Mutts, Migrations, and New Homes

Abstract

Nancy Anne Coyne: Of IDS Center/Macy's Skyway Minneapolis August 4--November 15, 2008 This past Fall in particular was a time of transition. As of November 4, the United States has a new president elect who, to the unmitigated delight of a great many Americans of mixed ethnic and/or cultural descent, recently compared himself to a mutt. Barack Obama embodies the U.S. of the twenty-first century: a wild mix of geographical affinities and family legacies, a person equally at in Indonesia, Hawai'i, and Chicago. Speaking of Home, a public art installation recently on view in a downtown skyway in Minneapolis, investigated 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. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Twenty-three large-scale, black-and-white photographs made up Speaking of Home. Printed on transparent fabric and mounted on the skyway's windows, the photographs faced both inside and out, a mode of display that suggests and invites multiple viewpoints. The motifs ranged 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 left Iraq, Lobsang Dorjee left 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 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. …