COMPLEX DREAMS
Esmaa Mohamoud
The Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum, MI, USA
ON VIEW until February 16, 2025
We are thrilled to share Esmaa Mohamoud’s new ground-breaking exhibition COMPLEX DREAMS on view at MSU Broad Art Museum, Michigan.
As a young girl, artist Esmaa Mohamoud collected monarch caterpillars from her school’s playground fence. She secretly kept them in her desk at school, nurturing and caring for them. These small, quiet creatures yet held an incredible force within them. The monarch caterpillars would soon undergo a transformation as mind-bending as it is beautiful. Called metamorphosis, this shape-shifting alteration most notably gives the caterpillars their wings. For Mohamoud, her connection to monarch butterflies has always been a part of her life, as well the possibility for transformation. Have you ever wondered what it would feel like to sprout wings and fly?
COMPLEX DREAMS is a meditation on the power of art to express the enduring perseverance and strength of Black girlhood in the face of great adversity. Conceived by Mohamoud (Canadian, b. 1992, lives and works in Brooklyn, NY) specifically for the museum, the exhibition is composed of newly commissioned works in conversation with a recent immersive installation, together which span two galleries here on the first floor. As the artist explains, “the focus of my work has been heading towards ideas of Black nostalgia and Black experiences of childhood, and those interests are really at the heart of this project.” Multisensorial and moving, the works on view speak to Mohamoud’s powerful vision for the liberation of Blackness from the shadows of art history and society at large, often through a very personal, autobiographical lens.
This exhibition also inaugurates the museum’s new Signature Commission Series, which invites internationally renowned artists to respond directly to the iconic architecture of the Julie and Edward Minskoff Gallery. The experience of Mohamoud’s work in our Zaha Hadid-designed galleries cannot be replicated. Immersive in nature, her work invites us in, envelopes us. References to the persistent beauty of life and the natural world in the forms of dandelions and butterflies are joyful in spirit while also inviting a deeper meditation on the experiences of Black people-past, present, and future.COMPLEX DREAMS is organized by the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum at Michigan State University as part of the Signature Commission series and curated by Steven L. Brides. Interim Director & Senior Curator and Director of Curatorial Affairs. Major funding for this exhibition is provided by the MSU Federal Credit Union and the Eli and Edythe Broad Endowed Exhibitions Fund.
Exhibition statement courtesy of MSU Broad Art Museum.
Photography credit, Kyle Flubacker.
Learn more about the exhibition here
