Upcoming Exhibitions
Minnesota Handwork 2026 is here!
TWO-SPIRIT STORIES
Penny Kagigebi, curator
Mary Giles Gallery
April 14 – July 11, 2026
Artist reception Thursday, June 4, 5:30 – 7 pm
TWO-SPIRIT STORIES showcases the work of emerging Two-Spirit Native artists residing in Minnesota. In a celebration of traditional and contemporary handwork, these artists are affirming Indigenous and queer identity using themes of ceremony, community, and ancestral tradition.
Answering a call to pick up their gifts, to bring their medicine forward, TWO-SPIRIT STORIES offers craftwork and hand-built pieces that move past adornment to systems of identity, past utility into reciprocity. When we build with our hands, we invest energy and life force to be shared with relatives, loved ones, and strangers alike.
Serving as Curator for Community Collaboration, Penny Kagigebi, invites Minnesota artists from tribes across the Upper Midwest to tell their stories. What is your story?
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Mni Sóta: Traditions & Innovations
Fiber and Material Culture of the Indigenous Landscape
Delina White, curator
Joan Mondale Gallery
April 14 – July 11, 2026
Artist reception Thursday, June 4, 5:30 – 7 pm
Mni Sóta: Traditions & Innovations honors Native textile and fiber arts as living knowledge held in the hands and shaped by place. For the Tribal Nations of Minnesota, textiles are teachings, protection, identity, and relationship, formed through artistic skills guided by water, forest, prairie, and season, and carried forward across generations.
Featuring distinguished Dakota and Anishinaabe artists working today, the exhibition highlights practices that extend ancestral forms through contemporary expression. Beadwork, cloth, fiber, hide, quilting, weaving, and mixed media reveal technical mastery, material understanding, and cultural responsibility.
Curated by Delina White, the exhibition brings together Minnesota artists whose work invites close looking and thoughtful appreciation. Each piece carries labor, intention, and story, affirming Native textile arts as a living presence, continually becoming.
Save the dates for these upcoming exhibitions:
2026 is the year of MINNESOTA HANDWORK!
Join us for a series of exhibitions throughout 2026, as part of Craft in America’s Handwork, celebrating fiber art and artists in Minnesota! Follow the year-long program in a special section on our website: MINNESOTA HANDWORK
