No anniversary is complete without a photo, and the University of Minnesota is no exception.
For its 150th anniversary, the university's College of Liberal Arts commissioned recent MFA graduate Xavier Tavera to photograph every department. "On Purpose: Portrait of the Liberal Arts," on display at the university's Nash Gallery through Dec. 8, could have been a very boring portraiture show. Fortunately, it is not.
All 60 of the college's departments or organizations got in front of Tavera's camera. The fun comes from the collaboration. Rather than have people sit and be photographed, Tavera serves as both artist and commercial photographer, aiming for an image that brings his subjects into the creative process.
Each photo is accompanied by a statement from the department, which ranges from the sort of bland text you'd see in a course catalog to commentary that's meta/conceptual.
The Department of Spanish and Portuguese Studies, for example, gets smart, weird and whimsical. Five people from the department — Michelle Hamilton, Javier Zapata Claveria, Lauren Truman, Thomas McCallum and Maria Emilce López — fashion themselves into a contemporary take on Spanish Golden Age painter Velazquez's "Las Meninas," playing with point of view, reality and illusion just like the original. There's even a mysterious person reflected in a looking glass.
The accompanying statement references the ways in which "Las Meninas" challenged the norms of a royal court portrait, deconstructing the department's own power structure. Isn't that sort of what a liberal arts degree is about? (I say this as someone with a liberal arts degree.)
In the Chicano & Latino Studies Department's photo, a professor, a recent graduate and the program's founder are grouped together in front of Morrill Hall. On the steps, two people hold up red signs saying "Viva la Huelga!" and "Unidos Estaremos, Unidos Venceremos" — symbols of the Chicano movement. The text reproduces a 1972 press release announcing the department's establishment — the first program of its kind in the five-state region — along with more recent actions, such as a 2017 objection to the university appropriating Dia de los Muertos.
Not every department is that creative. The Institute for Global Studies is represented by a portrait of a woman with connected dots in the background, while the English Department gets very literal with cutouts of words and folks chilling on the stairs. Tavera is a talented photographer, and the photos themselves are lush, large and in charge. Some departments could have benefited from a bit more nudge in the creative direction.
