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.