Quarter Gallery

A blurry photo of Fannie Lou Hamer with the letters of her name floating backwards on top
Caption
Bill Gaskins, Blackboard #15: Fannie Lou Hamer

 

March 26 - April 13, 2024
Bill Gaskins: Black Mystery Month

Saturday, March 30, 2024
Reception | 6:30 - 8:30 PM

Thursday, April 4, 2024
Visiting Artist Talk | 12:00 PM | InFlux Space, E110

Gallery hours are Tuesdays - Saturdays, 11am - 5pm

 

The Department of Art at the University of Minnesota is pleased to present Bill Gaskins: Black Mystery Month, an exhibition that plays with the notion of Black History Month and consists of thirty black-and-white photographs of photographs from press archives and the public domain with plastic letters randomly placed on each print. The photographs are blurred and the focused text, spelling out the subject’s name, appears backwards and scrambled. These visual and textual disjunctives are part of the mystery of Black Mystery Month. The puzzles created by the texts in the photographs can be quickly decoded with a mirror or the selfie mode on a cell phone camera as an inventive interactive feature. Either way, the viewer must insert themselves into the frame, into the flow of history.   

Most of the photographs render Black Americans prominent in the nation’s history, including for example the scholar Dr. Carter Godwin Woodson, who proposed Negro History Week nearly a century ago, in 1926. The suite also includes an image of Viola Fauver Liuzzo, a white civil rights activist who participated in the Selma to Montgomery freedom marches in 1965 and was killed by the Ku Klux Klan. The exhibition, especially intended to be seen in university art galleries, poses the question “what do you know, what do we know, about American history?” Each artwork is titled Blackboard with a corresponding number, referencing the pre-digital chalk boards ubiquitous in school classrooms, and the Blackness of the subjects. 

Black Mystery Month includes a video by Gaskins titled Mystery Lessons that unpacks the tension and contention over Black History Month across racial lines through satire and substance. The artist has noted that in “the twenty-first century, the dominant idea of a person with cultural weight as a thinker, living and thriving in the domain of ideas, remains white and male in the popular imagination—an idea that travels across lines of race, class, and gender identities. This suite of photographs merging portraiture and still-life and the accompanying video are made to engage attention through their unexpected form and content. The exhibition playfully tests cultural and historical aptitudes through selected chapters of American history that disrupt claims of a post-racial America, and guide viewers to lessons on the most durable and mysterious pandemic of the human story beyond the gallery.”    

Thursday, April 4, 2024
Visiting Artist Talk | 12:00 PM | InFlux Space, E110

A Black man with glasses smiles at us from a long empty interior.
Image Credit: William R. Staffeld

Bill Gaskins is a thoughtful producer of photography, video, and nonfiction writing that offer viewers and readers engaging aesthetic impact, knowledge, and meaning. The range of his creative and scholarly work merges the visual and liberal arts through his interests in the history of art, photography, cinema, and American and African American Studies. Gaskins’ essays and photographs appear in journals, magazines, anthologies, and exhibition catalogs, including Nka Journal of Contemporary African Art, Society of Contemporary Craft, Artsy, Aperture, Nature, and the New Yorker Magazine. In addition, solo and group exhibitions at major venues, including the Crocker Art Museum, Brooklyn Museum, Detroit Institute of Arts, and the Smithsonian Institution, reflect his relevance as a contemporary artist. Gaskins is also known for his impactful teaching and innovative curricular vision; he was awarded the Watts Prize for Faculty Excellence by Cornell University Department of Art in 2016 and received a University Distinguished Teaching Award from the New School in 2011. He is currently a professor and founding director of the MFA Program in Photography + Media & Society at Maryland Institute College of Art.

Sponsorship
Black Mystery Month is sponsored by the Katherine E. Nash Gallery; the Department of American Studies; the Department of History; the Department of Art's Visiting Artists and Critics Program; the Associate Dean for Arts and Humanities, College of Liberal Arts; the Givens Collection of African American Literature & Culture at the University Libraries; and the Givens Foundation for African American Literature.

The Quarter Gallery spans 2,000 square feet for the presentation of student exhibitions and community partnerships.

Location
Regis Center for Art (East)
405 21st Avenue South
Minneapolis, MN 55455

Gallery Hours
Tuesday - Saturday, 11 am – 5 pm

The Regis Center for Art is locked to the public on Saturdays, with U-card access only. Visitors can call 612-624-7530 to gain entrance into the galleries and should plan to enter the building's main entrance located on 21st Avenue South directly across from the parking garage.

Upcoming Closures
April 16-20, Closed for Installation

Contact Us
nashgallery@umn.edu
612-624-7530

Parking & Public Transit
Learn more about the parking options below:
21st Avenue South ramp
5th Street South lot
19th Avenue South ramp

Hourly metered parking is available nearby on 22nd Avenue South and Locust Street
The gallery is accessible via Metro Transit buses and light rail lines. For your best route, visit Metro Transit Trip Planner.

Accessibility 
Regis Center for Art is accessible to visitors who use mobility devices or prefer to avoid stairs. Service animals are welcome in the gallery. A fully accessible, gender neutral restroom is available on the 2nd floor of the Regis Center for Art (West). To access this restroom, take the elevator to the 2nd floor and proceed across the skyway towards Regis West. As you exit the skyway the restroom will be directly across from you. Fully accessible gendered restrooms are located directly to the left hand side when exiting the gallery on the first floor of Regis Center for Art (East).

April 23 - May 11, 2024
Temporal Exchange

The Quarter Gallery at the University of Minnesota presents Temporal Exchange, a group exhibition of works on paper curated by BFA students and alumni in the Department of Art at the University of Minnesota. Temporal Exchange encapsulates the impermanent nature of time inherent to the human experience. The exhibition portrays visual documentations of lived experience from emerging artists as they navigate relationships with the past, present, and future. The human condition is defined by the progression of time both through the mental experience and the physical body. By highlighting works on paper, the curators call attention to the transitory nature of this material, which can fold, bend, and warp, and its function as a tool of documentation. Paper offers an intimate material experience that mirrors the fragile, flexible nature of memory and time.

Artists in the Exhibition
Zakaria Abdullahi, Miram Anglin, Ella Bounds, Charlie Cassellius, Leon Valencia Currie, Jack Drummond, Nafyar (Ekhlas), Essence Enwere, Wasima Farah, Nina Lund, Ian McKenna, Sonja Quimby, Renee Rademacher, Mia Schultz, Camden Stevens, Peter Verdoorn, Natasha Warwick, Nora West, and Venus X.

BFA Student Organizing Team
Temporal Exchange was organized by Miram Anglin, Mia Schultz, and Camden Stevens with assistance from Charlie Cassellius (BFA 2023), Nafyar (Ekhlas), Jacquelyn Fay, Nina Lund, and Natasha Warwick. Lamar Peterson, Associate Professor of Drawing & Painting, provided faculty sponsorship and guidance to the organizing team.
 

January 16 – March 16, 2024
Little Earth Native Youth Arts Collective

November 21 – December 9, 2023
Undergraduate Scholarship Awards

October 16 – November 11, 2023
Stay Human

September 12 - October 7, 2023
Regis Center for Art 20th Anniversary Exhibitions: Works by Faculty Emeriti

March 23 – April 22, 2023
Queer Ecology Hanky Project

February 21 - March 18, 2023
Sites of Exhaust: MALFLOR & Nancy Julia Hicks

January 17 – February 11, 2023
Fred Joel Larson: A Celebration of Life and Art