"Rightly viewed, the whole soul of man is a sort of picture gallery, a grand panorama, in which all the great facts of the universe, in tracing things of time and things of eternity, are painted." - Frederick Douglass
The Katherine E. Nash Gallery, operated by the Department of Art at the University of Minnesota presents, A Picture Gallery of the Soul, a group exhibition of over 100 Black American artists whose practice incorporates the photographic medium. Sampling a range of photographic expressions from traditional photography to mixed media and conceptual art and spanning a timeframe that includes the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries, A Picture Gallery of the Soul honors, celebrates, investigates, and interprets Black history, culture, and politics in the United States. In conjunction with the exhibition, the public is welcome to RSVP to the following ticketed events:
Thursday, November 17, 12:15 pm, InFlux Space, Regis Center for Art
Writers Reading event with Mary Moore Easter, G.E. Patterson, and Davu SeruMary Moore Easter, a 2020 recipient of an Artist Initiative Grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board, and Cave Canem Alumni Fellow, is the author of four poetry books: Free Papers: poems inspired by the testimony of Eliza Winston, a Mississippi slave freed in Minnesota in 1860 ( 2021); The Body of the World (Minnesota Book Award in Poetry Finalist, (2019), Walking from Origins, and From the Flutes of Our Bones (2020). Twice nominated for a Pushcart Prize, she was also Founder and Director of Carleton College’s dance program.
G.E. Patterson’s debut poetry collection, Tug,was called “brilliant” and praised for its “Ellingtonian mastery of many voices” (Washington Post). NYC’s Fund for Poetry hailed To and Fromfor its “contributions to literature.” He is a past Edelstein-Keller Fellow in Creative Writing. Patterson began large-scale, public-art activities, under artist Seitu Jones’s leadership, on Jones’s food-justice conversation Create: The Community Meal. Patterson was one of three artists commissioned to work on the Dale Street Bridge Replacement.This project’s structural aesthetics, sculpture, and text-based work are a response to the intentional fracturing of St. Paul’s Rondo community by the construction of Interstate 94. In a 2021 essay, Patterson recognized the heterotopic community at the site of George Floyd’s killing. He is teaching 2020-22: Crisis, Critical Resistance and Creative Resilience, through The State Silk Museum in Tbilisi, Georgia and the Art Prospect Network. He was recently named Guest Dramaturg, Tanztheater Münster.
Davu Underwood Seru is a multi-disciplinary artist, scholar, educator and native of the Twin Cities. He is co-author with photographer Charles Chamblis of the book Sight, Sounds, Soul: The Twin Cities Through the Lens of Charles Chamblis (Minnesota Historical Society Press, 2017) and is co-author of a forthcoming book on artist Seitu Ken Jones. Davu is a recipient of numerous awards including the prestigious McKnight Fellowship and serves as Assistant Professor of Practice in the Department of English at his alma mater Hamline University.
