NAC: Sustaining Membership Drive 2020

The Nemeth Art Center has brought challenging and thoughtful exhibitions and programming to the northern Minnesota region for a number of years. And despite the innumerable challenges 2020 has presented, we are proud of the way we problem-solved to continue serving our community. 

The group show of course, where else opened in early July and anchored our 2020 season. It featured six regional artists from Minnesota and North Dakota, and contained a wide range of media and subject matter. The initial intention in bringing together this group of artists was to underscore a sense of place that permeates the work – whether that be in a literal addressing of the landscape, or through a more intimate, bodily lens. And as time passed, and the tumult of this year set in – ideas about healing, resiliency, comfort, and ritual came forward and amplified these connections. 

And since our ability to physically gather was limited, we refocused our engagement efforts to our online platforms – using Instagram livestreams and recorded Zoom conversations to connect our audience to the knowledgeable and engaging artists in our roster. COVID-19 or not, we at the Nemeth have always felt that building an online archive of content and resources would be the best way to keep our content accessible during our off-season, and we’re happy that this process has been set in motion. 

So in order for us to continue developing our remote content and to prepare for what should be an absolute blockbuster of a 2021 season (more details on that below) – we’re asking for your support. This campaign seeks any membership level you can afford. We are hoping to build a team of annual sustaining membership that will help us provide these art experiences all year round.

Sustaining year-round memberships with the Nemeth Art Center will provide critical support to our organization, enabling us to not only provide high quality art exhibits and cultural events from May–September, but also to be a community leader in bringing arts education and positive, creative exploration to our area youth. It also assists in our ability to connect local and regional talent to a wider dialogue, and to bring more expansive national talent and viewpoints to our community. 

Join us as a sustainable member, and you will receive the second edition of our artist-designed t-shirt series. Group show artist Amber Fletschock took the reins for the 2020 design, and we could not be more excited with the outcome. 

And as promised, more background on what the Nemeth Art Center has on deck for 2021:

T.L. Solien, See the Sky (Career Survey)

To kick off our 2021 season in May, regionally beloved and nationally recognized artist T.L. Solien will occupy the entirety of our gallery spaces. The exhibition will be organized around overlapping themes, such literature, art, landscape and autobiography. These themes are familiar to many artists but Solien has a distinctive Neo-Surrealist vocabulary that is accented with illustrative exaggeration, multi-colored layered collage, and a sometimes-furtive sense of humor.T.L. Solien, Her Easel (Pelican Lake), 2009 

See the Sky includes significant paintings, sculptures, and works on paper that have not been shown before. Solien is also interested to collaborate with us on building arts learning activities that will accompany the exhibit, with an option of the artist leading a workshop himself.

Dana Schutz & Ryan Johnson

As a continuation of our ongoing two-person/artist couple series, the NAC is elated to announce the internationally celebrated, Brooklyn-based Dana Schutz and Ryan Johnson.

Schutz, a painter, grew up in Livonia, Michigan – a suburb of Detroit. She studied art at the Cleveland Art Institute and received her masters at Columbia University in New York City in 2002. Schutz is known for her gestural, figurative paintings that often take on specific subjects or narrative situations as a point of departure. She first came to attention with her debut exhibition Frank from Observation (2002) based on the conceit of Schutz as the last painter, representing the last subject “Frank.” 

Dana Schutz, Sneeze, 2001

Since then she has shown her paintings both in New York City and internationally. Dana Schutz’s paintings can be seen in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Solomon R. Guggenheim, New York; The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; among many others. 

The Nemeth will have access to a new series of Gouache paintings from Schutz, paired with the sculptural work of her husband, Ryan Johnson. 

Ryan Johnson, Pedestrian, 2007

Johnson, born in Karachi, Pakistan is a sculptor who uses a variety of materials including wood, medical casting tape and sheet metal to depict fragments of distorted realities that have been described as having, “strange spatial compressions, surreal displacements and quasi-Futurist illusions of movement.” The figure has often held a central role in Johnson’s work, though it naturally varies.