Operating Support
ACHF Arts Access
Widen community outreach to Minnesota high schools. Outcomes include: Nash Gallery will research and present an exhibition that situates Minnesota feminist art history within a national context. Feminist Art: Then and Now will be presented January-February 2013. Beginning spring 2012, Nash Gallery will reach out to art and history teachers at the 875 high schools in Minnesota and offer their students gallery tours with members of the research and curatorial teams organizing the exhibition. Regarding the outreach to high schools, we had hoped for a total attendance of 450 for the gallery tours. But a statistical evaluation showed that we came short of our 450 goal; we provided tours to 210 high school students. The schools are dealing with their budget limitations; even though we offered the gallery tours free of charge, they had to cover the cost of their own transportation. While we can't fund their transportation, we will continue the outreach efforts, to build and grow these relationships so that the Department of Art and Nash Gallery become a future priority. We are working with the Art Educators of Minnesota to try and bring the annual Scholastic Art Awards to the Regis Center for Art, beginning in February 2015. 2: Support experimentation and excellence by Minnesota artists. As an outcome, Nash Gallery will research and organize a group exhibition of Minnesota artists whose varied and experimental sensibilities investigate conceptions of culture, experience, and perceived value. Minnesota Funk will be presented December 2012-January 2013. The exhibition and public programs were very successful, according to our evaluation of the attendance and the community and media response. Janice Lane-Ewart, the curator of The Collective Eye program on Radio KFAI, invited Chris Larson and Herman Milligan on the radio program, to hear the selected jazz music and discuss the artworks. In her review for the Star Tribune (Minnesota Artists Not So Woebegon) Mary Abbe wrote, As an alternative to Minnesota's tradition of keenly observed landscapes, 'Funk' plumbs quirky psychic byways. In his review for Minnesota Monthly, Gregory Scott wrote, The list of exhibitors is pretty much a varsity line up of iconic contemporary artists working in our state. For the Walker Art Center blog Sarah Peters wrote of Larson's video, What begins as a simple recording of the artist working in his studio becomes a fascinating set of events that upturn the viewer's perception of the reality created by the camera. One of our visitors wrote to us, Wonderful idea. I like the threads that link the artworks. Great diversity of media.
As planned, we presented the exhibition The House We Built: Feminist Art Then and Now January 22 through February 23, 2013. The exhibition was presented in the Nash Gallery and included about seventy artists; most of them were Minnesota artists who had been part of the Women Artists Registry of Minnesota in the 1970s, and some were national artists. We also presented a companion exhibition of work by Josephine Lutz Rollins who taught at the Department of Art for nearly thirty years, along with students who had received the Josephine Lutz Rollins Fellowship that is awarded to a female graduate student each year. We had an overflow audience for the public lecture by artist Harmony Hammond on January 24, and a live video feed broadcast her lecture to another crowd in the building lobby. We reached out to the high schools as planned, and we were able to arrange a number of gallery tours, but not as many as we'd originally hoped. 2: As planned, we presented the exhibition Minnesota Funk December 4, 2012 through January 12, 2013. The exhibition included work in a variety of media by the following Minnesota artists: Kent Aldrich, Kate Casanova, Perci Chester, Kelly Connole, Jim Dryden, Mary Esch, Frank Gaard, Tom Garrett, Chris Larson, Faye Passow, Lamar Peterson, Sandy Resig, and Jenny Schmid. As we hoped, the exhibition provided a platform for artistic experimentation. For example, Frank Gaard asked us to curate a selection of his drawings and format the works as a digital sketchbook running to 250 pages. We presented Chris Larson's architectural video Heavy Rotation as a room-size projection, surrounded by his carved sculptures. We had two public programs: a reception on December 6 for the artists and the public, and an evening of jazz curated by Herman Milligan on December 11. The musical selections he curated were inspired by the themes in the gallery artworks. Both events were well attended.
Other
local or private