Weisman Art Museum

Molly Roth
I am So Happy You are Here
Knit wool, weights, 2005

Housed in a striking stainless steel and brick building designed by architect Frank Gehry, the Weisman Art Museum offers an educational and friendly museum experience. The museum's collection features early 20th century American artists such as Georgia O'Keeffe and Marsden Hartley, as well as a diverse selection of contemporary art. A teaching museum for the University of Minnesota and the community, the Weisman provides a fresh, engaging arts experience through an array of programs and a changing schedule of exhibitions.

The current exhibit is on Seasonal Affective Disorder and it was rather intriguing. I particularly liked the piece pictured above (found on their website).

SAD features nine Twin Cites-based artists-Ana Lois-Borzi, Jan Estep, Theresa Handy, Chris Larson, Charles Lume, Molly Roth, Andrea Stanislav, Piotr Szyhalski, and Katherine Turczan-whose work is evidence of this impulse across a range of media, including video, installation, painting, photography, and sculpture. Meant not as diagnosis of the artists or the specific culture, SAD instead offers a view of ways in which artists interact with and illuminate particular environments and atmospheres and engage ways in which we understand human subjectivity. As with the age-old tradition of landscape painting, the artwork in SAD addresses a sense of place focused not on land, but on the qualities of light and atmosphere, and the sense of time to which those elements relate. Furthermore, the works in SAD all assert the connection between physical and psychic space, speaking to how our surroundings affect and define us.

Our group took a little side trip through the museum after lunch on Wednesday before we returned to our work at the Kerlan. Since I've always meant to go to the Weisman, I was thrilled with this opportunity, despite the brevity of our visit.