I believe it is imperative that artists participate in the significant dialogues of their own times. Their points-of-view are wide ranging, their vision is shaped by the canon of art accumulated through the ages. On July 13, 2008, the spectacular exhibition, “Goya in Time of War,” closed at the Prado in Madrid. In a recent review, free lance-critic Barbara Rogers wrote, “The exhibit is so compelling that even those who thought they didn’t care much about Goya are drawn into the tumbled world of 18th-century Spain. Ranging from portraits of his royal patrons to etchings satirizing the follies of mankind and the Disasters of War, the show also includes the two monumental paintings that form the best-known artistic record of the abortive May 2 (1808) uprising.

Today’s artists are not asked to record the definitive history of their times but instead to give their contemporary audiences the means to understand their own times. Ours is not a contemplative society; artists often are.  For some artists, like some writers, assume the role of moral compass for the larger society. In 1991 Johanna Branson, an art historian at Massachusetts College of Art in Boston, curated a seminal exhibition “Seeing through ‘paradise:’ artists and the Terezín concentration camp.” Terezín, known in German as Theresienstadt and a way station on the path to Treblinka and Auschwitz, was the camp where the best artists in Europe were sent to create propaganda for the Nazis. They officially drew and painted the “wonderful” place called Terezín and then, in the dark of night using stolen paper and charcoal, they drew their own horror stories. They hid the drawings under floorboards or passed them on to farmers to bury in their fields. When an artist was caught, he or she was killed. It was as though, “If I survive I will tell; but if I don’t survive, my drawings will tell.” These are drawings born of the need to tell, and what magnificent drawings they are, what human darkness they unveil.

The North Dakota Museum of Art is currently touring an exhibition I curated throughout Latin America called “The Disappeared.” It brings together the work of twenty-five living artists from South America, who, over the course of the last thirty years, have made art about Los Desaparecidos or the disappeared. These artists have lived through the horrors of the military dictatorships that rocked their countries in the latter years of the twentieth century. Some worked in the resistance; some had parents or siblings who were disappeared; others were forced into exile. The youngest were born into the aftermath of those dictatorships. And still others live in countries maimed by endless civil war. The artists are drawing huge crowds in Argentina, Uruguay, Chile, Guatemala, and Colombia as their governments begin to deal with their own dark pasts. Guatemala, with hundreds of thousands dead, may be the most important venue of all for only now is official Guatemala beginning to publicly address its past. In selecting the work I sought the most honest, direct work I could find that could communicate across language and country. To do this, the work had to be deeply felt, universal in concept, and superb as art.

As I faced narrowing 500 entries down to thirty for Aftermath, I realized that many good works of art would have to be eliminated. In 1997 I edited Under the Whelming Tide: The 1997 Flood of the Red River of the North about the flooding of my own place, a flood that turned western Minnesota and eastern North Dakota into a vast inland sea all the way into Canada. In Grand Forks only 5% of the buildings remained dry, the North Dakota Museum of Art among them.  As I juried this exhibition, I saw once again that floods are floods the world over, be it Grand Forks, North Dakota, or New Orleans, Louisiana.

I also faced reproduction issues. Slides of yesterday revealed more than today’s digital projections, and nothing is better than seeing the works of art. One can only judge the image, not the craftsmanship, the color, the scale, the presentation, and most importantly, the physical presence of the work when one stands before it. One can’t even judge the originality of the art because the indelible hand of the artist can only be measured when looking at it directly. And yet, I found wonderful things.

I have included several works in traditional printmaking media because I find the meditative process of the making often overflows into greater thoughtfulness. When curating “The Disappeared,” I was surprised to find no paintings that I felt transcended time and place. Printmaking, on the other hand, is as important as the photo image to the artists in “The Disappeared.” Younger artists might consider the printmaking works in Aftermath to be old fashioned. On the contrary, I feel they bring gravitas to the exhibition and a sense of the timelessness of all disasters.

Laurel Reuter, Juror
Director and Chief Curator
North Dakota Museum of Art