December, 2007: Exhibits at MCP
Continuing This Month
Mary
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Chuck Avery
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Dorothy Nuetzel
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Cathy ten Broeke
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MCP Connects:
An exhibit highlighting MCP's Youth Education and MPGallery
September 10, 2007 to January 11, 2008
At the Minneapolis Foundation
Opening Reception:
November 15, 4:30 - 6:30 p.m.
The Minneapolis Foundation
800 IDS Center
80 South 8th Street
Minneapolis, MN 55402
Admission to the opening reception is free and open to the public
www.minneapolisfoundation.org
+Please note+ viewing the exhibition outside of the scheduled opening reception date requires reservations. Please call the Minneapolis Foundation at 612.672.3878 to schedule a tour of the show.
Minnesota Center for Photography (MCP) has connected people and photography since 1990. As the major center for photographic art in the upper Midwest, we provide these connections in many different ways. This exhibition spotlights two of them-our Youth Education Program and our Minnesota Projects Gallery.
Classes allow individuals-young, old, and in between-from all walks of life to encounter the special thrill of experiencing the world through a camera and transforming what they see into a photographic print, realizing in the process what constitutes the art of photography. Whether the final product is a gelatin silver print from MCP's traditional darkroom, an ink jet print from one of the state-of-the-art printers connected to our digital lab, a body-scaled collage, or a wall-sized mural, the connections reveal the exciting, multifaceted nature of photography as an art medium and point to the myriad ways that MCP continues to connect with its audiences.
Discovery, within and through photography, is a significant feature of MCP's programs. MCP connects viewers and makers in an on-going process of looking and learning.
+MCP Youth Education+
MCP is dedicated to enriching the arts community with vital and high quality educational opportunities, and our youth educational program is no exception. Through partnerships with local organizations, outreach programs, curriculum building, mentorships, public events, classroom visits, K-12 Educators programs, and MCP photo courses and workshops, we are proud to be guiding the artists and visionaries of tomorrow.
+MCP Youth Education has worked with many groups in the past year, including:
YMCA Beacons Program, Sheridan School
Free Arts Minnesota
Juxtapositoon Arts
5 Centers for Art Camp (MCP, Northern Clay Center, Textile Center, MN Center for Book Arts, and Highpoint Center for Printmaking)
5 Centers Art Educators Program
Great River School, St. Paul
Youth Link
Kids Get Together Preschool, Chaska
Kulture Klub Collaborative
Boys and Girls Club of America
+MN Projects Gallery+
As part of our exhibitions program, the Minnesota Projects Gallery (MPG) provides a unique space for Minnesota artists to create and install new, evolving, and site-specific work in a dedicated space adjacent to our Main Gallery. Each of the artists featured here has taken part in this program over the past two years, and their photography has connected with our audiences in wonderful and surprising ways. MPG has been used for projects that look inward, as Dorothy Nuetzel's family photographs do, and outward, as apparent in Chuck Avery's startling photographs of suburban construction sites. MPG projects have also been unique experiences in themselves; Cathy ten Broeke lined one wall of the space with faces from her encounters with people experiencing inadequate housing, and focused her other work on images accompanied by personal narratives from these individuals.
+Chuck Avery: Landscape of Progress
Bio:
Chuck Avery received a BFA from the Kansas City Art Institute in 1977. He has shown nationally and internationally, including Pingyao International Photography Festival (Pingyao, China), Sohophoto Gallery (New York), Minnesota Museum of American Art, and Dougherty Arts Center (Austin, Texas). He is currently working on two topical projects, Landscape of Progress and The Architecture of Amusement, and a personal project titled Beneath the Surface.
Statement:
Landscape of Progress documents the uneasy transition of a large undeveloped suburban area in the Twin Cities into a planned community of megastores, strip malls, high-density housing and hotels. It is a landscape of intent on a vast scale. A drive through the heart of this area drives the point home; one side of the road is a converging sea of themed architecture in various stages of completion, while the on the opposite side is a vista of endless mountains of dirt, rock and sand being carved out of the earth.
While the undeveloped land is being stripped, dug up and flattened in preparation for commercial exploitation, it is also being mined for the sand and gravel under its topsoil. It is a raw, almost monochromatic landscape. A sense of flux permeates the area as large, mobile machinery and equipment slowly disembowels it. I have spent my mornings and evenings here for the past four years photographing the resultant landscape. On one level, my images are documents of the physical power exerted upon the landscape by this equipment. On another level, my photographs aim to convey the emotional undercurrents of violence, desolation and control that one encounters when immersed in this landscape.
The physical transformation of this land is also symbolic of the underlying social and economic forces that drive the process of urban sprawl. This sprawl, in turn, is changing both the physical and political landscapes of our country as people migrate outward from the central cities to these planned communities of conspicuous housing and shopping. Instead of taking a dogmatic approach with this project by condemning urban sprawl, I would rather inspire awareness of the process and help to pose questions that a development of this magnitude raises.
web links:
www.chuckaveryphoto.com
+Dorothy Nuetzel: Hers for Now
Bio:
Dorothy Nuetzel was born in St. Louis, Missouri in 1978. She holds an MFA in Photography from the San Francisco Art Institute. Nuetzel's work focuses largely around the psychology and interpretation of childhood. She works primarily in medium format color photography but often incorporates installation and collage. Nuetzel currently resides in Minneapolis, MN.
Statement:
This certainly wasn't an enchanted wood...five acres at best, boxed in by strips of subdivision ranch houses...it was not lush enough for Eden; no giant flowers or snakes rose up to speak to you...but because of the easy geographical claims of childhood, this place was hers for now.
-Darcey Steinke, from And she walked, from a book on Gregory Crewdson's work entitled Hover.
Hers for Now is a series of photographs exploring the loss of a sacred space. This space is physical as well as psychological. It exists in the landscape and in the mind of the child. In these images I focus on the specific space of the forest as a site in which to consider the loss that exists in the transition from childhood to adulthood. By exploring a girl's relationship to nature I am re-examining the passing of this space.
By visually reconstructing the past I am exploring the idea of the child as both the protector and the protected. I am interested in the forest as a place relating to the unique combination of strength and vulnerability I see in childhood and work to question these connections through the dialogue of loss and the landscape.
web links:
www.mnartists.org
+Cathy ten Broeke: PICTURE ENDING HOMELESSNESS
Bio:
Cathy ten Broeke has practiced documentary photography for many years.
Prior to this exhibit, her recent work includes a traveling statewide exhibit entitled Portraits of Home, which documents the lives of men, women, children and youth struggling with homelessness or substandard housing in Greater Minnesota.
In 2003, ten Broeke co-produced with writer Margaret Miles, Stories from Supportive Housing, a photo essay about people who have moved from homelessness into housing with support services. Margaret Miles conducted many of the interviews on view in this exhibit.
In 2001, ten Broeke co-taught photography to men and women experiencing homelessness and with them, co-created a 164 photo exhibit titled Perspective, showing the daily lives and dreams of the homeless photographers.
Her work has been shown throughout the state, including Intermedia Arts, the Landmark Center, the Hennepin History Museum, Minneapolis City Hall, the Hennepin County Government Center, and the Minnetonka Center for the Arts.
In addition to her work in photography, ten Broeke has a significant background in the areas of affordable housing and homelessness, including eight years as advocate and Director of St. Stephen's Shelter in Minneapolis, 3-1/2 years as Policy Aide to Hennepin County Commissioner Gail Dorfman, and a 2004 Archibald Bush Foundation Leadership Fellowship researching effective strategies for ending homelessness around the country.
Currently, ten Broeke is the Coordinator to End Homelessness for the City of Minneapolis and Hennepin County, where she leads the planning and implementation of the community's Ten Year Plan to End Homelessness.
Statement:
Every night in Minnesota, 9200 people sleep in shelters, on our streets, or in other places unfit for human habitation. Homelessness strikes children, youth, families, and single adults. It disproportionately impacts people of color, veterans, gay-lesbian-bisexual-transgender kids, and women escaping domestic violence. 47% of all people experiencing homelessness in our community are children and young adults.
Many people are poorly informed about who is homeless and why. People often tell me that they do not see very many people homeless in our community except for the few they see holding signs on the street corners. The fact is they do see people who are homeless every day without realizing it. They are the grocery bagger, the store clerk, the child in their kid's classroom, the veteran who has recently returned from Iraq, the youth getting ready to go into the military, the baby in her mother's arms...
As a photographer and a long-time advocate on the issue of homelessness, I have worked to figure out how to use photography as a tool for educating people about homelessness and for social change. I have tried to move away from traditional homelessness photography, the kind that almost always depicts the stereotypical scene - the crumpled man in the doorway, overstuffed bags at his feet, perhaps an empty bottle near by. These kinds of photos may evoke pity, but they don't help the viewer feel a connection to or an understanding of their subject.
I hope the photos and interviews in this exhibit do the opposite. I hope that people will recognize themselves and their loved ones in the faces and stories.
I believe that once people truly understand the issue, hear the individual stories, and see people who are experiencing homelessness as people not so different from themselves, then they will no longer be able to ignore the problem. They will have to act. The community will demand change and create the tipping point that will make homelessness history.
I would like to thank the Minnesota Center for Photography for the opportunity to show this work, as well as the Corporation for Supportive Housing, The Greater MN Housing Fund, and FORECAST Public Art for the funding that made this work possible over the past four years. I would especially like to thank all of the remarkable men, women, children, and youth who have shared their stories and their lives with me. I know that I am changed because of them. I hope you are too.
web links:
www.gmhf.com
