Rochester Art Center
40 Civic Center Drive SE
Rochester, MN 55904
T + 1 (507) 282 8629
info [at] rochesterartcenter.org
www.rochesterartcenter.org
Facebook / Instagram / Twitter
Rochester Art Center is pleased to announce our spring 2016 exhibition schedule. RAC is a non-collecting art center focusing on contemporary art with a local, regional, national, and international focus.
Amanda Curreri: The Calmest of Us Would Be Lunatics
January 22–May 8
Curated by Susannah Magers, RAC Curator of Art and Public Engagement
Artist Amanda Curreri’s first solo museum exhibition, The Calmest of Us Would Be Lunatics emphasizes the active role of the archive, the power of the past to inform the future, and presents a call to action through engagement. Drawing from archival references and materials as well as contemporary content, Curreri
presents new and recent works including paintings, sculpture, prints, and video.
The exhibition and related programming are exercises in exploring and encouraging collaboration, incorporating the exhibition itself as an experiential platform for connection. Calling on the participation of many additional entities—such as c3:initiative, Portland, OR; The Jean-Nickolaus Tretter Collection, and archivist Lisa Vecoli; a commissioned interview with Amanda Curreri by activist, writer, librarian, and archivist Shawn(ta) Smith-Cruz; and ERNEST, a working group currently based in the Bay Area, CA and Cincinnati, OH, comprised of a flexible group of members—the exhibition functions as an intentional space for interdisciplinary connectivity, social interaction, and open dialogue. The exhibition offers strategies for self-determination to reveal and empower the “everyday activist” in all of us.
PROJECT Feminist Space
January 22–May 8
Rochester Art Center is proud to participate as a satellite site of The Guerrilla Girls Twin Cities Takeover and offers the public an additive, mutable project space for feminist artists and activists. One of the central themes in Curreri’s exhibition emphasizes a call to action through engagement. In this spirit, conceptually connecting with the notion of the “every day activist,” we have invited the iconic feminist art group The Guerrilla Girls to present fifteen works in the project space. These posters reflect more than 30 years of work, propagandizing the ideas of feminism and art activism. A SPEAK OUT wall encourages the audience to respond to both exhibitions, as does a Lending Library, a selection of books and important texts that have informed Amanda Curreri’s practice.
Emmett Ramstad: After You
February 26–April 24
Curated by Susannah Magers
After You is the first exhibition in Rochester Art Center’s 2016 3rd Floor Emerging Artist Series, featuring new sculpture and installation-based work by Emmett Ramstad, a Minneapolis-based artist. The sculptures in the exhibition originate from familiar bathroom features such as towel dispensers, soap dishes, bathroom stalls, and restroom insignia. Together they form extraordinary pieces that distort the scale and function of bathroom surroundings and ask the viewer to reconsider their public grooming associations. Intervening with certain elements typically found in these spaces—placing soap dishes with bars of soap on the opposite side of installed soap dispensers, or removing signage denoting “male” or “female,” and placing mirrors on the doors—the work addresses access, the politicization and policing of public restrooms, and the notion of false privacy.
Instead of focusing on the ways in which we are divided and separated, Ramstad’s work encourages us to reimagine how we are connected through the universality of function in the daily behaviors we all enact—from using the restroom to washing our hands. The viewer is asked to contemplate the following questions: Who is regulating privacy and public space? What are the rules that we follow because we think we have to? How do we craft our own sense of belonging in these spaces?
