MAMC+ Saint-Étienne mounts Franco-American 'Flying Colors' with Minneapolis Institute of Art collections

The Musée d’art moderne et contemporain de Saint-Étienne Métropole has opened 'Flying Colors. Dialogue avec les collections du Minneapolis Institute of Art', a cross-collection exhibition bringing together 160 works by around 40 American artists from the Minneapolis Institute of Art and the MAMC+ collections. The exhibition runs from 27 June 2026 to 3 January 2027, with a vernissage on 26 June at 6:30 pm.

According to the museum, the project presents a traversée of American art movements from 1950 to the present, using the dialogue between the two institutions’ holdings to trace major developments over roughly 75 years. The exhibition is organized through FRAME, the French American Museum Exchange, which links the museums and supports the exchange of collections across the Atlantic.

The MAMC+ notes that it began collecting American art in the early 1970s, building what it describes as major holdings now brought into conversation with works from Minneapolis. That institutional history shapes the exhibition’s premise: rather than a simple survey, 'Flying Colors' stages a comparison between two public collections with distinct strengths and a shared interest in postwar and contemporary American art.

The exhibition title comes from an image of an airplane covered in color by Alexander Calder, a reference the museum uses to evoke the transatlantic exchanges that form part of the show’s broader context. The exhibition text also places those exchanges against the backdrop of the Second World War, when the United States offered opportunities and freedom for many European artists, while some American artists settled in Paris and drew inspiration from modern artists there.

The museum says the exhibition aims to show how the United States helped shape major artistic currents and how artists continued to defend the values of alterity. The selection includes works by artists such as Morris Louis, Jim Dine, Roy Lichtenstein and Robert Rauschenberg, presented through the museum’s online media gallery and in the exhibition itself.

'Flying Colors' is described as the first part of a Franco-American exchange of American collections that will travel from one continent to the other. The Minneapolis Institute of Art is scheduled to present an exhibition drawn from the MAMC+ collections in 2030. The Saint-Étienne museum has also tied the project to a 2026 American season marking the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, with the exhibition listed among the museum’s current programming at Rue Fernand Léger in Saint-Priest-en-Jarez.