In Our Hands: Native Photography, 1890 to Now

Arts & Photography

History & Criticism

Minneapolis Institute of Art

The first posthumous survey of Ojibwe artist Jim Denomie’s paintings, which invite further conversation about American history, memory, and place\nA prolific artist, Jim Denomie (La Courte Oreilles Band, Ojibwe, 1955–2022) did not begin his art career until the age of 35. Over the course of three decades, his award-winning work has been featured in national and international exhibitions and found in notable private and public collections. The Lyrical Artwork of Jim Denomie explores themes in the artist’s work, such as the legacies of colonization, reconsideration of American history, and what he saw as the absurdity of our current zeitgeist. His paintings are satirical and surreal, displaying a vibrant palette, along with dark humor and pointed references to historical and contemporary issues and injustices. Denomie drew upon lived experiences, pop culture, Ojibwe beliefs and traditions, and American history to tell stories with universal lessons. Alongside his satirical, history paintings, Denomie created a deeply personal body of work that depicts his spirituality, memories, and relationship to place.\nIn addition to its incisive essays, the book includes forewords by Denomie’s friend and gallerist, Todd Bockley, and the artist’s wife, the author Diane Wilson, as well as a transcript of one of his final interviews. In its totality, this catalogue begins the conversation around the lasting impact of Denomie’s work and life.\nDistributed for the Minneapolis Institute of Art\nExhibition Schedule:\nMinneapolis Institute of Art 
(July 8, 2023–March 24, 2024)

The Lyrical Artwork of Jim Denomie

Soukup, Nicole E

Art Works from the extensive private collection of the renowned art historian. Over the course of a long and distinguished career as an art historian, Alfred Moir has expanded our knowledge of artists working in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, and his painstaking research has yielded new attributions for a wide range of works. Over the past three decades, he has amassed an impressive private collection of master drawings, primarily old master Italian drawings but including drawings by French, Dutch, Russian, German, Austrian, English, Flemish, and Spanish artists working into the early twentieth century. To celebrate his seventy-sixth birthday, Moir has lent seventy-six drawings from his collection to an exhibition that debuts at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts in the spring of 2000 and will go on to museums in Pennsylvania, California, and Louisiana.
 Comprised of black and colored chalks, pen and ink drawings, brush and ink work, and watercolors, the drawings reproduced in this catalog of the exhibition capture the breadth of Renaissance drawing and reflect Moir's own interests and passions as an art historian and collector. Richard J. Campbell is the John E. Andrus II Curator of Prints and Drawings at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. Jane Immler Satkowski is a research associate at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. Distributed for the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. Translation Inquiries: Minneapolis Institute of Arts

Master Drawings from the Collection of Alfred Moir

Campbell, Richard J.

Built by William Gray Purcell and George Grant Elmslie in Minneapolis in 1913, the Purcell-Cutts house features a buff-colored facade, nearly flat roof, floor-to-ceiling art glass windows, and a revolutionary interior structured around an open floor plan, facilitating everyday living without the senseless division of space. Progressive Design in the Midwest documents the house and its furnishings from the year it was built to the time it was donated to the museum, restored, and opened to the public in 1990.
The many objects in the Institute's Prairie School collection, including works by Louis Sullivan, Frank Lloyd Wright, William Gray Purcell, and George Grant Elmslie, among others, are described in detail. Along with each piece is a list of relevant texts, exhibitions, and the historical background of the piece, as well as information about the designer.
With its multitude of historic photographs, many never before published, Progressive Design in the Midwest is a unique combination of history, house tour, and museum guide.

Progressive Design in the Midwest: The Purcell-Cutts House and the Prairie School Collection at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts

Komar Olivarez, Jennifer

Beauty, Honor, and Tradition: The Legacy of Plains Indian Shirts represents a powerful collaboration between two great museums - the National Museum of the American Indian/Smithsonian Institution, and The Minneapolis Institute of Arts - and two curators, father and son members of the A'aninin Indian Tribe of Montana. George P. Horse Capture, and his son, Joseph D. Horse Capture, bring different insights to this project as they explore new relationships among the shirts, the shirtmakers, the historians and scholars, and the audience of Indians and non-Indians alike.

Beauty, Honor, and Tradition: The Legacy of Plains Indian Shirts

Health, Fitness & Dieting

Horse Capture, Joseph D.

Horse Capture, George P.

Beauty, Grooming, & Style

Walker Evans (1903-1975) is best known for documenting the people and living conditions of the American South during the Great Depression. But his photographic accomplishments were much broader than these famous images: modernist views of New York City, such as his Flatiron Building, New York (1928-29) and Brooklyn Bridge (1929); architectural studies of Victorian homes and other buildings in Boston, Cape Cod, Saratoga Springs, and small towns in upstate New York; a series of spontaneous and surreptitious portraits taken on the Manhattan subway; scenes from Cuba in the 1930s; and his commercial assignments as a staff photographer and writer for Fortune magazine. The familiar work from his Farm Security Administration project is also here-views of the rural South immortalized in his collaborative book with James Agee, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, along with urban images from New Orleans and Savannah. 
Essays by Christian A. Peterson, associate curator of photography at The Minneapolis Institute of Arts, describe Evans's photographic vision and include fascinating information about the acquisition history of many of the photographs in this book. Illustrated with almost one hundred high-quality black-and-white photographs, Walker Evans presents the full breadth of Evans's expansive and varied photographic art. 
Distributed for The Minneapolis Institute of Arts.

Walker Evans

Minneapolis Institute Of Arts

Christian A. Peterson

Individual Artists

Currents of Change was written in conjunction with an exhibition of fine and decorative arts - assembled from public and private collections - representing the Mississippi Valley during a time of unprecedented economic and technological change. This fully illustrated catalogue contains 150 colored illustrations and 44 black-and-white photographs.

Currents Of Change: Art and Life along the Mississippi River, 1850-1861

Busch, Jason

Currently underappreciated, William B. Post (1857–1921) was a pioneer fine art photographer at the turn of the twentieth century. Admired by Alfred Stieglitz, he was among the first American photographers to compose his images and sensitively craft his finished prints. This catalogue presents approximately thirty of Post’s images, noteworthy for their rich and exquisite tone. Post’s deep affection for the landscape of rural Maine, where he summered and eventually lived, is evident in his soft-focus capturing of the essence of apple trees in blossom, fields at harvesttime, and most notably snow and water lilies. Like contemplative, Japanese-inspired poems, Post’s subtle platinum prints are quiet homages to his spiritual communion with nature. Minneapolis Institute of Arts curator Christian A. Peterson follows Post’s life and work and assesses his creative accomplishments, illuminating his important place in photographic history and the unique and sophisticated beauty of his photographs. Christian A. Peterson is curator at The Minneapolis Institute of Arts. Distributed for The Minneapolis Institute of Arts

The Quiet Landscapes of William B. Post

Peterson, Christian

The penny bank craze of the twentieth century began quietly enough. Here, a slotted pottery pig from Scotland. There, a grimacing human face made in Bennington, Vermont. In 1793, penny banks first appeared in America, along with the first large copper pennies. Those who mistrusted paper currency saved their “hard” money in vessels of pottery, glass, and tin. In the 1890s, “China Pig” with a slit in his back sold for a dime. Plump pigs and pennies went together like thrift and future success. To this day, these iconic examples of American folk art and vernacular design are prized additions to museum and personal collections throughout the country. Money in the Bank details a wide range of extraordinary still and mechanical banks acquired by Katherine Kierland Herberger, who initially discovered the pleasure and variety of toy banks as gifts for her son. Over 1,200 purchases later, she donated the collection to The Minneapolis Institute of Arts. All are pictured here in full color for the first time. Acclaimed art historian Karal Ann Marling contributes an essay to the book tracing the importance of banks in popular culture, and an introduction narrates Herberger's extensive collecting activities. Money in the Bank is a lavishly illustrated and remarkably comprehensive catalog that demonstrates the charm and whimsy, as well as the significance, of toy banks in America. Corine Wegener is assistant curator at The Minneapolis Institute of Arts. Karal Ann Marling is professor of American studies and art history at the University of Minnesota. Distributed for The Minneapolis Institute of Arts

Money In The Bank: The Katherine Kierland Herberger Collection

Marling, Karal Ann

Wegener, Corine

Collections, Catalogs & Exhibitions

In 1916, Herschel V. Jones, a distinguished and passionate art collector, purchased 5,600 prints from William Mead Ladd of Portland, Oregon. Jones promptly gave his newly acquired etchings, engravings, woodcuts, and lithographs to The Minneapolis Institute of Arts and the museum’s distinguished Ladd and Jones collection was born. In Herschel V. Jones, Lisa Dickinson Michaux sheds new light on the creation of this extraordinary collection. Through in-depth essays, she reveals Jones’s ambitious goals as well as his tenacity—he requested anonymity from the museum until he had “secured rare additional prints to fill in the gaps, making it a collection that represents the entire history of the graphic arts.” Eventually Jones added more than six hundred prints. This beautifully produced volume, abounding with full-color illustrations, reproduces over one hundred of the most important and interesting prints in the Institute’s Ladd and Jones collection and paints a vivid picture of these pioneering collectors and the history of print collecting in America at the end of the nineteenth century. Lisa Dickinson Michaux is associate curator of prints and drawings at The Minneapolis Institute of Arts. Distributed for The Minneapolis Institute of Arts.

Herschel V. Jones: The Imprint of a Great Collector

Michaux, Lisa Dickinson

Kinney, Marla J.

Satkowski, Jane Immler

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Books by Minneapolis Institute of Art