Kylie Linh Hoang had been looking at a lot of faces.
As the assistant curator at the Minnesota Museum of American Art, she co-created the downtown museum’s new flagship exhibition of its permanent collection. The show, “Here, Now,” opens on a pair of gallery walls with some two dozen portraits looking down upon visitors, welcoming them in.
Behind the scenes, as Hoang was considering the hundreds of portraits in the M’s collection, many of which ultimately fell outside the scope of the “Here, Now” show, she found herself reflecting on the invisible relationship between the subject of a portrait and the artist. A portrait doesn’t only depict what a person looks like — instead, more precisely, it depicts how one person perceives another.
“Even if you do feel you’re looking your best, it’s kind of scary to let somebody that close to you,” she said. “There’s a sort of reciprocity in that process. The portrait tells you just as much about the painter or the artist as it tells you about the subject.”
Minnesota Museum of American Art assistant curator Kylie Linh Hoang sits on a bench in an exhibition she created, called “When You’re In The Mirror…,” on May 21, 2025. Artworks in this particular gallery are hung a few inches lower than is common, which Hoang said is meant to challenge traditional ideas of who is prioritized in art museums. (Courtesy of the Minnesota Museum of American Art)
This is the idea behind the adjacent exhibition “When You’re In The Mirror…,” Hoang’s first solo-curated show, on view through Aug. 3 following a four-month extension. If we solely pay attention to the subjects of portraits, the exhibition argues, perhaps we’re missing part of the story.
To illustrate her point, Hoang points out one of the exhibit’s vignettes, in which four works are shown together: One finished painting and one unfinished sketch each by Clara Mairs and Clement Haupers, romantically linked St. Paul artists and educators in the early 20th century, with both artists’ pairs of works depicting the other.
In Mairs’ sketch of Haupers, the man’s body is drawn only in quick, gestural outlines but, in his face, she’s careful to render the mustache and arched eyebrows that also show up in her realistic painting of him. More than just confirming that Haupers had a mustache and eyebrows, this could lead us to infer that these were particularly important characteristics of his from the perspective of the person who probably knew him most intimately, which Hoang said illuminates the more tender moments of their relationship.
“Traditionally when you talk about portrait shows, there’s an expectation of very serious faces in gold frames; this person was a general in a war, and this person was a very well-to-do lady philanthropist,” Hoang said. “I didn’t want to recreate that.”
By redirecting focus back onto the artists and their relationships with their subjects, Hoang aims to call attention to and push back against common tropes of depicting men as powerful and stately and strong, and women as anonymous “symbols for other things; virginity, purity, sacrifice, motherhood,” she said.
Minnesota Museum of American Art assistant curator Kylie Linh Hoang discusses Leslie Barlow’s 2020 painting “Alex, at Juxtaposition Arts,” at the museum on May 21, 2025. The exhibition “When You’re In The Mirror…,” Hoang’s first solo curated show, puts portraits in the context of the relationships between their subjects and the artists behind the canvas. (Courtesy of the Minnesota Museum of American Art)
In a portrait of a person in a cowboy hat riding a horse through the desert — made with glitter, and in a crocheted frame — what is artist Moises Salazar saying about gender and masculinity? In the 1922 painting “Dewey Albinson,” Frances Cranmer Greenman depicts her artist friend and student in his studio. Shown directly alongside it is Leslie Barlow’s 2020 painting “Alex, at Juxtaposition Arts,” in which the title man, a graffiti artist, stands in front of his work. What is Barlow, and also Hoang, saying here about what an ‘artist’ looks like, what art is legitimized and how that might change over time?
The exhibition’s title, “When You’re In The Mirror…,” is a cheeky nod to the opening track of pop singer Charli XCX’s album “Brat” — itself a form of self-portrait, Hoang pointed out. And at the end of the exhibition, you’ll find an actual mirror, overlaid with the second half of the show’s titular lyric: “Do you like what you see?”
“I am not a subtle person; I think we’ve established that,” Hoang said, laughing. “I wanted folks to think about how they would feel seeing their faces in this space, too.”
In fact, though, one of the most conceptually interesting aspects of the show is also among its most subtle. Traditionally, museum artworks are hung with their centers about 60 inches from the floor — roughly corresponding to eye-level of the average man, Hoang said — but she positioned the works in “When You’re In The Mirror…,” at an average of about 54 inches from the ground.
“I was thinking about who gets the best view,” she said. “I’m 5’5 — even though I have big shoes on today — and, why don’t I get a good view of things? So the show is actually low, because I was thinking about who’s being prioritized during this viewing experience.”
“When You’re In The Mirror…” is on view at the M’s Nancy and John Lindahl Gallery through Aug. 3. Admission to the museum (350 N. Robert St.), located in the Pioneer Endicott Building and accessible either from the street or skyway, is free during its opening hours, Thursdays to Sundays from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.
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