Hend Al-Mansour had planned to open her solo show, “Contain Me,” at the Minneapolis Institute of Art last March. It was expected to be part of Mia’s artist-led Minnesota Artist Exhibition Program, a prestigious opportunity that comes with financial and other support for emerging and mid-career visual artists to realize a solo show at the museum.
A week before the show, after the work had already been installed, Al-Mansour learned her exhibition would be postponed until July of 2025.
In an Instagram post after getting the news, Al-Mansour quoted a statement from the museum. Mia “believes it is prudent to take the time to plan and further develop the show with deeper community consultation and engagement,” she quoted.
Her post went on to offer her own reflection on the turn of events. “My work contains figurative representations that some thought would offend the Muslim community,” she wrote. “I disagree, but I respect the decision and look forward to seeing you there in July next year.”
Mansour is now scheduled to open her solo show at Mia next July, but it won’t be the same show she had originally proposed to the panel of artists who originally selected her.
Heather Hofmeister, public relations manager at Mia, emailed me this update:
“Earlier this year, we worked collaboratively with Hend Al-Mansour and the MAEP panel to postpone the exhibition ‘Contain Me,’ given input from members of the community. We’re excited to share that Hend Al-Mansour will be featured in MAEP in 2025. The show ‘Mihrab: Portraits of Arab-Minnesotan Women’ will run from July 19 – Oct. 26, 2025, in the U.S Bank Gallery.”
Hofmeister noted Al-Monsour’s MAEP exhibition will be part of the program’s 50th anniversary. “We look forward to providing a platform for Hend Al-Mansour’s work and the meaningful connections it fosters with our visitors,” she said.
Meanwhile, you can see the work from Al-Mansour’s “Contain Me” at SooVAC Gallery in Minneapolis, on view through Jan. 5. (Here’s a sneak peek video)
The titular installation in the show, also called “Contain Me” (2024), depicts a scene described from Islamic literature. It captures the moment after the Prophet Mohammed has been visited by the angel Gabriel. Trembling, he asks his wife Khadija to cover him.
In Al-Mansour’s installation, the figures are painted on a two-dimensional surface, but they appear three dimensional because the painting is actually a wooden cut-out. Behind the main image, Al-Mansour places a hexagonal yellow frame that acts like a halo, and behind that is a third layer of colorful designs and patterns that reach along the wall, painted on canvas.
In an artist statement, Al-Mansour, who was born in Saudi Arabia and moved to the U.S. in the late 90s, writes that the work illustrates “my desire for my voice to be accepted and contained within Muslim beliefs and principles and the larger community,” according to text accompanying the exhibition.
Khadija is the main focus of the image. The male figure is turned toward the female figure, his face only partially shown, with his hand outstretched.
Khadija holds her arms around him, as if wrapping him in a blanket. Khadija’s head is covered loosely by a yellow scarf, and she holds a soft gaze — not looking at the male figure but at something perhaps looking inside of herself.
Khadija’s gesture in some ways transcends any particular textual lineage because it’s such a universal image of comfort and solace.
When I heard about Al-Mansour’s exhibition getting postponed, I was reminded of what happened to Erika López Prater. Hamline University declined to renew the adjunct instructor’s contract after she showed a historical painting of Mohammed from the 16th century, even after she noted she’d be showing it in her syllabus and gave a two-minute content warning for students to opt out during her online lecture in 2022. In that case, López Prater sued the university and the case was settled out of court.
According to Islamic art scholar Christiane Gruber writing for Newsweek, the Quran doesn’t forbid figurative imagery of the prophet, and “a search for a ban on images of Muhammad in pre-modern Islamic textual sources will yield no clear and firm results whatsoever.”
Islam is not a monolith, and there are a myriad of beliefs and practices of people of the Muslim faith historically and around the world today.
Al-Mansour creates a tender illustration of a scene from the Islamic tradition, and she does so in a way that shifts the focus toward an important female figure in that narrative.
In “The Scribe,” a work that illustrates another wife of the prophet, Hafsah, Al-Mansour pays homage to another important figure, who may have been instrumental in editing and codifying the Quran, according to some scholars. With a similar pop-up look, Al-Mansour shows Hafsah writing with a feather pen, pensively gazing at the viewer.
These are large, vibrant works that bring together Al-Mansour’s lifelike realism and attention to the flow of cloth worn by her figures with bold, dizzyingly complex patterns. Accompanying the two installations are two paintings portraying the two women in similar poses, and two animated works that offer insight into the artist’s process.
It’s a beautiful show, and it looks terrific in SooVAC’s space. It’s unfortunate this work by an important local artist who has shown her work in dozens of solo and two-person shows for over 20 years, and has exhibited and been in collections internationally, won’t have the platform that comes with being shown in the MAEP gallery. But I do look forward to seeing the work she does end up sharing at her rescheduled show next July.
While you are at SooVAC, you’ll also see the work of another artist, Fawzia Khan. In “Transformed,” Khan takes voice recordings of quotations by poets, thinkers, and spiritual leaders and creates a prayer rug based on the sound wave of that saying. As you walk through the exhibition, you can place headphones on your ears to hear the saying and see Khan’s delicate weaving work visualizing the sound of that saying. Khan’s exhibition also has an accompanying catalogue with photographs, an essay by Nicole Watson, director of the Catherine Murphy Gallery, and the different sayings Khan uses for inspiration.
Khan will be in conversation with Watson on Saturday, Dec. 14, from 3 p.m. to 4:30 p.m. at SooVAC. Both shows run through Jan 5 (free). More information here.
Al-Mansour’s MAEP show, “Mihrab: Portraits of Arab-Minnesotan Women” will run from July 19 – Oct. 26, 2025, in the U.S Bank Gallery at Mia. It will feature three installations Al-Mansour created for a 2018 show at the Arab American National Museum in Dearborn, Mich., plus a new installation and a new animation.
Sheila Regan is a Twin Cities-based arts journalist. She writes MinnPost’s twice-weekly Artscape column. She can be reached at sregan@minnpost.com.
Related
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by PostX News and is published from a syndicated feed.)
