In Focus: ‘Anonymous X’ Exhibit at Crossing Arts Alliance Addresses Identity

The Crossing Arts Alliance holds workshops and exhibitions from artists around the world to educate and allow people to experience art that locals in the Brainerd Lakes Area would usually have to travel multiple hours to see.

“One of our core missions here at Crossing Arts is to make sure that we’re bringing new art to people that is beyond what we might see here in our local community, to make sure we’re inviting visiting artists and making sure that that what we can provide here is new and unusual and boundary pushing to some degree,” said Crossing Arts Alliance Executive Director Jennifer Jacquot-DeVries. “Not everyone gets to visit the Minneapolis Art Institute or the Walker [Art Center] in the Twin Cities.”

The current exhibition is “Anonymous X.” Phillip Robinson, an artist who traveled from St. Louis, Missouri to display his work, explores identity in this series of paintings while also addressing a time where he feels we lost communication skills.

“[This] series of works was about the drive to see people beyond their identity and to let people sort of interact and neutralize that,” said Robinson. “But it also was a response to COVID and how we had to cover up and we lost part of, you know, our ability to be direct with people.”

On the surface, you might only see the eyes and mouth on these paintings, but if you look deeper, you can see much more than that.

“The reason behind that is to neutralize identifying status, ethnicity, and celebrity. But how would a person coming up on this respond to it? They could have probably [a] contradictory feeling because, you know, every group wants to be seen and respected and acknowledged,” explained Robinson. “Well, that’s a contradiction to what I’m putting up, which is limiting some of that. And I have kind of mixed feelings about it, too, but the work drove me to do it, and I would hope that people, when they look at it, they give it an opportunity to settle in.

The Crossing Arts Alliance rotates its featured exhibitions every month. The next exhibition, “Color in the Cold,” will be on display from Feb. 14 until Mar. 9. More information on current and future exhibits can be found on the Crossing Arts Alliance website.