Bowdoin College Museum of Art to Host First Retrospective of Poet and Artist Mina Loy

On April 6, the Bowdoin College Museum of Art (BCMA) opens Mina Loy: Strangeness Is Inevitable, the first monographic presentation of the art of Mina Loy (born Mina Gertrude Lowy, 1882–1966). Even though Loy developed a powerful body of visual art—one that was admired by contemporaries such as Marcel Duchamp—no comprehensive exhibition has addressed the visual production of this pioneering modernist and feminist, whose visibility, like that of so many women artists of her era, was often overshadowed by men. Curated by independent scholarJennifer R. Gross, with support from the BCMA staff and student interns, Mina Loy: Strangeness Is Inevitable represents an exciting milestone, unifying over 80 paintings, photographs, drawings, constructions, inventions, and original publications of poetry created by Loy and by her close friends and associates over the course of her career. Drawn from a dozen institutional and private collections, these remarkable objects reveal Loy’s omnivorous creativity and her influence as an image-maker, author, and cultural arbiter. They will be complemented by extensive, never-before presented, archival materials. A richly illustrated catalogue, featuring contributions from Gross and Conover, as well as poet Ann Lauterbach and Surrealist scholar Dawn Ades, published by Princeton University Press, accompanies the exhibition. The exhibition will be on view at the BCMA until September 17, 2023.

Public programming for the exhibition kicks off on April 27th with a public lecture by Roger Conover ’72, executive editor emeritus, MIT Press, and Mina Loy’s editor and literary executor. This program will be followed by a public reception. Gallery talks, lectures, and related events will continue through the summer and fall.

Organized chronologically and tracing Loy’s peregrinations across Europe and the United States, Mina Loy: Strangeness Is Inevitable traces the development and trajectory of the artist’s incisive critical perspective as it infiltrated, cross-pollinated, and honed the ambition of the literary and artistic avant-gardes of France, Italy, Germany, and America in the first half of the twentieth century. Images of Loy taken by her friends and associates Man Ray, Carl Van Vechten, Lee Miller, and George Platt Lynes appear in the galleries together with correspondence involving art world visionaries like Mable Dodge Luhan, Peggy Guggenheim, and Marcel Duchamp. Through her visual art, poetry, letters, photographs, inventions and patents, visitors will be introduced to the pioneering work of this bold and revolutionary woman, working at the intersection of art, literature, and design, and whose important influence is perhaps even more obvious today than it was during her own lifetime.

Today, thanks largely to the impact of scholarship on her long-lost poetry in editions by Roger Conover '72, a biography by Carolyn Burke (1982), and a recent study by Mary Ann Caws (2022), Loy is well-known within literary circles. Mina Loy: Strangeness Is Inevitable introduces the work of a powerful female visual artist into the canon and creates a project that bridges the worlds of the visual and literary avant-gardes. The exhibition adds greater complexity and nuance to our collective understanding of networks of creative innovation during the opening decades of the twentieth century. It reveals that Loy’s influence extended well into the 1960s, as she continued to create, exhibit, and publish up until the time of her death in 1966.

By emphasizing Loy’s accomplishments in the visual arts, while contextualizing this work within the full breadth of her creative expression—including painting, drawing, poetry, prose, art criticism, fashion design, and industrial design—the exhibition will engage audiences with the remarkable vision of this bold iconoclast.

“This exhibition will expand current considerations of Loy as a noted poet, author, and artistic muse and restore her to the full stature of regard she was held in by her peers as a formidable intellect and artist,” explains Gross. “It also reveals that Loy can arguably be credited with introducing Italian futurism to America, radicalizing the aspirations of feminism, expanding the aesthetics of Surrealism, and presaging American pop art in her late assemblage constructions, all the while violating entrenched literary decorum and forever altering the breath and cadence of modern verse. The astonishing arc of Loy’s creativity presented in the exhibition mediates the mythology that has built up around her to disclose the real enigma that was Mina Loy.”

Anne Collins GoodyearCo-Director, Bowdoin College Museum of Art