Art In Bloom at the Minneapolis Institute of Art - Blooming Spectacular!

Art In Bloom has been happening annually at the Minneapolis Institute of Art since 1984, but this was the first year I've been able to attend (these are the silver linings of my missing my Venice life dearly as I'm here taking care of my family). I took my Mom for opening day, and it was nothing short of breathtaking. Spectacular! *(I've been so busy lately between caregiving and other writing that I haven't been able to share many stories here, apologies. THIS demanded its own spotlight for sure though).

Floral artists make arrangements to accompany many of the works of art in the permanent collection at MIA, and there were MANY to see.  We were determined to see them all - and did - over a full afternoon of discovering the flowers scattered throughout the entire museum. 

Each was more gorgeous than the next, and it was very hard to choose a favorite ... so I'm going to share many of them with you. 

As flowers perish, the exhibit is on only this weekend, through Sunday, so I encourage all in Minnesota this weekend to get there, and all the rest of you get to see them virtually, because I know you'd love it too. 

The only thing I can't share is the marvelous aroma enveloping the museum ... ahhhh. 

It sounded like the process for choosing artworks to honor was a little haphazard, as each artist I spoke to had a different experience of how they wound up with the one they got. One guy just decided to make a floral replica of the Notre Dame football stadium, and find an artwork to match later! He also got extra credit because his glass vases were hand-blown! Wow.

 

I was amazed to learn that many of the pieces were done by amateur flower arrangers! One lady was a lawyer that likes to arrange flowers, several were retired and fill their days with flowers, and some were from real deal florists from all around the Twin Cities. ALL were glorious. 

MIA has such a vast and diverse collection that each room is different than the last, and the flowers followed suit. Materials from nature, and the creativity that resulted in these fantastic creations was truly moving. There is so so so much talent in this world! 

There were tours going on, but we opted to go it alone ourselves and revel in the magic of discovery. Several of the artists were on hand, often seen watering or adding flowers and making sure their work was perfect. 

 

That was nice because you could ask questions and hear all about their process ... to the point where now we kind of want to try our hand at it ourselves next year - anyone can! 

It was fun to see some of my favorite permanent pieces so honored, like the Native American costume with its top hat and photographic lining beautifully replicated in flowers. 

Some artists played it very literal with their recreations ... 

 

 

 While others did more of an abstract representation ... 

 

 

 No matter what they chose to do, we loved every one of them and hoped that they all go to good homes when the show wraps on Sunday. They should auction them off to a good cause, I know I'd be bidding on several just to cheer up the home for a few days. I'm really not sure what happens to them when it's over. 

 

I learned a lot yesterday listening to the artists, about technique, brush strokes, post-Impressionism, realism, structure, all kinds of stuff that came just from asking about flowers. You truly could spend the whole weekend there and still have more to listen and learn from. 

 

It was so packed yesterday that we didn't really linger with any one piece, and that would be fun to do, but there's just so much ground to cover, and people to dodge.

 

We'd wait our turn to get in close for a second, then scoot away to let someone else in. This would be the one to get locked in for a night at the museum!

 

 

I LOVED this one, florally ...

... and then seeing what it represented just felt so joyous. 

In these rather bleak times - both weather and world-wise - flowers bursting out everywhere and the good feeling it gave everyone was very heartwarming. 

It would be very hard to maintain a bad mood with all this beauty around. Beauty, Art, and Nature truly SAVE. It gives us HOPE. 

 Look at these whimsical pink shoes! 

Look at the Frank Lloyd Wright hallway piece! 

 

Look how they did her black stockings! 

Look how good this coat is!

Oh wow, look how they represented this nude woman!

Mom, check out this chair one! 

Look how this one is exactly the painting! 

 

I love how the flowers match his jacket!

Oh, I want to crawl inside this one and live here forever! 

The above was pretty much a verbatim recording of me enthusing about everything yesterday. We truly enjoyed it so much, and hope that as many people as possible will be able to get to MIA this weekend. It's supposed to rain all weekend, so I can't think of a more perfect way to go cheer yourself up and give the gift of this beauty to your soul. 

 

Thank you to MIA and all of the artists involved, both with their work in the museum collection and the artists who worked with flowers. You truly lifted our spirits ... and what is better than that? I'm going to bring in Yeats (snippets from Ode on a Grecian Urn) to explain the feeling of this beautiful show ...

 "Ah, happy, happy boughs! that cannot shed

         Your leaves, nor ever bid the Spring adieu;

And, happy melodist, unwearied,

         For ever piping songs for ever new;

More happy love! more happy, happy love!

         For ever warm and still to be enjoy'd

For every (painting), and for ever young; 

"Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all
                Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know."

 

 

 Art in Bloom is on now through this Sunday at MIA.

Foot In The Door 5 at MIA - AKA My Mom's Museum Debut!

I could not be more thrilled to announce the opening of my Mom's first museum showing in the Foot In The Door 5 exhibit held every ten years at the Minneapolis Institute of Art! The idea is that once a decade, MIA opens its doors to artists from the area, with the only criteria being that their work must fit within one square foot. This year's extravaganza of paintings, photography, drawings, prints, mixed media, sculpture, and textiles has to be held virtually due to Covid, which is a big drag, but super cool nonetheless that my Mom is in her first museum show at age 80! 

To know Marilyn Gronner is to love her, and no one knows her or loves her better than me. This is because yes, she's my Mom, but also because I have seen her work so hard and sacrifice her entire life - always with grace, always with an eye toward helping others, and always with a smile on her face. She was a music and art double major at Augsburg College (our whole family's alma mater), and was (is!) a beautiful painter and musician (trumpet, piano, and pipe organ!). She met my Dad, got married, had three kids, and figured she'd raise us and work on her art and that would be her perfectly happy life. 

The world doesn't always work out for you like you think it's going to, sadly. My Dad died of cancer at 33, and left Mom alone with three kids to raise. Painting and music were pushed to the back burners, as Mom focused her full attention on us, doing any and all creative jobs she could to keep us fed, clothed in what all the other kids were wearing, and with a happy enough childhood to not really notice it was different from most of our friends' families. But best believe that our graceful swan of a Mother was scrambling her legs hard and fast under the surface to make sure we all stayed afloat. And we always have.

Years passed, I moved away, always encouraging Mom to pick up her paints again, but never really seeing it happen. Last year I came back home to help Mom after she tragically lost one of her scrambling legs due to a vicious infection. She moved into an assisted living facility, where we thought she could finally return to her passion for painting. That didn't happen, because their big activities were like Bingo and junk like that, and Mom was miserable in there. That was not going to be the rest of her life on my watch. 

We got Mom out of the awful home just in time, about a month before the world began to lock down for Covid, and we would not have even been able to visit her! Once home, I was going to make sure that Mom's life was happy and creative again, and we went out and got her some tiny canvases to get to work on, thinking that the smaller sizes would be less intimidating for her to complete. I had never even heard of the Foot In The Door exhibits at MIA in the past, and then I saw an announcement for it in City Pages one day (RIP, City Pages!). The art had to be fit within one square foot, and here Mom was working in exactly that size and smaller!

I secretly submitted my favorite of Mom's new pieces, Peace of Wood Lake, because Wood Lake means so much to me, she had painted it as as gift to me for springing her from the dreadful prison of a nursing home, and because I thought it was the best of her recent work. I waited about a month, and then received the happy news that Mom's work had been accepted, and she would be in her first museum show at 80 years old! I literally jumped up and down all over the house when I heard, and Mom just laughed at me, not really getting the big deal of it, but happy to see me so happy for her. 

I could not be prouder of this lady, truly. Her attitude on life has always been so positive ... but this is the woman who told the doctors that she'd like to walk into her surgery to remove her leg on her own two feet one last time - and she did. The strength that took (and the pain she must have felt!) has been an inspiration not just to her kids, who adore her unconditionally, but to people the world over. This is the woman who did not want to spend the rest of her life in a wheelchair watching daytime t.v. - she wanted to return to her creative life, and be better than she ever had been before. She has a new enthusiasm for her work, which had been dormant for decades, and this has been rewarded by having her first new piece of art accepted into a show at an internationally renowned museum, that also happens to be one of my favorites anywhere (especially this last year with their groundbreaking show like Hearts Of Our People and When Home Won't Let You Stay, plus Ai Wei Wei's awesome installation last winter!). My Mom is in MIA!!! How extra cool is that?!?!

Please attend Foot In The Door 5 online, and don't forget to click on the little heart next to my Mom's work as one that you love, as we continue to encourage her to keep it all up! I wish we could really see it on the walls of the actual museum ... but we're going to aim for Foot In The Door 6 for that! Thank you to all involved for giving my Mom the recognition and encouragement she has earned through her lifetime, and for giving her the opportunity to show her work. This proves that you are never too old to be doing something you love, and that doors will always open to you when you follow your heart and your deepest passions. She would also like you to know that she's accepting commissions! That's right.

Congratulations on your Museum debut, dear Mom! Wow. 

Foot In The Door 5 is virtually on display now through January 10, 2021 HERE! 

 

Clogtown: When Home Won't Let You Stay: Art and Migration at MIA

I really needed a break from the world yesterday, and that feeling often leads me to an art museum. This might be a particularly great outing to think about these days, and everyone tends to give each other space and quiet in museums.

 I've been itching to get back to the Minneapolis Institute of Art to see the When Home Won't Let You Stay: Art and Migration exhibit since the day I saw the Ai Weiwei work Safe Passage and its thousands of life jackets adorning the pillars out in front of the museum, so that's where I headed.

This extremely emotional exhibit might not have been the exact escape I was looking for, as I was choked up when viewing much of it, but the recent string of extra excellent shows at MIA continues. It's wonderful and thought provoking, and really something to see - and reflect on.

Minnesota has the highest number of refugees per capita in the nation, a fact I didn't know until I was at this exhibit. America has always been a melting pot - that's the beauty of it! - and unless you're Native American, we're ALL from immigrant families, so I've never really understood the problem some people (usually old white men besides Bernie Sanders) have with it.

Migration has shaped our world, and we really are now one giant global village at this point. How refreshing it would be if our individual governments could act like it, right? The piece that opens the show is called Woven Chronicle, 2011-2019, by Reena Saini Kallat, and the balls of yarn show the paths of world migration, accompanied by a kind of heavy soundscape that is meant to echo the hum of global movement. Impressive.

Exodus II, 2002, by Mona Hatoum, a Palestinian refugee to the UK, consists of two suitcases linked together by human hair. It makes one wonder what someone would stuff into their luggage if you could only take along a little bit of your life. The hair humanizes the thought, and to me, made it sadder. 

Similarly, Temporary Storage: The Belongings of Juan Manuel Montes, 2017 by Camilo Ontiveros shows us the personal belongings of Montes, believed to be the first DACA recipient to be removed from the United States by Trump. Ontiveros got permission from Montes' mother to create a sculpture of his belongings tied up with rope. It's heartbreaking, as is so much of this show - but it needs to be a part of our global conversation to improve life for everyone.

Everything #4, 2004 by Adrian Piper is equally heavy. An oval mirror printed with "Everything Will Be Taken Away" is the artist forcing people to literally face this reality ... and deal with it. Piper was a New Yorker working in Berlin, when she was placed on a suspicious traveler list, and has refused to return to the States, resenting any such authority of her movement - and I don't blame her. This piece insists that we look within ... like who do we really want to be as a people? We can do so so so much better.

A very heavy and similar piece to the life jackets outside MIA is Le Mer Morte (The Dead Sea), 2015 by Kader Attia. The clothing strewn across the floor represents the 1 million people who fled across the Mediterranean Sea in 2015, with 3,753 missing and believed to be dead. The blue clothing items help you visualize the people who have washed ashore ... the HUMAN BEINGS that died looking for a better life. Incredibly sad, this one is tough to take in. (As are the many video installations of people speaking of their harrowing experiences throughout this show).

Xaviera Simmons says of her piece Sundown (Number Twelve), 2018, "Black people, especially those who descend from American chattel slavery, have been in a constant state of migration since the country's formation." Her piece shows a character in colonial dress with an African mask, holding a photograph of people during the "Great Migration" (1890-1930), and was one of my favorite works in the exhibit. "Sundown" refers to towns that were not safe for black people after dark. The work kind of sums up that entire experience and history in one beautiful image.

Simmons also presents the text painting, Found The Sea Like The River, 2018 which features excerpts from Christopher Columbus' diaries when he was exploring the New World. It focuses heavily on the nature, and conveniently leaves out the violence and terror these explorers rained down on the indigenous people that already lived here. I'm ALL for Indigenous Peoples Day over Columbus Day, so I dug this one. (And I'm firm on calling it  Lake Bde Maka Ska too).

Do Ho Suh presents Hub-1, Entrance and Hub-2, Breakfast Corner, 26-7, Sungbook-dong, Sungboo-Ku, Seoul, Korea, 2018 as interactive pieces that depict the process of migration, "where each step of the process is like crossing another threshold." I didn't really get it until I read the blurb, that says it evoked memories of Suh's childhood home, and that the translucence is like the hazy memories from other times. Cool.

I loved the works by Aliza Nisenbaum, who MIA invited to have a residency to work with groups in the Minneapolis Whittier neighborhood. Her bright pieces, full of color and life, depict everyday life in the immigrant communities surrounding the museum. Nimo, Sumiya, and Bisharo Harvesting Flowers and Vegetables at Hope Community Garden, 2017 shows the Somalian women who care for this garden. Beautiful.

Nisenbaum's La Talaverita, Sunday Morning NY Times, 2016 portrays a lazy Sunday morning in a Mexican community in Queens, NY. There is such beauty in the everyday, if only we can be more aware of it.

Angel Exterminador/Exterminating Angel, 2015 by Guillermo Galindo is an actual section of the Mexican-United States barrier. As awful as that thing is, Galindo turns the sculpture into an instrument that can be played by the artist or other performers. His intent was to make more noise than the anti-immigrant factions out there ... and rightly so.

An entire giant wall is taken up by Artifacts found from California to Texas between 2013 and 2015/Artefactos encontrados entre California y Texas de 2013 a 2015, 2013-2015 by Richard Misrach was another real heavy one.

Misrach photographed the remnants left behind by travelers throught the desert trying to get to the border ... clothes, water bottles, bikes, toys ... that once again serve to humanize the immigrant experience - and maybe make it a bit easier to put yourself in their shoes.

My very favorite part of the entire exhibit was The American Library, 2018 by Yinka Shonibare, 2018. A whole room is filled with cloth covered books, with the names of American immigrants  or members of The Great Migration within the U.S. who have made their marks on American life stenciled there on the spines in gold foil.

There is a website that invites you to sit down and read the stories of the names on these books - or to write your own. The interactive quality makes it feel like a real library, and it was fascinating to sit and listen to a few of the stories that make up America. It was jolting, however, to find that it does not include Native Americans, ignoring the cultural contributions of our original inhabitants - sort of like our government does.

I zoomed in to show the detail on the gorgeous books, and was delighted to find that the spot I zoomed in on held the names of Yoko Ono, Joe Hill, and Bob Marley - all personal favorites of mine without even looking. I could have spent the entire afternoon just looking at the spines, and thinking about all of the wonderful people that have created our country by leaving theirs. This room allowed me to leave the exhibit with hope, rather than despair. What a beautiful way to acknowledge all of the glorious tapestry of lives and nations that have combined into this one ... may we honor it also in our own everyday lives.

The exhibit concludes with CarryOn Homes - Living Room, 2020. It's a cozy space strewn with pillows (handmade from clothing linked to the artists) that allows attendees to sit and relax, and find some calm from the difficult realities they just viewed. Interviews are played on the screen from members of the CarryOn Homes art collective, telling their stories of being artists and immigrants from all over. There are resource books there too, so that immigrants and refugee communities can come together with shared connections. It's all very thoughtful, and again, offers some hope.

There was again a wall of thoughts and comments from people who have come through the exhibit, asking "What does HOME mean to you?" Even a quick glance lets you know that this show is making people think. I saw one that asked in the current climate, with everyone freaking out over the pandemic and hoarding things and being forced to quarantine, and not travel, and not attend events ... that maybe now Americans can stop and think about how life is for refugees. Now we're all being forced to do (and not do) things we don't want to do ... how does it feel? Maybe all of this will cause a big swell of empathy when everyone FINALLY realizes that we are all one, and all in this together. I hope so anyway.

As you're coming or going to the exhibit, there is a gigantic photo (5,776 of them!) wall by Ai Weiwei, depicting the thousands of refugees crossing the Mediterranean ... the same ones that wore the life jackets hanging on the columns outside.

The faces again show the actual humanity involved in these nightly news stories, and let you know that world policies affect real people, people just like you and I.

People that COULD be you and I real soon here if some massive progress isn't made in the fights against climate crisis, looming wars, famine and disease. Think about it ... just like this excellent social studies class of an art show asks you to.

Thank you to MIA for giving us yet another beautiful, important show that exemplifies that spirit of art being the hammer that shapes the world. Well done!

When Home Won't Let You Stay: Art and Migration is at MIA now through May 24, 2020.