Now On View: Daniel Minter in Thresholds at the Haggerty Museum of Art

Daniel Minter’s sculptural practice is rooted in the relationship between material, memory and ancestry. His work in Thresholds, currently on view at the Haggerty Museum of Art in Milwaukee, places carved and assembled objects within a wider conversation about Black cultural memory, bringing contemporary work into dialogue with African objects from the museum’s collection.

Running through December 19, 2026, Thresholds brings together Minter with Aisha Tandiwe Bell, Portia Cobb and Stephen Hamilton. The exhibition is part of the Haggerty’s fall program, The Otherworld Is Home, and considers the space between the visible and invisible, the present and ancestral, and the places people leave and those in which they arrive.

Minter works with wood, metal and found objects, often combining materials that carry their own histories of use. His practice draws on Black Atlantic spiritual traditions, with the artist describing his work as a kind of technology for reaching ancestral strength and knowledge. The resulting objects are neither purely sculptural nor simply illustrative. They function as constructed forms through which histories, beliefs and inherited knowledge can be considered in material terms.

One of the works included in the exhibition is Directionality (2025), an oil on carved wood relief incorporating reclaimed wood, copper, iron and black-eyed peas. The combination of materials reflects Minter’s broader interest in assembling objects through processes of carving, collecting and transformation. Materials that might otherwise appear ordinary become part of a visual language concerned with history and continuity.

The placement of Minter’s work alongside objects from the Haggerty’s African collection is central to Thresholds. Rather than presenting contemporary artists as separate from historical African art, the exhibition establishes what the museum describes as a “call and response", allowing works from different periods to be considered together. The dialogue creates a connection between inherited forms of knowledge and contemporary artistic practice.

For Minter, that relationship extends beyond formal resemblance. His work considers how cultural memory survives through objects, rituals, materials and artistic practices, particularly within the African diaspora. The museum presents his sculptures as part of an ongoing process in which the past remains active rather than fixed, with contemporary artists reinterpreting and extending what has been inherited.

The other artists in Thresholds approach related questions through different materials and histories. Bell explores diasporic identity through multimedia work, Cobb draws on Gullah Geechee oral histories and family traditions, while Hamilton works with weaving, dyeing and carving methods connected to his study of Nigerian traditions and Yorùbá thought. Together, their practices create several perspectives on memory, displacement and cultural continuity.

The exhibition also gives Minter’s work a different context from a conventional contemporary sculpture presentation. Historical African objects are not simply background references; they form part of the conversation. The encounter asks how meaning changes when objects and artistic practices move across time, geography and cultural contexts, and how contemporary artists can engage with collections without treating the past as something static.

Minter’s sculptures occupy that space between object and memory. Through carving, assembly and the reuse of materials, he creates works that retain evidence of physical making while addressing histories that cannot always be represented directly. In Thresholds, those works become part of a larger examination of how Black cultural memory is carried forward, altered and renewed.

At the Haggerty Museum, the exhibition ultimately places contemporary artistic practice and historical African art within the same continuum. Minter’s work contributes a material and spiritual vocabulary to that exchange, using sculpture as a way to consider what survives, what is inherited and how ancestral knowledge can remain present within contemporary life. Exhibition: Thresholds Artist: Daniel Minter, with Aisha Tandiwe Bell, Portia Cobb and Stephen Hamilton Venue: Haggerty Museum of Art, Marquette University Location: Milwaukee, Wisconsin, USA Dates: August 28 – December 19, 2026