Museum Director Laurel Reuter has gathered the work of twenty artists from across North and South America in a contemporary exhibition that is touring the State. Works in the exhibition include five videos, numerous paintings and photographs, plus sculpture.

The biological definition of animal refers to all members of the kingdom Animalia, including humans who are only one of the nine or ten million species of animals that inhabit planet Earth. In curating the exhibition, Reuter searched for art from the complicated animal genre that exhibits contrasting and conflicting visions, points-of-view, assumptions, assertions, and historical remembrances of other members of the kingdom Animalia.

There are historical ways of thinking about animals. Henry Horenstein, a photographer from Boston, has a photographs in the exhibition that was part of his 2008 solo exhibition at the Harvard Museum of Natural History. It was part of a series designed as “lessons in looking.” According to Elisabeth Werby, Director of the Harvard Museum, Horenstein’s work continues a centuries-old tradition of natural history illustration. In such work, “Animals are often presented in shallow space with limited landscape, sometimes even against a blank page, in order to promote close examination and study of detail.”

Other artists create art directly from their own relationships with animals; chief among them is Guillermo Hart. His family owns an estancia encompassing thousands of hectors of land in the far south of Patagonia, Argentina. Even while completing his graduate work in photography at the Massachusetts College of Art, Hart would return to the family ranch to work and to photograph. His photographs tell the story of Argentine ranching where the stomachs of cattle are dried on fences for the cheese industry, hundreds of hare pelts are placed on racks to cure for the fur trade, and the interior of the veterinarian’s office is hung with Argentinean hunting trophies and a two-headed calf.

Artists in Animals: Them and Us:

Pirjo Berg, Grand Forks, North Dakota • Cecelia Condit, Milwaukee, Wisconsin • Guillermo Hart, Buenos Aries, Argentina • Chris Pancoe , Winnipeg, Manitoba • Stuart Klipper, Minneapolis, Minnesota • Kim Bromley, Fargo, North Dakota • Henry Horenstein, Boston, Massachusetts •Ingrid Restemayer, Minneapolis, Minnesota • Vance Gellert, Minneapolis, Minnesota • Kate Javens, New York, New York • Terry Evans, Chicago, Illinois • David Madzo, St. Paul, Minnesota • Frank Kelley, Grand Forks, North Dakota • Barton Benes, New York, New York • Susana Jacobson, Salt Lake City, Utah • Lynn Geesaman, Minneapolis, Minnesota • Thomas Allen, Coloma, Michigan • Roberta Paul, Newtonville, Massachusetts • Mary Lucier, New York, New York • Catherine Chalmers, New York, New York Mary • Sprague, St. Louis, Missouri