Minneapolis Institute of Art

ON VIEW

AFTERSHOCKS
JOANN VERBURG

In 2016, while JoAnn Verburg was shooting video in Italy, three earthquakes jarred her out of an ancient culture into a frightening present. With parts of buildings falling around her, the world was suddenly precarious. The aftershocks continued for months, as did the later global aftershocks of the murder of George Floyd, the Covid pandemic, and increased threats to the environment. For Verburg, as for so many others, the world felt dangerously out of balance. As urgent as the need to respond to crises was the need for creative resilience.

As this exhibition demonstrates, Verburg's reaction to the barrage of aftershocks was to use art to seek out peace and the vitality that coexists with trauma. She set up her camera in two of her favorite places that had endured for centuries. Olive orchards she had photographed twenty years earlier offered inspiration and relatively solid ground. The stunningly clear "fonti" (headwaters) of the Clitunno River, fed by natural underground springs, affirmed the constant renewal of nature. Human beings are part of nature, and some of her images include a human presence. A close friend or her husband, Jim Moore, may be seen entangled, camouflaged, or in counterpoint with their surroundings. Verburg's hope is that as you look at this exhibition, your sense of separation from a larger world dissolves. In that spirit, you are invited to sit down, look longer, take in more than your first impressions, and allow yourself the gift of contemplation.

ART WEEK EVENTS

WALKTHROUGH + POETRY 
WED 3PM
Walkthrough Aftershocks with the artist JoAnn Verburg + hear a poetry reading by Jim Moore. 

JoAnn Verburg received a BA in sociology from Ohio Wesleyan University and an MFA in Photography from the Rochester Institute of Technology.

Distinguished by its extraordinary sensitivity to the energy and sensuality of the natural world, Verburg’s photographic work combines exquisite color, varied focus, and thoughtful composition to convey the beauty of its subject and setting. Often presented as diptychs and triptychs, her images of olive groves near her home in Spoleto, to which she has returned for over 30 years, envelop the viewer in a serene, dreamlike atmosphere and explore the passage of time both literally and figuratively.

Verburg has exhibited her work extensively in the United States and around the world. She was the subject of a mid-career survey at the Museum of Modern Art New York in 2007, Present Tense, which also traveled to The Walker Art Center in 2008. Verburg’s work can be found in the permanent collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the National Portrait Gallery, Washington, D.C., the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Jim Moore has been writing poetry for more than four decades. His most recent book, Invisible Strings, was published in 2011 by Graywolf Press. In 2012 he received a Guggenheim Fellowship for the work in that book. Underground: New & Selected Poems is available now from Graywolf Press.

He has won the Minnesota Book Award for his poetry four times. Jim has received grants from the Bush Foundation, the Minnesota State Arts Boards, the Loft Mcknight and in 2012 from the Guggenheim Foundation.  His poems have appeared three times in Pushcart Prize Editions as well as in many magazines, including The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The Nation, American Poetry Review, Harper’s The Kenyon Review, The Threepenny Review, and Water-Stone Review.


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Minneapolis, MN 55404
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Thursday 10am–9pm 
Friday–Sunday 10am–5pm
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Image: JoAnn Verburg (American, born 1950), BIG PINK (A Lover's Dream) (detail), 2020, pigmented ink on paper, Courtesy of the artist, Pace Gallery, and G. Gibson Projects ©️JoAnn Verburg