{"id":3390,"date":"2026-09-21T09:24:44","date_gmt":"2026-09-21T09:24:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.echoartfoundation.com\/daniel-minter-at-the-haggerty-brooms-totems-and-the-labor-of-spiritual-care\/"},"modified":"2026-09-21T09:24:44","modified_gmt":"2026-09-21T09:24:44","slug":"daniel-minter-at-the-haggerty-brooms-totems-and-the-labor-of-spiritual-care","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.echoartfoundation.com\/es\/daniel-minter-at-the-haggerty-brooms-totems-and-the-labor-of-spiritual-care\/","title":{"rendered":"Daniel Minter at the Haggerty: Brooms, Totems, and the Labor of Spiritual Care"},"content":{"rendered":"

Step into the group exhibition Thresholds<\/em> at the Haggerty Museum of Art and the first sight is a chorus of humble tools transformed: dozens of hand brooms arranged in long, orderly rows. Bound with scraps of ribbons, cords, and braids in a wide range of colors and textures, each sweeper sprouts raw branches from a fallen tree. Made during a participatory workshop in July at Lynden Sculpture Garden, the brooms are what artist Daniel Minter<\/strong> calls a \u201ctalisman, tool, and object of remembrance.\u201d His ongoing inquiry into the broom reflects a broader practice that considers how cleansing and care\u2014of space and self\u2014can be acts of devotion and empowerment.<\/p>\n

Assemblage as Vessel<\/h2>\n

At the Haggerty, Minter\u2019s multi-faceted approach comes into focus. Alongside the community-created brooms, he presents vibrant carved sculptures painted with stylized portraits and superimposed motifs. These figurative assemblages merge found objects with carefully selected materials that, as the artist sees it, become vessels for spiritual and ancestral knowledge. In a catalog essay for Thresholds<\/em>\u2014which pairs the museum\u2019s holdings with his sculptures\u2014Minter writes, \u201cI came from a people with a long and complex tradition of creating exactly these kinds of tools\u2014objects of communication and transformation. The objects and masks from the Haggerty Museum collection bring my work into direct contact with that timeless technology. They allow me to see my carving as a way of reconnecting with and continuing a living system of communication with the spirits, the ancestors, the unseen.\u201d<\/p>\n

Nature, Color, and a Public Offering<\/h2>\n

Minter is intentional about staging spaces for such communion. Nature is the foundation, and the walls in his section of the exhibition are keyed to its facets: blue for the ocean, red for fire and thunder, and green for the forest. A central, freestanding sculpture positions an abstract, totemic figure on a patch of astroturf\u2014typically presented outdoors or in a forest\u2014and serves, in his words, as an instrument of hope. \u201cHow do you find the things you need to see a future when the objects before you say different?\u201d he asks. \u201cDo objects transmit spirituality? No, they remind us of our spirituality. They allow us to translate. A particular object can remind you that you can think deeply and pass this obstacle that is in front of you\u2026 That\u2019s a service.\u201d<\/p>\n

Based in Portland, Maine, for more than two decades, Minter was raised in Georgia during Jim Crow, across the street from a white-only swimming pool; his schools were segregated until fourth grade. \u201cWhen you start seeing the systems that create these inequalities, you also can begin to notice systems that empower you,\u201d he says. \u201cYou notice the systems that give you a stronger sense of yourself.\u201d That sense was nurtured by his mother\u2019s constant singing and his own drive to make: as an adolescent, he carved small sticks and painted signs for neighbors, later studying illustration in college. He still collaborates on children\u2019s books, and his work for Going Down Home with Daddy<\/em> even won the prestigious Caldecott Medal.<\/p>\n

Thresholds<\/em> is on view through December 19 at the Haggerty, which is part of Milwaukee\u2019s Marquette University.<\/p>\n

V\u00eda thisiscolossal.com<\/a><\/em><\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In the group exhibition Thresholds at the Haggerty Museum of Art, Daniel Minter presents community-made brooms and vibrant carved assemblages that he frames as vessels for spiritual and ancestral knowledge, with nature-coded galleries and a totemic sculpture offering a service of hope. The show is on view through December 19 at the Haggerty, part of Marquette University in Milwaukee.<\/p>","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":3389,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3390","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-happening-now"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.echoartfoundation.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3390","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.echoartfoundation.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.echoartfoundation.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.echoartfoundation.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.echoartfoundation.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3390"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.echoartfoundation.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3390\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.echoartfoundation.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3389"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.echoartfoundation.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3390"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.echoartfoundation.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3390"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.echoartfoundation.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3390"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}