Brick X Brick

Brick x Brick is a group exhibition that foregrounds the slow and deliberate process of building as a way to understand the social and cultural topographies of cities and the built environment. Artists represented in the exhibition use a diversity of media—including photography, painting, sculpture, drawing, and craft—to show how building contributes to and disrupts the features of local, national, and international urban landscapes.

Architecture is an endlessly fascinating lens through which to observe dramatic changes in the history and texture of contemporary cities. From Robert Polidori’s photographs of pastel-hued Havana to Carolyn Swiszcz’s paintings of St. Paul’s aging retail landmarks, buildings reflect how communities change and adapt, while creating more diverse layers of social and architectural history. Allan McNab’s woodcuts show houses sprouting up like mushrooms that spread over a hillside. Mike Lynch’s painting of abandoned grain silos, Elevator – 29^th and Harriet from 1988, is a haunting reminder of Minneapolis’s past as the “Flour Milling Capital of the World.”

Artists also use building blocks of form and color to comment on the formal and conceptual construction of art itself. Julie Mehretu’s lithograph Entropia contains 32 layers of colorful ink that recall architectural plans and swirling topographical maps. George Morrison’s Cube is a sculptural collage of finely polished wooden puzzle pieces. Rob Fischer’s Industrial Revolution salvages a high-Modernist color palette and old panes of glass in order to build something new from something old. Each work in the exhibition reveals how art and architecture share the same reflex—to construct a new relationship to the world around us. 

Brick x Brick showcases works by over 30 artists from across the country, including 12 from Minnesota. The majority of the works in the show come from the permanent collection of the Minnesota Museum of American Art, and are complimented by generous loans from artists and private collections.