Minor Key

Although often associated with sadness, music in a minor key can express a complex array of emotions. It is often sedate and introspective.

During the first 12 years of her career (2005 – 2017), Samantha Box created “The Invisible Archive,” a body of work that records the lives of at-risk LGBTQ+ youth of color in New York City. The archive is made up of three subsections: “The Shelter, The Street,” which documents life in a Midtown emergency shelter for queer and trans youth; “The Last Battle,” an exploration of community in the Kiki Ballroom scene; and “Maps,” a meditation on the vanished “stroll” in the West Village. Together, they explore the ways that these young adults build identity, structures of care, family, and survival, within these uncertain, yet expansive spaces.

This exhibition features photographs from “The Invisible Archive” alongside works from the Des Moines Art Center’s permanent collections that build on the emotional tenor of Box’s series, one the artist likens to music in a minor key. Although often associated with sadness, music in a minor key can express a complex array of emotions: it is often sedate and introspective, summoning sensations of interiority that can suggest intimacy, like those seen in Joel Meyerowitz’s “Margaret and Caroline.” With its inward turn, the minor key can also evoke stories that are a little uncertain or unresolved, like those in Key Heyman’s “Arms Pulling A Sleeping Boy Up, New York” or Cindy Sherman’s “Untitled Film Still #56.” So too, the artworks on display here convey intimacy and interiority, their narratives are ambiguous, and their mood is somewhat melancholic.

“Minor Key” is co-curated by Samantha Box and former Des Moines Art Center Curator Mia Laufer. It is organized in concert with the concurrent exhibition in the Anna K. Meredith Gallery, “Samantha Box: Caribbean Dreams.”

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