Collectors Circle for Contemporary Art Studio Visit with Joe Minter

Join curator Jade Powers at Joe Minter’s African Village in America as he discusses his practice and artist-created environment. Born and raised in Birmingham, Alabama, Minter vividly remembers the Jim Crow era and the Civil Rights Movement. Minter served in the military for two years, and later worked in metal construction for over a decade, making a range of products and machinery. He left the construction industry for health reasons but continued to craft with metal by making sculptural works. Minter has since pursued a self-taught practice, creating works that honor and commemorate Black American history. In 1989, Minter began making African Village in America, a site-specific installation located at his home in Titusville, Alabama. Minter’s village includes an extensive assembly of signs, found metal objects, and assemblage works that chart both local and global events from the past and present, with particular attention paid to those that involve or have affected Black Americans. Minter has also painted sporadically since the 1960s, a practice he has pursued consistently since 2021. Minter’s vibrant paintings are didactic and expansive in subject matter, ranging from nature scenes to images that recall the collective trauma of the Covid-19 pandemic. Minter has participated in exhibitions at the National Gallery of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Minneapolis Institute of Art, and the Royal Academy of Art, London, among others. His work was included in the 2019 Whitney Biennial. In 2024, he was one of four Artists Choice grantees from the Ruth Foundation for the Arts. The BMA acquired work by Minter in 2019 and this work will be featured in Roll Call: Two Hundred Years of Black American Art.

To join us for this event, please register through the link or contact Jade Powers at jpowers@artsbma.org or 205.254.2969. Please RSVP by Friday, September 11.

NOTE: This event is for Collectors Circle for Contemporary Art members only. You must be an active member of the support group to attend. Learn more on our Support Groups page.

Image caption: Joe Minter, 2023. Photo by Viva Vadim.