Mutts, Migrations, and New Homes
Skyway art in downtown Minneapolis
Fall 2008 has been a time of transition in more than a seasonal sense. As of November 4, we have a new president elect who, to the unmitigated delight of a great many Americans of mixed ethnic and/or cultural descent, compared himself to a mutt recently. Barack Obama embodies the United States of the 21st century: a wild mix of geographical affinities and family legacies, a person equally at home in Indonesia, Hawai’i, and Chicago. “Speaking of Home,” a public art installation on view in a downtown skyway in Minneapolis until November 15, investigates the manifold meanings “home” takes on at this moment, barely past the brink of a new century, when migration and cultural hybridity have risen to new presidential prominence and become, if not yet the norm, an increasingly widespread and normal phenomenon.
Twenty-three large-scale black and white photographs make up “Speaking of Home.” Printed on transparent fabric and mounted on the skyway’s windows, the photographs face both inside and out, a mode of display that suggests and invites multiple viewpoints.
The motifs range from individual portraits to domestic scenes peopled by families and friends, whose slightly awkward smiles give way to the serious miens reserved for those consciously marking an occasion. These images are as ordinary as they are haunting: souvenirs of bygone days, of past lives in distant places. Yet the distance is bridged by the brief life stories that accompany each photograph and situate the images in someone’s real, lived experience.
While their very ordinariness functions as a powerful antidote to xenophobia, each of the stories “Speaking of Home” presents is equally extraordinary. Artist Nancy Ann Coyne provides the space to show what motivated each individual migration: Mai Chue Vang, a Hmong refugee, survived in Thai camps before re-settling in Minnesota. Similarly, Nasra Mohamed Noor’s family left Somalia to escape escalating violence, Adanan Shati’s Iraq, Lobsang Dorjee’s Tibet. Conflicts from around the globe echo through the skyway, in a mix of melancholic longing for what might have been home, and celebration of a new, more peaceful home.
Others came here for educational and economic opportunities, looking for a private version of the American Dream; still others followed family members in a quest to make a home with those they love. James Farlough, one of the more recent immigrants, moved to Minneapolis after hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans. These narratives of escape and shelter, opportunity and safety, freedom and inalienable rights are as old as they are still potent for each of these individuals.
The United States, after all, is a nation founded by immigrants. In recent years, immigration has risen to unprecedented levels of visibility in Minnesota, with the state accepting more than 90,000 new arrivals, a number surpassed only by California. Honoring this new demographic make-up of the state in a public space where audiences do not self-select was occasioned by Minnesota’s upcoming sequicentennial celebration. “Speaking of Home” offers an inclusive, celebratory take on making a home. The skyway is lined with the word “home” in each of the collaborators’ languages, a gesture that does not signal exile, difference, and displacement but respect, embrace, and the promise of lived cultural pluralism.
The notable exception to these narratives of immigration is Jim Denomie’s story. His family moved off the truncated remains of Anishinabe land as part of the Relocation Act of 1954. Thus the only voice who could claim a home complete with ancestral origins right here, in what became Minnesota 150 years ago, is that of a man who, in his words, now moves with ease between mainstream and Native cultures. This particular migration does not span continents, as so many others in “Speaking of Home” do, but points to the painful history of losing one’s home in the very place that has generously become home for so many immigrants.
Co-presented by Forecast Public Art, the Family Housing Fund, and the Institute for Advanced Study at the University of Minnesota, “Speaking of Home” is public art at its best, sparking dialog and getting people involved: not only the original twenty-three collaborators but local high school students from over nineteen different countries who wrote their own stories of re-defining home in a new country. Minneapolis-based design companies, such as HartungKemp, Larsen, and Devotion, contributed to make the project not only politically relevant but aesthetically meaningful: in the collateral material, orange dots break free from a gray background and segue into a state of hyper-visibility before comfortably merging into a background once more, abstractly illustrating the process of migration.
Displayed in a space of pedestrian transit, “Speaking of Home” suspends images and certainties of home above Nicollet Mall, where passers-by on the street encounter the skyway as a bridge, connecting the tall buildings on either side. Inside, visitors are free to stroll past the photos, or to stop, linger, read, and look. The space itself quietly emphasizes the transition that comes with all migrations, bridging the uneasy move from here to there, from an old home to a new.
Speaking of Home is on view in the IDS Center/Macy’s Skyway, Minneapolis, from August 4 to November 15, 2008.
This review was originally published in the January 2009 issue of afterimage.
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