MINNEAPOLIS, MN.- The Minneapolis Institute of Arts (MIA) announced that it will present a major exhibition entitled “More Real? Art in the Age of Truthiness.” The exhibition will presents work by some of today’s most accomplished and promising international artists who are examining our shifting experience of reality. Organized by the MIA, the museum is partnering with SITE Santa Fe, which will open the exhibition in Santa Fe in July 2012, before it travels to the MIA in February 2013.

Over the past century, during a period of unprecedented technological change and global social upheaval, once agreed-upon beliefs, or “truths,” have been cast into doubt — changing and shaping our understanding and experience of reality. Through diverse media and in unexpected ways, this exhibition explores the impact and role of deception, play, memory, power, simulation, and new technologies on art and everyday life. Artists whose work will be presented in the exhibition include Ai Weiwei, Thomas Demand, Leandro Erlich, Cao Fei, John Gerrard, Pierre Huyghe, An-My Le, Joel Lederer, Sharon Lockhart, Feng Mengbo, Raqs Media Collective, Walid Raad, Seung Woo Back, and Eve Sussman, among others.

Elizabeth Armstrong, Curator of Contemporary Art at the MIA, and the organizer of the exhibition, said, “the exhibition proposes that we now live in an ‘Age of Truthiness,’ a period in which the slippage between fact and fiction has become increasingly blurred. Today artists in all parts of the world are exploring the pervasiveness of “truthiness” in art, politics, and the culture at large.” She added, “We are also excited to be launching ’More Real’ at SITE Sante Fe next summer, as it provides an ideal context for the globalization and heightened visibility of contemporary art, and platform from which to express these important ideas of our time.”

Stephen Colbert, comedian and host of the popular satirical news program, “The Colbert Report,” coined the word “truthiness” and brought it to the forefront of the English lexicon. Defined by the American Dialect Society as “the quality of preferring concepts or facts one wishes to be true, rather than concepts or facts known to be true,” the notion of “truthiness” quickly caught hold and it became Merriam-Webster’s word of the year.

By presenting art that reveals, confronts, and questions the nature of reality in an age when the relationships between truth and fiction have never been less definitive, “More Real” explores our constantly changing shared sense of what is real.