The Minneapolis Institute of Art (Mia) will present “María Berrío: Songlines” from Sept. 12, 2026, through Jan. 10, 2027, bringing together approximately 20 works spanning a decade of the Colombian-born, New York-based artist’s career.
Co-organized with the San José Museum of Art, the exhibition takes its name from Berrío’s 2025 piece “Songlines” and frames storytelling as a vehicle for memory, movement, inheritance and transformation. Leslie Ureña, Mia’s associate curator of Global Contemporary Art, and Lauren Schell Dickens, chief curator at SJMA, co-curated the show.
Berrío, born in 1982, builds her large-scale compositions by layering hand-cut Japanese paper with watercolor, a process that gives her figures unusual depth. Her work draws on world mythologies, history, contemporary events and Latin American literary traditions, touching on motherhood, nature, migration, childhood, uncertainty and survival, according to the museum.
“Her layering is one that traverses the material to the conceptual,” Ureña said of Berrío’s work.
Dickens said Berrío’s command of paper allows her to render both precise details and moody abstraction, adding that “it’s her deep attention to paper that guides her stories.”
The exhibition centers on Berrío’s process, which begins with drawing before she builds each composition piece by piece in paper, a technique the museum describes as effectively “painting with paper.”
Featured works include “El Dorado” (2024), a large-scale piece the museum says reflects Berrío’s recent shift toward more abstract passages, and “Songlines” (2025), which inspired the show’s title. Also on view are “Edge of the Salted Plains” (2025), “Self-Portrait” (2019), one of Berrío’s rare self-representations, and “Clouded Infinity” (2020), described as a personal meditation on uncertainty.
Loans for the exhibition come from the Des Moines Art Center, the Dallas Museum of Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Wichita Art Museum and private collections in the United States and Europe.
An illustrated catalogue will accompany the show, with essays from Ureña, Dickens and Katherine Brodbeck of the Columbus Museum of Art, along with an artist interview conducted by Mia’s Valéria Piccoli and original texts by Berrío. The catalogue will be sold in the Store at Mia.
“María Berrío: Songlines” will be on view in Galleries 275-276 at Mia, and admission is free. After its Minneapolis run, the exhibition travels to the San José Museum of Art from Feb. 12 through July 12, 2027, then to the Wichita Art Museum from Aug. 14, 2027, through Jan. 2, 2028.
Support for the national tour comes from Hauser & Wirth and Victoria Miro, with Mia’s presentation additionally backed by the iArtis Foundation and Maria G Bales. SJMA’s presentation is funded through the SJMA Exhibitions Fund.
