Fine-art portraits made in Northeast Minneapolis. Painterly, theatrical, a little haunted.
Shelly Mosman makes photographs that behave like paintings.
She started young, posing her younger sister in front of the family's 1984 Grand Am with a plastic camera. She studied drawing and painting at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, spent about a decade shooting weddings, and in 2011 turned to the work she is known for now: Animal Child, the signature series that pairs children with the creatures they love.
In her studio in the Casket Arts Building in Northeast Minneapolis she builds each portrait as a constructed tableau: a single sitter, vintage clothing borrowed from shops like My Sister's Closet, a hand-painted or tapestry backdrop, controlled light, and often a live animal that belongs to the person in the frame. She allows, in her words, "a certain amount of play time during the shoot." Her subjects rarely smile. The result is solemn and still, closer to a 19th-century portrait than a contemporary photograph.
Mpls.St.Paul Magazine has called her portraits "casually surreal." Writing in City Pages, Camille LeFevre found in them "the depth and mystery associated with the Old World Masters' coloration and gravity." Her photographs have been featured internationally and are held in the permanent collections of the Plains Art Museum and the Rockford Art Museum. Her work has been exhibited at the Eiteljorg Museum, at the Rockford Art Museum alongside the painter Julie Heffernan, and in 2025 at the Minnesota Marine Art Museum, which presented Currents, a solo exhibition of her water-inspired portraits. Alongside her gallery work she photographs musicians, including album photography for Prof. She was named one of City Pages' Artists of the Year in 2014.
A rotating selection of original prints, including pieces from the Currents exhibition at the Minnesota Marine Art Museum, is available by inquiry. Sizes, editions, and availability shared privately.
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