The Missoula Art Museum (MAM), in Missoula, Montana, was founded in 1975, and is one of the leading contemporary art museums in the Intermountain West. As a museum, MAM has often held exhibitions which challenge viewers to make them think and talk about contemporary social issues.
One of the recent MAM exhibitions, In the Light of Conscience, featured the work of Irish artist Brian Maquire.
According to the Museum:
“Brian Maguire is an Irish artist whose work stems from his involvement in the civil rights movement of Northern Ireland in the 1970s. In his work, Maguire draws attention to marginalized voices by occupying a role as facilitator, which he is uniquely careful not to exploit.”
According to a museum display:
“Maguire’s work is united by atrocity. As a storyteller, he bears witness to this atrocity, traveling to the locales where injustice has taken place and meeting with eyewitnesses to draw attention to marginalized voices by occupying a role as facilitator.”
According to the display:
“Maguire depicts a drowning refugee as a comment on immigration policies and the dangerous Mediterranean crossings people are forced to make while fleeing war, climate change, or poverty.”
According to the display:
“Maguire connects the gruesome violence of hate crime to the agonizing and painful act of crucifixion, one of the central tenets of Christian theology, and has titled his painting to make this connection explicit.”
According to the display:
“Undocumented migrant deaths occur in all states bordering Mexico, but are often focused on Arizona and in Tucson specifically. There, Dr. Gregory L. Hess, the medical examiner for the county, has created a database documenting more than 3,300 deaths in the past 21 years, largely Indigenous populations from Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador who died while crossing the Sonoran Desert.”
According to the display:
“Maguire based this painting on an image in the archive for El Norte, a daily newspaper in Nuevo León, Mexico. The photograph showed police cadets saluting a local mayor during their graduation ceremony.”
More Museum Photo Tours
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Museums 101: Constructing African-American Identity (Photo Diary)
Museums 101: Interpretive Sculpture (Photo Diary)
Museums 101: Rodin at Maryhill (Photo Diary)
Museum of Glass: Human figures by Lalique (photo diary)
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