unnasch remarked, "With every crushed can there is the hand of the maker," crushing your beer can makes a sculpture...

Karl Unnasch, Husk, 2020, stained glass, metal

I've mentioned only 11 of the 28 artists in the exhibition. Each of the others presented unique works that reflect aspects of their individual experience that also connect to larger issues. Sometimes I argued with the label content, but in every instance the art inspired interaction and engagement. In two museums in two days I encountered easy and reassuring beauty that left me calm and a bit aloof, and more challenging, less beautiful objects that caused me to think about issues of rural life. 

Sioux City Art Center April 2021

Our first outing of 2021 was to Sioux City, Sioux Falls, and Fargo. The Sioux City Art Center, a lovely building designed by Joseph Gonzalez of Skidmore, Owings and Merrill and opened in 1994. The circular entrance court is reminiscent of the Richard Meier court of the High Museum, with stairs that circle the court and provide a refreshing break from art viewing. Lobbies outside the gallery are pleasant; one displayed midwestern ceramics. The permanent collection includes artists like Thomas Hart Benton and Kaethe Kollwitz that were not on view when we visited. We did see the very pale gold ethereal Grant Wood Corn Room murals, whose interest to me is primarily in their original hotel ballroom setting and history of being papered over, restored, and transferred to the museum, where they are housed in a meditative setting.

The main exhibition was 20 Artists 20 Parks. Twenty artists affiliated with Iowa State University each made work associated with one of the 20 state parks in Iowa. I thought this was an engaging and appealing concept and the work mostly had a kind of summer pleasantness, several of them versions of landscape. I was particularly taken by Deborah Pappenheimer's Architectural Navigators, 2019, a quilt of birds and flora associated with Walnut Woods State Park, and with Kristen Greteman's strips of blue cyanotype photography mounted on plexiglas, for Wildcat Den State Park 

Deborah Pappenheimer, Architectural Navigators, 2019, hand-dyed organza, embroidery thread, commercial fabric

Architectural Navigators, detail

Kristen Greteman, Wildcat State Park: A Deep Map, 2019, digital photography, cyanotype photography on Thai Kozo paper mounted on acrylic

The permanent collection focuses on regional artists, mostly from the upper Midwest. We appreciated seeing a painting by our Kansas City friend Marcus Cain, as well as work by Keith Jacobshagen, Larry Schwarm, and Gary Bowling. Catherine Ferguson made creative sculptures from everyday sources and  Stephen Dinsmore's Spring, the Pink Flowers seemed appropriate for the season.

Gary Bowline, Loess Hills Brushing in Winter Afternoon, 2000, oil on canvas

Marcus Cain, Ritual, 2018, acrylic on canvas

Catherine Ferguson, Laura, Sweet One, Van Rijn, 2013, bronze

Stephen Dinsmore, Spring, the Pink Flowers, 2007, oil on canvas

 Jennifer Homan's pastel landscapes are vibrant with huge skies, reminiscent of Jacobshagen; my photographs don't capture it. And I was somehow touched and befuddled by Christopher Meyer's Masked Consciousness, cast iron, an image that could only be from 2020.

Christopher Meyer, Masked Consciousness, 2020, cast iron

The permanent collection also displayed smaller works on paper by earlier artists, including early directors of the Art Center. It reminded me that each region has its home artists, whose work has special value to the community and that a museum serves the community by celebrating those artists. As an out-of-towner, I left feeling challenged in that I was unfamiliar with many of the artists, at the same time the works on view had been surprisingly accessible.