Upcoming Exhibitions

Family Walking, 1952

Influenced by his older contemporaries in the Harlem art community such as Jacob Lawrence, Romare Bearden, and Charles White, De Carava shared their interest and concern with African American life and history. Although trained as a painter and printmaker, De Carava embraced photography as his primary medium in the late 1940s, and went on to establish and define a new aesthetic in American photography.

This exhibition, organized by The Museum of Modern Art, New York, and its accompanying publication, were supported by a grant from Metropolitan Life Foundation. Additional funding was provided by Agnes Gund and Daniel Shapiro, and the National Endowments for the Arts.

Information about the events accompanying this exhibit can be found online.

Ralph Rapson's pioneering contributions to the field of modern architecture and design helped introduce this style to the world in the years after the Second World War, when building and furniture design were at an all- time high. Rapson's signatures such as the large glass walls and sculptural, light-catching ceilings and roof lines of his architecture, as seen in his original design for the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis and the Philip W. Pillsbury residence in Wayzata, Minnesota (both 1963) and the organic, curving, and even whimsical lines of his furniture, defined forms that have predominated for almost fifty years.

The exhibition, held concurrently at The Minneapolis Institute of Arts and the Weisman Art Museum, will use an impressive collection of drawings, along with architectural elements, models, furniture, photographs, and video installations, to present approximately twenty major projects of his extensive career.

Although this exhibition is the culmination of ten years of portrait painting, Gaard emphasizes that it is not a conclusion to the project but part an on- going, open-ended process. The portraits represent an optimistic side of Gaard, who considers them, "Monuments to both life as identity and to the humility of representation."

For two decades, Gaard's reputation was linked to Artpolice, the underground grafix collective magazine that he created and guided, and to a body of work that depicted nightmarish, sexually explicit images. He is also well-known for his provocative writing and criticism and for his honest discussion of manic- depression, an illness that has informed both the content and construction of his work.

Born in 1948, Frank Gaard earned a B.F.A. degree from the school of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1967 and an M.F.A. from the California College of Arts and Crafts in 1968. He served as a professor of fine arts at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design from 1969 to 1987. Gaard has exhibited his work regionally, nationally and internationally.

This retrospective will include about 60 of Bacon's finest and most significant oil paintings, including a number of the famous triptychs. The exhibition aims to demonstrate the many facets of Bacon's imagery: the Crucifixion themes; the screaming popes inspired by Velázquez's Portrait of Innocent X; the studies of the human body developed from Bacon's fascination with Eadweard Muybridge's pioneering action photographs of the 1880s, and with the cinema of the 1920s; the Van Gogh series; portraits, animals, and at least one of his enigmatic landscapes.

Featured in the exhibition are 175 works of art created by Chokwe, Lwena, Luchazi, Lunda, and other related peoples of Angola, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Zambia. The pieces are selected from prominent private and museum collections in the United States, Europe, Canada and South America. Among the variety of forms included are masks, chief's and ancestral figures, thrones, scepters, and figurative ceramics. The exhibition explores the significance of art in the context of male and female initiation and the transmission of knowledge from one generation to the next.

The exhibition features approximately fifth of Louise Bourgeois' powerful and evocative prints and artist's books made during the last decade. It surveys her preferred themes of animals, geometric forms and women.

Alfred Moir, a retired art history professor and native Minnesotan, has assembled an impressive, private collection of mainly old master Italian drawings. There are also several French, Dutch and Spanish works and 19th-century drawings. His research over the years has yielded new attributions and expands our knowledge of artists working in the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries. The exhibition will be comprised of 75 drawings to include: black and colored chalks; pen and ink; brush and ink work and watercolor.