Brick x Brick

The 30 historical and contemporary artists represented in this exhibition use a diversity of media— including photography, painting, sculpture, and drawing—to show how building contributes to and disrupts local, national, and international urban landscapes. The majority of works come from the Minnesota Museum of American Art’s permanent collection and are complemented with generous loans from nationally recognized artists and prominent private collections.

From Robert Polidori’s photograph of pastel-hued Havana to Carolyn Swiszcz’s painting of an aging St. Paul retail landmark to Mike Lynch’s painting of an abandoned grain silo, buildings reflect how communities change and adapt, while creating more diverse layers of social and architectural history.

Artists also use building blocks of form and color to comment on the formal and conceptual construction of art itself, such as George Morrison’s Cube, Rob Fischer’s Industrial Revolution, Louise Nevelson’s Untitled, and Juan Angel Chavez’s massive wall sculpture Hard Bark. Together, the artworks in the exhibition reveal how art and architecture share the same reflex—to construct a new relationship to the world around us.

Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website.