After more than a year, I ventured a visit to the Minneapolis Institute of Art, a place that has played a vital role in my imagination since I was small child. The museum is hard to reach from the south. All exits on the freeway leading into neighborhoods west of I-35 are closed north of 46th Street. (The easiest way to get to the MIA northbound on 35 has always been to exit at Lake Street and zigzag north to 24th Street and 3rd Avenue where the complex is located. With exits at 36th and Lake closed, there is no way to access the museum from the freeway, meaning that the visitor approaching from the south has to drive into downtown Minneapolis and find a way across the east-west freeways to drive back to the museum.) In the Covid hiatus, the MIA, a place notably more conservative than its sister institution the Walker Art Center, has become significantly more "woke". Each gallery now displays a painting or object made by a Black artist or woman -- it appears to me that many of these works, which are interesting, have been resurrected from the MIA's vaults. I didn't observe any masterpieces from these works that have been dusted-off and installed -- but masterpieces are few and far between and, certainly, these canvases are as good as what they have replaced. (I didn't notice any major omissions from the permanent collection although my survey of the galleries was haphazard and there were large parts of the museum that I didn't enter.) MIA's"wokeness" is evident in some of the explanatory labels for the artworks. For instance, I noticed no fewer than three labels in a couple of galleries of classical Chinese art remarking that imperial courtesans in the Emperor's court were marginalized and, generally, got a raw deal. I suppose that being an imperial concubine was mostly dull work, with sexual encounters very rare, probably unsatisfactory and, even, frightening -- the Emperor had hundreds of women available to him. On the other hand, I would guess that being confined in the Emperor's palace was a good deal better than alternatives available to these women. In any event, there is a smug aspect to these explanatory labels -- presumably, the label-writers think that we know so much more today that we can regard the imperial concubines, for instance, as cautionary examples, handmaidens, the victim's of institutional sexism. But, of course, these concepts are modern constructs and really have little relevance to what the pictures show. And, in any event, some of the Chinese wall-hangings make disturbing points about sexual politics in a way that is more self-aware and poignant than the rather tendentious labels. In particular, there is a wall-hanging, almost life-size, showing a woman in the royal court who seems to be middle-aged and, apparently, no longer of interest to her lover who has replaced her with a younger woman -- the image has a particularly haunting quality. Clearly, the painter found the woman's plight to be sufficiently interesting and poetic to pause from his commission to portray the Court beauties to show this particular, sad-looking lady. I don't recall previously seeing the series of images of court women now gracing the walls of the Chinese art galleries to the east of the entrance atrium. Several of those pictures were a revelation to me.
Souls Grown Deep is a small exhibit of art by self-taught African-American artists, mostly from the South. This little show is located in the gallery on the ground floor, also to the east of the entrance desks and information kiosks. (This little gallery has often been used to display small special exhibitions or new acquisitions to the museum collection.) The objects in Souls Grown Deep are all very interesting, raw-looking paintings smeared on wood with thick layers of impasto and, in many cases, idiosyncratic subject matter. Some of the objects are crudely carved wood or collages of scrap timber. "The Old Rugged Cross" is an assembly of rough pieces of fencing banged together -- it commemorates a church bombing during the Civil Rights crusade. A man named Jesse Aaron has cut a log into a jagged-looking shark and affixed a pale plastic doll on the sea-creature's back -- it looks like a sinister, predatory mermaid. There are monstrous creatures in bas relief on panels of wood -- these monsters seem to have been molded from wood putty and, then, painted. A noteworthy example is a horrible-looking "Spider Lady" with fat splayed limbs extending away from her torso (made by Eldren Byron). Prophet Royal Robertson is represented by three large panels -- one shows "Fire Dragon fighting Giant Electric Eel", a nice piece of draftsmanship, brightly colored, that seems to depict a scene from a Godzilla movie; another of Robertson's works is screed against his ex-wife, whom he calls a "Nasty Gal", buxom cartoon women winking at the viewer from within mesh cages of letters -- it's extremely misogynistic, funny and scary at the same time. A man named Arthur Dial has created a large mural of "Eve and Adam" with two pillowy naked figures (suitably equipped with large fig leaves) separated by a jaunty-looking snake made from a painted garden hose. There are several devotional images of Jesus with black skin that are effectively painted. The works have an Art Brut aspect -- they are vigorous, engaging, and a little menacing. (Far more sedate are two large quilts done by Black women -- these are both variants of a so-called "Housetop" pattern, constructed as a series of boxes joined together by the central spine of a ridge-line; these works are abstract and rather soothing with harmonious colors.) An African-American curator supplies an annoying commentary on a TV screen -- you would like to tune her out but this isn't possible. Far more interesting are the labels for the paintings and other works which show us pictures of the artists -- with the exception of the quilts, the artists are all fierce-looking old Black men who uniformly ascribe their inspiration to Jesus working through the Holy Spirit. The portraits of these men and their statements, all highly religious, falsify most of the what the curator is saying in the TV message. She suggests that the art works are somehow healing -- I experienced them as raw, provocative, and disturbing in some respects.
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