Edward K. Thomas’s “View of Fort Snelling,” on view in gallery 303, shows the landscape the way it was in 1850.
Last summer, I caught up with my friend Monica Haller while she was in the Twin Cities working on an exciting project for Northern Spark, the all-night festival of light. (Working with Molly Reichert, Nick Knouf, and Jonathan Zorn, she set up special listening decks by the Mississippi River for people to hear the sounds of the river through headphones.)
Monica Haller’s
“Veterans Book Project: Objects for Deployment” was exhibited at the Milwaukee Art Museum
in 2013.
Our summer MAEP shows and the first year of installations in the Target Wing at the MIA were getting ready to come down, so it was a good time to share what I’d been working on at the museum and talk about how a multimedia artist like herself might creatively interpret the art and spaces at the MIA. Now that Monica has become our new artist-in-residence, sponsored by the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), she’s worked out the perfect angle for her new art project: soil. Yes, dirt. The ground beneath our feet. America beneath the ground.
Another view of Monica Haller’s 2013 “Veterans Book Project” installation at the Milwaukee Art Museum.
Before coming to the MIA, Monica had just wrapped up her Veterans Book Project, a library of books she co-authored with dozens of veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which archived their experiences as well as those of their family members and Iraqis. The idea was to use photographs and stories to initiate healing and understanding, and Monica set up Veterans Book Project workshops all over the country, including one at the Milwaukee Art Museum that led to a six-month exhibition there in 2013.
Her interest in this most elemental of elements began several years ago south of New Orleans in the Mississippi Delta, on land that has been in her family for generations and is washing away through with coastal erosion and marshland degradation. More recently, and closer to home, her family sold the remaining acres of their farm in Albertville because housing and commercial developments were slowly encroaching. But before moving, her father removed piles of soil from the property and stored them, a gesture that became the starting point for some very interesting discussions—about soil and digging down into it to discover history, and about connecting artworks in our collection to questions about land values, ownership, colonized land, soil science, and geological time.
Over the past few weeks, Monica has made some great connections with researchers at the University of Minnesota, which has been studying samples of Minnesota soil for years, and at the Minnesota Geological Survey, which maps Minnesota under the ground. She’s using this scientific research to find new ways of understanding artworks, particularly how a knowledge of soil might affect how you view historical depictions of the landscape as well as objects made of materials from the ground. All of this research will culminate in a tour, opening in early May.