Exhibitions at the M
Two major exhibitions are planned as the first in the newly expanded M: Hazel Belvo: For Love and Here, Now: American Hi/stories of Land, Heart, and Stars.
Hazel Belvo: For Love is an exhibition that explores the impact of a significant Minnesota artist at a legacy stage in her career. Opening in fall 2023, the exhibition will be the first in the M's galleries post-pandemic and the first retrospective of Belvo's 70-plus-year career. Related community programming will be offered for an opportunity to engage with the exhibition alongside other curious residents, visitors, and creatives.
Here, Now: American Hi/stories of Land, Heart, and Stars will bring together 150 meaningful artworks from the M's permanent collection. The M's collection holds more than 5,000 objects from the late nineteenth century to the present. This exhibition will be the largest-scale permanent collection exhibition in a dedicated space since 2009. Here, Now will explore interconnectivity and relationships within and between artworks in the collection through three subthemes: land, heart, and stars. With this exhibition, the M foregrounds explorations of American art with recognition of the foundational role Indigenous cultural practices have had on the cultural life of this region.
Additional planned exhibitions that the FY24/25 ACHF grant will support include a 20th-anniversary retrospective with Grupo Soap del Coraz'n artist collective and a retrospective and public art project with Seitu Jones.
The success of this project will be measured in a few ways.
The M places great importance on relationship-building with our community stakeholders and artists. Partnership surveys will inform us whether we are meeting our goals of developing a sense of trust, collaboration, and mutual support at the end of each exhibition.
We will track and set attendance goals and revenue goals for the run of each show. For instance, in FY24, we expect 25,000 to attend Hazel Belvo, For Love. Once fully reopen in the spring of 2024, we expect 50,000 annual visitors.
We will track the number of tours, and for FY24, we plan to conduct 20 tours. In FY25, we expect to host anywhere from 50-100 tours.
Achieved most of the proposed outcomes