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miacontemporary.bsky.social
MIA: Contemporary Art (Bot)
@miacontemporary.bsky.social
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Sharing artworks from the Minneapolis Institute of Art's Contemporary Art department. Not associated with the Minneapolis Art Institute.
Automated thanks to @andreitr.bsky.social and @botfrens.bsky.social
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Untitled, from "i-jusi" https://collections.artsmia.org/art/109623/
head and torso of black woman with stars covering her nipples and two Band-Aids across her mouth, wearing a jeweled tiara, two necklaces (one with pendant reading, "NET / BLANKES") and earrings--one with antelope skull and one with wheel; two faux logos for shoe polish and detergent on either side of her head; text and top and bottom i-jusi is the name of an internationally renowned, experimental South African graphic design magazine edited and published by graphic artist Garth Walker. Roughly translated as “juice” in Zulu, i-jusi was first released in 1995, one year after the end of apartheid in South Africa, as a cultural and artistic response to the country’s newly established democratic state. For 15 years, i-jusi has encouraged South African artists to remove themselves from the influence of Western aesthetics and create “a visual language rooted in the African experience.” At its very core, the publication asks the question, “What makes me African'” The i-jusi Portofolio features examples of the most iconic images by South African artists who contributed to the magazine during its run, including David Goldblatt, Anton & Mark Kannemeyer, Brandt & Conrad Botes, Brode Vosloo, and Pieter Hugo. The portfolio consists of 10 lithographs, each signed by the artist, which were selected by designer Garth Walker and art publisher and gallerist Gavin Rooke. The portfolio is a survey of i-jusi’s long history as well as a condensed visual documentary of South Africa’s artists as they journey through the aftermath of apartheid.
December 27, 2025 at 5:56 PM
miacontemporary.bsky.social
Departure, Red Rock Variation: Lake Superior Landscape https://collections.artsmia.org/art/4567/
Landscape.
December 27, 2025 at 3:24 PM
miacontemporary.bsky.social
I was a hidden treasure, then I wanted to be known... https://collections.artsmia.org/art/129362/
wall hanging made of strips of cloth, with hanging cords, cloth, strings of beads, and tassels, and several globes made of wire The tapestry, I Was A Hidden Treasure, Then I Wanted To Be Known... resembles a camouflaged terrain, or perhaps an abstracted tree canopy. The work’s title comes from a well-known hadith qudsi, or extra-Quranic record of the words, actions and the silent approval of the Islamic prophet Muhammad. This passage originally references the motivation behind the divine creation of humankind but can also describe the deep desire for each of us to be known and loved by one another. Embellished with the fabric, metal, beads, rope and tassel, the tapestry acts as a symbolic veil for Adams’ own unearthing of his true identity as well as an invitation for the viewer to remove their own veils in order to discover their true selves.
December 27, 2025 at 1:04 PM
miacontemporary.bsky.social
Philadelphia Wireman #479 https://collections.artsmia.org/art/126249/
medium gauge wire and rubber bands wrapped around plastic with a screw and safety pin; piece of bright blue metal; large washer
December 27, 2025 at 10:35 AM
miacontemporary.bsky.social
Candor https://collections.artsmia.org/art/116539/
abstract painting with dark salmon ground with two rectangles, green on the L and red on the R; blue and red splatter up R edge Han Hofmann was a major figure of Abstract Ecpressionism as well as an influential teacher and mentor to younger artists. This canvas is a classic example of Abstract Expressionist painting in which figurative or narrative representation is superseded by an inquiry into the fundamental elements of painting: form, color, and gesture. Hofmann famously created the "push and Pull Theory," in which he rejected one-point perspective as the primary method of creating the illusion of space in a two-dimensional medium. Instead, Hofmann focused on the "push and pull" of color, light, and shape, and how the tension between contrasting elements can lead to a visual experience of depth and motion. In this technique, the eye is lead around the painting rather than directed to one point. The single colored ractangles in Candor act as the principle spatial organizing tool on a loosely painted background - a signature of Hofmann's late work. The thinck impastos of the rectangles contrast with the thin wash of the background, and the solid forms of the rectangles are complimented by the scattered drips of similarly toned paint in the periphery of the image. Candor is a carefully balanced composition that explores the relationship between form and color.
December 27, 2025 at 8:05 AM
miacontemporary.bsky.social
Model for Proposed Labyrinth https://collections.artsmia.org/art/12085/
Mazelike construction with high walls near center; painted light tan
December 26, 2025 at 4:52 PM
miacontemporary.bsky.social
#33 https://collections.artsmia.org/art/89587/
see previous exhibition catalog for illustrations of all 50 paintings Artist commentary: To cross the river people blew up plastic bags or made bamboo rafts. Those that had money hired Thai boaters to take them across. After already receiving the payments, the boaters dump the boats in the middle of the river killing everyone while he swam to shore. Once across some of the people were forced by the Thai police to turn back to Laos.
December 26, 2025 at 12:06 PM
miacontemporary.bsky.social
#2 https://collections.artsmia.org/art/89556/
see previous exhibition catalog for illustrations of all 50 paintings Artist commentary: Two brothers were working in the field. An old man appeared and told the brothers that a great flood was going to come. Because the older brother treated the old man unkindly, he instructed the older brother to build a metal drum while telling the younger one to build a wooden drum. When the flood came the younger brother and his sister got into the wooden drum. The older brother in the metal drum was lost in the flood, but the wooden drum floated for days until the earth dried. Because the brother and sister were the last two humans on earth they agreed to marry each other. Out of incest they gave birth to a big pumpkin. The brother cut the pumpkin into pieces and each piece turned into a human being. These beings became all the clans of the Hmong family.
December 26, 2025 at 9:27 AM
miacontemporary.bsky.social
Top Man https://collections.artsmia.org/art/128369/
image of a man with oblong head, wearing a clear helmet, scrunched textured face, shirtless, with American flag draped around his shoulders; flesh-colored cartoon-like dog in LLQ; bright blue sky with violet clouds in background Top Man is a powerful example from May Stevens’ Big Daddy series featuring a grotesque caricature of her father, Ralph Stanley Stevens. The pasty, doughy, bald male figure is seated nude with his arms crossed, cloaked only in an American flag that is draped over his shoulders. Seated on Big Daddy’s lap is his pet bulldog, whose folds of pale skin reiterate the wrinkled man’s face, and whose tongue is clearly a stand-in for the aged man’s phallus. The character of Big Daddy, created at the height of the Vietnam War, is intended to be an embodiment of ignorance, bigotry and racism in America at the time. Top Man and the Big Daddy series are examples of political pop art from the 1960s and 70s which addressed issues surrounding the Vietnam War, as well as the fight for equality in the Civil Rights Movement and the first wave American Feminism. Writing in 1975 of Stevens and her Big Daddy series, art critic Lucy Lippard remarked that Big Daddy “is a graphic representation of the authority figure which has a special meaning for a woman in a male- dominated society. Steven brings to the Big Daddy paintings a controlled but powerful rage against imperialism on the foreign and the domestic fronts.”
December 25, 2025 at 6:38 PM
miacontemporary.bsky.social
#4 https://collections.artsmia.org/art/89558/
see previous exhibition catalog for illustrations of all 50 paintings Artist commentary: One thousand years later the Hmong people who had migrated to the south built another kingdom. The kingdom was called “San Miao” (Peb Hmoob). In Chinese it means “Three Hmong.” In Hmong it means “Us Hmong.” The Chinese expansion eventually caught up to the Hmong Kingdom. There we fought another great war. We lost again. The migration continued further south, close to the borders of Laos, Thailand, Vietnam and Burma.
December 25, 2025 at 5:02 PM
miacontemporary.bsky.social
Untitled https://collections.artsmia.org/art/125771/
repeating magenta floral and spot pattern against half white, half fluorescent orange background; fluorescent orange flame like and floral pattern accompany the magenta pattern in upper white background; vertical band of blue floral pattern running down R side The paintings of Hisachika Takahashi are best understood in the context of his contemporaries of the 1960s such as Konrad Lueg and Daan van Golden, both of whom experimented with pop art styles inflected through a uniquely European lens. In 1961, at the age of twenty-one, he sold a large-scale sculpture to the city of Yokosuka, a transaction that paid for his one-way voyage to Europe by cargo boat. Takahashi arrived in Venice, Italy where he soon met Lucio Fontana, and began working as his assistant. During this time, Takahashi was working on his Untitled flower paintings—of which this is one example. This series employed commercial rubber rollers to apply overlapping layers of floral patterns in bright fluorescent and phosphorescent colors. The resulting works on canvas have an all-over composition similar to wallpaper and glow in the dark thanks to their phosphorescent pigment. In 1969, Takahashi traveled to New York where he met many of the artists in the New York scene and where he would stay for the next forty years. Takahashi became a studio assistant to Robert Rauschenberg, initially working in the former chapel that Rauschenberg bought at 381 Lafayette Street in New York City, and continued to assist Rauschenberg until the senior artist’s death in 2008.
December 25, 2025 at 3:07 PM
miacontemporary.bsky.social
#8 https://collections.artsmia.org/art/89562/
see previous exhibition catalog for illustrations of all 50 paintings Artist commentary: The Hmong fought the Chinese with cross bows and used the mountainous terrain to their advantage. They lured whole units into gorges and then rolled rocks onto the unsuspecting Chinese. The Hmong fighters were feared throughout China.
December 25, 2025 at 10:55 AM
miacontemporary.bsky.social
8 https://collections.artsmia.org/art/21269/
Black stenciled "8" inside a red hexagon, inside a yellow circle, inside a black square. Robert Indiana’s painting of the number eight is colorful, bold, and simple. It is not difficult to believe that, at the start of his artistic career, he referred to himself as a sign painter. This wasn’t false modesty—he really was interested in the potential of letters and numbers to be transformed with color and design into signposts of mass culture. Evoking the signs of our daily lives, Indiana fused images from small-town America with the visual language of high art. The result was what he called “verbal-visual” forms. Taken from their original contexts, Indiana’s signs expose the power of symbols in our quest for meaning making.
December 25, 2025 at 8:18 AM
miacontemporary.bsky.social
#12 https://collections.artsmia.org/art/89566/
see previous exhibition catalog for illustrations of all 50 paintings Artist commentary: There were already people in the low lands. The only places left were the mountaintops. This new land gave up the freedom to live freely. Life on the top of the world was difficult. To survive we had to resort to slash and burn farming methods. Huge water works constructed out of bamboo brought in fresh water.
December 24, 2025 at 6:47 PM
miacontemporary.bsky.social
Ad Lumen--The Rainbow Awakener https://collections.artsmia.org/art/60629/
tall, armless, 2-legged male figure with animal's head, at L; vertical spear-like object at R; mounted on a board
December 24, 2025 at 4:10 PM
miacontemporary.bsky.social
Untitled 752 https://collections.artsmia.org/art/109261/
dress-shaped open-work form covered in white wax with several white candles embedded around bottom edge Untitled 752 is one of Petah Coyne’s beloved “girls,” a nickname the artist gives to all of her hanging sculptures. Like her sisters, Untitled 752 is an eerie combination of beauty and decay – underneath a thick layer of white wax lie remnants of found objects, their once delicate forms disfigured by the wax coating. The accrual of objects and surface in Coyne’s work can be viewed as symbolic of our own experiences. We all retain memories of relationships and incidents from our pasts, and while older memories may fade as we accumulate new ones, their presence always remains. Coyne emphasizes the potency of memory in her use of found objects, which she believes carry the residue of their former use.
December 24, 2025 at 12:52 PM
miacontemporary.bsky.social
Jose Ignacio Uceda Leal, Madrid, Spain https://collections.artsmia.org/art/113494/
matador wearing orange, black and silver costume with coral-colored stockings, with blood stains on pants, leaning against a table with a black cloth with heavy needlework in white; very large mirror behind man reflecting chandelier and tapestry hanging on opposite wall A resident of Mexico City, Denise De La Rue is known for her interest in outsider groups within Latin America culture. In 2006 she started making portraits of matadors, a project that took her to bullrings throughout Latin America and Spain. The resulting body of work is among her most elegant series of photographs. Removed from the theatrical immediacy of the bullring, her subjects are placed in settings reminiscent of Baroque portrait painting. The matadors are photographed after their fight, often appearing bloody battered—icons of a spectacle with deep roots in the past. Jose Igacio Uceda Leal, the subject of this photograph, ranks among the world’s top matadors. He fought his first bullfight at the age of twelve, and had gone on to fight and kill more than 450 bulls in Spain and Latin America. Like other 21st century bullfighters, he walks a precarious line between fame and infamy - revered by fans, who mob him like a rock star, and reviled animal-rights activists and others who condemn the sport. De La Rue’s portrait of Leal captures the social and moral implications of modern bullfighting. Framed against the elegant but time-worn backdrop of a room in a former palace, Leal seems almost mythic. Undeniably heroic in tone and posture, the portrait also suggests the faded glamour and bravado of a sport that has long been the subject of disapproval outside of Spain and Latin America.
December 24, 2025 at 12:18 PM
miacontemporary.bsky.social
#563 https://collections.artsmia.org/art/109151/
abstract in blues; dark blue along bottom and light blue along top with a few touches of yellow David Reed's art cannot be discussed without a reference to the legacy of American Abstract Expressionism. At the same time, his work has been compared to Baroque and Mannerist art. The artist has likened the marks in his work to the billowing cloaks that cover figures in Baroque paintings. Yet he believes contemporary art needs to be radically reinvented to be relevant to the present. "During the Renaissance and Baroque periods they had a wonderful religious light that came from above," he said. "Today we have a technological light, the light of a TV, movie screen, or computer monitor, which is directionless and increases the intensity of every color." In addition to their unexpectedly lush tones and Technicolor palette, the voluptuous, polished surface of this work is achieved by using transparent layers of paint and various glazes, which are sanded down to obscure the artist's hand. The illusionistic effect is almost photographic or cinematic. The intensity of Reed's elongated canvas is reinforced by his deep understanding of contemporary color and light combined with his expert handling of paint.
December 24, 2025 at 8:47 AM
miacontemporary.bsky.social
Untitled https://collections.artsmia.org/art/8772/
December 23, 2025 at 7:08 PM
miacontemporary.bsky.social
#46 https://collections.artsmia.org/art/89600/
see previous exhibition catalog for illustrations of all 50 paintings Artist commentary: Not only the culture changed, the children changed. We were once forced by the Chinese to divide into groups. Now the Hmong children willingly divide each other into groups, wearing different colors, and killing each other.
December 23, 2025 at 4:54 PM
miacontemporary.bsky.social
Untitled https://collections.artsmia.org/art/45349/
red diagonal bands, with a few black diagonal bands running opposite direction; thin gold and turquoise swirls, particularly near edges
December 23, 2025 at 2:56 PM
miacontemporary.bsky.social
An Inner Dialogue with Frida Kahlo (Hand Shaped Earring) https://collections.artsmia.org/art/109149/
head and shoulders of figure wearing floral headpiece, brown scarf around shoulders and bronze-colored hand shaped earrings Using makeup, costumes, painting, and sometimes digital manipulation, Morimura Yasumasa has explored the intersection of art and identity by impersonating portraits of famous individuals from art history. He’s posed as Vincent van Gogh, Marilyn Monroe, the Mona Lisa, and, in this case, Frida Kahlo, the Mexican artist known for her lush, surreal self-portraits. Morimura, who calls himself a cross between an actor and a visual artist, says of the work, “The various elements of . . . Frida and myself mix into a muddle and a chemical reaction occurs, creating this imaginary Frida of mine.” Kahlo’s Mexican shawl has become a stylish Louis Vuitton wrap, and instead of fresh flowers Morimura wears a tiara of artificial blossoms.
December 23, 2025 at 11:42 AM
miacontemporary.bsky.social
Jumna https://collections.artsmia.org/art/28578/
dark blue ground with streaks of turquoise, white and black
December 23, 2025 at 9:25 AM
miacontemporary.bsky.social
Policeman on W.C. https://collections.artsmia.org/art/109140/
mostly abstract in bright colors with several fish-like elements against pink in URQ The New York Times describes Peter Saul as "an artist's artist" and "a serial offender in violations of good taste." He was inspired by 1940’s comic strip drawings and the painterly style of Expressionist artists such as William de Kooning and Max Beckmann. Saul's use of cartoons and pop-culture imagery situates him among the forefathers of Pop Art, but his pessimistic political satire sets him apart from mainstream Pop styles.
December 22, 2025 at 6:51 PM
miacontemporary.bsky.social
Untitled https://collections.artsmia.org/art/23744/
Abstraction.
December 22, 2025 at 4:27 PM