CURATED EVENTS - MINNEAPOLIS
MinneCulture | ‘Sissy’ as in Sister
In the 1970s, lesbian and feminist organizations popped up in cities across the nation. Minneapolis and Saint Paul were no exception. Here in the Twin Cities, the Amazon Feminist Book Store, Lesbian Resource Center, and Lesbian Feminist Organizing Committee all provided space and community for newly out lesbians and queer women.
At the same time, a small network of transgender women started their own type of organizing, one that relied more on mutual support than a physical meeting place.
But these groups weren’t mutually exclusive. In the late 1970s, a trans woman named Sissy Potter tried to join a lesbian feminist group called A Woman’s Coffee House. She’s probably not the only one, either. On this episode of MinneCulture from producer Kira Schukar, Sissy’s letter sparks a conversation about feminism, gender, and transfeminism in the Twin Cities and beyond.
Content warning: This podcast contains a transphobic slur and comments.
More information can be found here.
Dance In The Galleries: Alexandra Bodnarchuk And Zoran's Surrealist Sculpture
Join us for a unique experience in the museum as one remarkable local artist activates the work of another. Choreographer Alexandra Bodnarchuk presents a short original work she created in conversation with the sculptures of Zoran Mojsilov’s exhibition, Dry Neck of the Pig and Other Curios. This program explores the concept of dance as embodied gallery interpretation, inviting museum visitors to experience a different mode of engagement with visual art. Performances will take place at noon, 2 PM, and 3 PM. No reservations necessary.
$0-14. Free for members and children; $5 for students; $14 for adults; $12 for seniors.
More information can be found here.
Analog Dance Works Presents: The Awe Factor
World premiere!
May 16-19 at the TEK BOX Theater
This work, choreographed by Artistic Director Brenna Mosser, interweaves single-use plastic waste with the science of awe. In this fantastical and surreal world, 10 dancers examine how we access awe, what we do when we are confronted by it, and how we can harness this emotion to better our collective lives.
Portions of choreography presented in The Awe Factor were commissioned by Threads Dance Project for their Tapestries 7.0 program and by Alternative Motion Project for their Tenth Season Performance.
Thursday, May 16 at 7:30pm
Friday, May 17 at 7:30pm – post-show reception
Saturday, May 18 at 7:30pm
Sunday, May 19 at 2:00pm – post-show talkback
Tickets: $15-$30, pay as able.
More information can be found here.
"Nim ye," Pao Houa Her
Bockley Gallery invites you to Nim ye, our fourth solo presentation with Pao Houa Her.
Pao Houa. Her artistic practice engages legacies and potentials of photographic traditions and aesthetics to create works that consider identity, longing, belonging and resilience in Hmong diasporic communities. Marking Her first video installation, and focusing on a single aspect of kwv txhiaj, or Hmong song poetry, the five-channel Nim ye immerses audiences in a score of continuous beginnings.
More information can be found here.
Esprit de Corps: Women Artists in Twin Cities Skateboarding
A group exhibition of women artists who skateboard, curated by Emily Landberg, Ellen Puls and Jeanelle Carufel.
Esprit de Corps is a collective showcase of 11 local artist-skaters. This vibrant exhibition offers a compelling peek into the lives and creative realms of women who transcend the confines of their daily lives in the Twin Cities to embrace the intersection of skateboarding and art.
More information can be found here.
Keith Haring: Art Is for Everybody
Keith Haring: Art Is for Everybody explores the distinctive quality and enduring influence of Keith Haring’s life and art, through more than 100 works and rarely seen archival materials. Haring’s unique visual language—now broadly recognizable in popular culture—continues to resonate for its prescient address of social issues and its celebration of joy, solidarity, community, and hope.
Spanning the full arc of the artist’s career, the exhibition features a wide range of works, including major paintings, sculptures, drawings, and mural-scaled works featuring Haring’s emblematic characters, such as dancing figures, barking dogs, and crawling babies. It also includes video, photographs, ephemera, and important source material from the artist’s personal journals. A section of the exhibition highlights the immersive environment of his celebrated Pop Shop, an artist-designed store that featured his imagery on a variety of everyday products, from T-shirts to skateboards. Also included in the exhibition is material highlighting the artist’s 1984 residency at the Walker Art Center.
Haring embraced a democratic spirit in his work, aiming to dissolve barriers between art and life. His practice was rooted in the notion that “art is for everybody,” a creative ethos and mission he carried from his early drawings in New York’s subway stations to his renowned public murals. The artist’s art and passionate activism were intertwined, and works in the exhibition show his commentary on issues surrounding environmentalism, capitalism, religion, race, and sexuality. In particular, the artist’s participation in the nuclear disarmament and anti-Apartheid movements, and his activism within the HIV/AIDS crisis led to significant works.
A major catalogue accompanies the exhibition, available in the Museum Shop and published by The Broad in collaboration with DelMonico Books. The book features texts by exhibition curator Sarah Loyer, and writers Kimberly Drew and Tom Finkelpearl; a roundtable conversation between performer Patti Astor and artists Kenny Scharf and Kermit Oswald; and reflections by select contemporaries of Haring’s including George Condo, Ann Magnuson, Bill T. Jones, Julia Gruen, Tony Shafrazi, and Gil Vazquez.
More information can be found here.
Compensation by Zeinabu irene Davis
Zeinabu irene Davis’s debut feature film takes place across two parallel narratives set in Chicago at the beginning and end of the 20th century. Each tale is a love story between a Deaf woman and a hearing man and their navigations of not only the language barrier between American Sign Language (ASL) and spoken English but the racism, audism, and other obstacles in their lives. Using ASL as well as filmmaking devices from the silent film era, Compensation imagines an inventive approach to a bilingual film that makes visible the creative efforts and necessary work of accessibility, essential to meaningful communication. 1999, 16mm, b/w, US, in English with subtitles and American Sign Language, 95 min.
More information can be found here.
Discussion: Angela Hume's Deep Care
Starting in the 1970s, small groups of feminist activists met regularly to study anatomy, practice pelvic exams on each other, and learn how to safely perform a procedure known as menstrual extraction, which can end a pregnancy, using equipment easily bought and assembled at home. This “self-help” movement grew into a robust national and international collaboration of activists determined to ensure access to reproductive healthcare, including abortion, at all costs—to the point of learning how to do the necessary steps themselves.
Even after abortion was legalized in 1973 with Roe v. Wade, activists continued meeting, studying, and teaching these skills, reshaping their strategies alongside decades of changing legal, medical, and cultural landscapes such as the legislative war against abortion rights, the AIDS epidemic, and the rise of anti-abortion domestic terrorism in the 1980s and 1990s. From the self-help movement sprang a constellation of licensed feminist clinics, community programs to promote reproductive health, even the nation’s first known-donor sperm bank, all while fighting the oppression of racism, poverty, and gender violence. The movement’s drive to keep abortion accessible also led to the first clinic defense mobilizations against anti-abortion extremists trying to force providers to close their doors.
Deep Care follows generations of activists and health workers who orbited the Women’s Choice Clinic in Oakland from the early 1970s until 2010, as they worked underground and above ground, in small cells and broad coalitions and across political movements with grit, conviction, and allegiances of great trust to do what they believed needed to be done—despite the law, when required. Grounded in interviews with activists sharing details of their work for the first time, Angela Hume reveals this critical, under-recognized story of the radical edge of the abortion movement. These lessons are more pertinent than ever following the Supreme Court’s 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson decision and the devastation to abortion access nationwide.
More information can be found here.
Artist Talk: LaToya Ruby Frazier
One of the nation’s most acclaimed photographers, LaToya Ruby Frazier reveals the stark reality of today’s America: post-industrial cities riven by poverty, racism, healthcare inequality, and environmental toxicity. By featuring voices and perspectives traditionally erased from the American narrative, Frazier not only captures our cultural blind spots—she teaches us how art is a powerful tool for social transformation. For more than two decades, LaToya Ruby Frazier has used photography and her art to preserve forgotten narratives of labor, gender, and race. Her brilliant, eye-opening work explores the post-industrial era, lifting up marginalized voices and the underrecognized work of women and people of color.
More information can be found here.
Reading: Alt-Nature Saretta Morgan
Saretta Morgan (she/her) is an artist, gardener and author of the chapbooks feeling upon arrival (2018) and room for a counter interior (2017). She lives between Phoenix and Mohave Valley, AZ where she teaches creative writing at Arizona State University and participates in the humanitarian aid efforts of No More Deaths. Recent work can be found in Triple Canopy, Colorado Review and the Academy of American Poets. Since 2016 she has received grants and fellowships from the Jerome Foundation, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Arizona Commission on the Arts, the Center for African American Poetry and Poetics and Headland Center for the Arts, among others. Milkweed Books welcomes Saretta Morgan for a reading from her new poetry book Alt-Nature, an emergent chorus feeling toward languages of connection in the American Southwest.
More information can be found here.
In-gallery Conversation: Women in Art
Minneapolis Institute of Art offers free opportunities to engage with art through our In-Gallery Conversation experiences. Conversations are offered Thursdays at 1 pm and 6 pm and Friday through Sunday at 1 pm. March conversation topic is : Women in Art.
More information can be found here.
Black Liberation: Dismantling Racism in Minnesota 1800s – 1960s
Black Liberation: Dismantling Racism in Minnesota 1800s – 1960s, curated by Tina Burnside, research assistance by Simiyah Garrison, and graphic design by Michaela Spielberger, is an exploration of the Black Liberation Movement in Minnesota focusing on Black-led organizations and Black leaders including abolitionists, labor, civil rights and Black Power leaders. This exhibition reflects the fight for Black self-determination in Minnesota from the 1800s – 1960s.
More information ca be found here.
Lisa Bergh : Topography
Lisa Bergh, whose colorful, abstract sculptures and assemblages are now on view at Mia (“Topography”) as part of the Minnesota Artists Exhibition Program, never intended to be a rural artist. But for close to 20 years, she has made a life, and a living, as a working artist and arts advocate in tiny New London, Minnesota, 100 miles or so west of Minneapolis. A passionate and committed ambassador for her community, Bergh is the co-founder and co-curator of the Traveling Museum, a mobile art space that bringscontemporary art to greater Minnesota. She and her husband, artist Andrew Nordin, collaborate on public art projects under the moniker Rural Aesthetic Initiative.
She may be the daughter of farmers, but Bergh was a city kid. She grew up in Iowa’s Quad Cities, went to college in Tucson, and then attended grad school in the Bay Area, where she met Nordin, a painter. The two moved to Milwaukee and lived there for five years. But soon after their first child was born, they realized their needs had changed. They considered different cities—or no city at all. Nordin had been offered a sabbatical replacement position at Ridgewater College, in Hutchinson, and in 2005 the couple moved to New London, expecting to stay a year at most. “I thought, oh, we’ll flip this little house. And then you have kids and jobs, and we’ve been here ever since. It’s just sort of where we landed.”
More information can be found here.
Multiple Realities: Experimental Art in the Eastern Bloc, 1960s–1980s
Multiple Realities: Experimental Art in the Eastern Bloc, 1960s–1980s offers a sweeping survey of experimental art made in six Central Eastern European nations during the 1960s to 1980s. Charting a generation of artists invested in experimentation, the Walker-organized exhibition features artworks rarely seen in the United States. Despite their geographical proximity, artists working during this time encountered different conditions for daily life and art-making, confronting varying degrees of control and pressure exerted by state authorities. Embracing conceptual or formal innovation and a spirit of adventurousness, Multiple Realities sheds light on ways that artists refused, circumvented, eluded, and subverted official systems, in the process creating works often riddled with wit, humor, or irony.
Drawing on visual art, performance, music, and material culture, Multiple Realities: Experimental Art in the Eastern Bloc, 1960s–1980s brings together works by nearly 100 artists from East Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, and Yugoslavia. While it presents select canonical figures from the region, the exhibition foregrounds lesser-known practitioners, particularly women artists, artist collectives, and those exploring embodiment through an LGBTQIA+ lens.
More information can be found here.