At the entrance of "In Her View," visitors will spot either a blue circle or a camera lens, depending on how you perceive it. Regardless, what's inside is clear: an exhibition of more than 30 photographic works created by women and women-identifying artists, acquired by the Minneapolis Institute of Art in the past five years.
"It's been really important to me since I started here — what it means to be the first woman in charge of this collection, and thinking about what kinds of knowledge and experience need to be brought into the collection," said Casey Riley, who became Mia's curator of photography nearly three years ago. "It's not an easy endeavor to go back into time and think what we should have collected in 1970 or 1985."
Riley thinks the museum has made inroads. She has added 257 photos to a collection numbering around 13,000. Although that number makes just a dent, it feels like a good start. Most of them are by women and artists of color. Works by women account for less than 9% of the museum's photo collection.
The images in this exhibit deal with questions of national identity and belonging, cycles of trauma and healing, and visualizing a world beyond our current one rife with racial inequity. With a mix of local, emerging and internationally renowned artists, "In Her View" feels like a step toward making that vision a reality. Each piece will ask you to stop and think for a while, so come with an open mind.
Nona Faustine's performative photograph "Isabelle, Lefferts House, Brooklyn (Self-Portrait)" portrays the artist looking straight at the camera, topless, wearing a white skirt with two pairs of white shoes tied to her waistband and a frying pan in her hand. In the background is an 18th-century farmhouse, Lefferts Historic House, which has become a museum focused on the lives of the Lenape, Dutch and enslaved African people who worked there.
"She's channeling ancestors, communing with the experience of Black women and their domestic servitude at these sites," said Riley. "You can see different tokens of her acknowledgment of the kind of labor that's happened on this site."
Minneapolis-based artist Jovan Speller's "I Just Came Across the River," made with a historic brown-print method that gives the photo an ethereal quality, portrays a Black woman in white, standing on the shore; she is a spirit of sorts, an ancestral connection to the past.
"The river has great significance in African American history, slavery and freedom, but also of connections with family," said Riley.
