“Stories of Place” draws on the rich range of artwork recently acquired by the Museum including collage, sculpture, photography, painting, and quilts. The selected works on view provide opportunities to reflect on the diverse meanings of “place” in the visual arts and in storytelling. Fundamentally, place is the wellspring of human (and non-human) relations; it is a site where stories are formed and reformed. Place is a container of experience, memory, and the imagination thereby providing rich terrain for artists.
Some art works on view focus on specific places such as the farmlands of the Midwest, the American South, or the vibrant Rondo neighborhood of St. Paul, Minnesota. Others seek to capture the “spirit” of place rather than an actual physical likeness by incorporating the textural fragments or sonic qualities of a place. Some artists remind us that place can also extend to fictive realms that blend purely imaginary elements with personal memories, or it can represent an alternative space that provides refuge from actual places. Other works encourage us to listen to the “language of the land,” especially when a place is at risk of disappearing, or becoming inextricably altered, or damaged; the language of the land can also encode cultural narratives, customs, and wisdom about the past, present and future of a place. Some artists seek to reconcile their experiences between places, or being from more than one place, and ask themselves how one place coexists, merges—or clashes—with the other.
“Place is not simply an intellectual perspective, it is an emotional experience… [it] encounters the world first from the place of the heart.”
—Yves Bonnefoy, as quoted by John Dixon Hunt in Genius Loci: An Essay on the Meaning of Place