Minneapolis / St. Paul Music Blog

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One of the year's top-tier art exhibits opens at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts this weekend. "The Louvre and the Masterpiece" brings more than 60 works of art from the world's greatest museum to the Twin Cities for a three-month run. The exhibit spans 4,000 years of visual art, from ancient Egyptian statuary to Renaissance drawings by Michelangelo and Da Vinci to 17th- and 18th-century paintings by Vermeer and Chardin.

We have word of the Walker Art Center's 2009-10 performing arts season, and it's an ambitious doozy. They sent us a novella explaining it all, but a few salient facts stand out: the big silver cube will be home to four world premieres, seven big-time commissions, nine touring artists in debut U.S. appearances, and companies based in 17 different countries.

Minneapolis is a glorious city for an art fanatic. Case in point: the currently ongoing Spark Festival, an annual 6-day celebration of electronic innovation in both arts and music. Activities held under the Spark banner range from visual art, dance pieces, and concerts to an array of talks held on subjects like "Social Class and Creativity," and, um, "Cyberactions and Cyberinstruments via Physical Modeling: Extending Physical Realities". Heady stuff. But, don't be put off by some of the dizzying academic athleticism on display; if you enjoy any kind of expression, there's something here for you. Take a tour through the multiple art installations, attend an experimental orchestral performance, or head over to the Barker Center for Dance to witness a bodily interpretation of electronic soundscapes. Or, maybe, you'd be more interested in moving your own body at the multiple late-night parties that are also a part of Spark.

"Penis Envy (no not really)" by Kate Van Cleve

Genitals proudly hung on the walls and sex seemed the only appropriate topic of conversation Saturday night at Rosalux Gallery's "Peepshow." By far the sexiest art fundraiser ever, Peepshow was an orgasmicly good time with plenty to see and lust. Naughty art, stag films, glory holes, a photo booth, drawing board and an interactive bed kept the hoards of people laughing and blushing late into the evening. 

Wing Young Huie, the award-winning photographer of projects like Lake Street USA, Frogtown, and Rural Minnesota, has received national attention for his efforts capturing the cultural landscape of our state. This Saturday his monthly Photo Salon series kicks off for 2009.

This Saturday marks the opening of "We Know What We Did Last Summer," a poster retrospective of Burlesque of North America's prolific 2008.

(above artwork by Alex Kuno)

Those looking to check out a variety of art, from sculpture to video to paintings and photography should check out Grain Belt's Holiday Gala.

The Minneapolis Institute of Arts' annual antique bonanza begins today offering lovers of all things old the chance to snap up cultural relics from 40 deals. Antique shoppers will peruse art and objects from between the 18th and 20th centuries including folk art, silver, and modernist design. The three-day sale will be spiced up with dealer lectures.

Local artists Amy Rice and Terrence Payne are mostly known for their stencil art, paintings, and silk screen work. Together, they have collaborated on an entirely new project: Sotheby’s Realty has opened up a space for the artists to turn their art into a home.

Minneapolis Artist William Hessian is challenging local residents to find one of 35 quarter sized, hand drawn octopus pictures hiding in plain sight in Minneapolis's parks.

Finders will get to keep the art, honor the victims of the 35W collapse, and enter to win another prize.

With the help of MNArtists.Org, Minn Post reports:

The 35 hidden artworks serve as a tribute to the victims of the 35W bridge collapse, and is timed to act also as a celebration of the bridge's recent reopening. As a Minneapolitan, himself, William was greatly effected by tragedy, and the "October Octopus" was chosen to represent Minneapolis in this art hunt because, "when an Octopus loses an arm in a conflict, its arm grows back bigger and stronger than before. Minneapolis is like the Octopus in that way: when a bridge falls down, it is going to be back bigger and better than before" Hessian said.

Click below the jump for treasure hunting clues and pictures of the artwork!

The First Amendment Arts gallery and the local design and print shop Burlesque of North America are in the midst of their very own political campaign: to set up as many Obama poster installations in the windows of local businesses as possible. Participating businesses so far include record shops the Fifth Element, Treehouse and Eclipse, along with Big Brain Comics and Puny Entertainment.

Here are some photos of the installations, which feature original designs by Burlesque alongside prints of the ubiquitous portrait by Shepard Fairey of Obey/Giant infamy:

This Saturday, R. Luke Dubois visits the Twin Cities to celebrate his art exhibit, "Hindsight is Always 20/20" with Hearsighted, a night of music and art. Dubois is not only an artist, but is also a musician and will be performing a DJ set that night. Other people slated to spin the tunes are DJ Etones and U of M students. There will be food and drink, art, and dancing throughout the night.

About two months ago "Hindsight is Always 20/20" opened at the Weisman Art Museum. Running through January 4, the exhibit features a series of prints and light boxes of presidential Snellan charts, aka those eye charts used to test vision at the doctor’s office or the DMV.

This weekend St. Paul gets creative with its annual art crawl. One of the largest of its kind, over 250 art studios and galleries will open their doors, giving live art demonstrations, theater performances, food and wine tastings, and music.

Once housed in only the downtown and lowertown regions of St. Paul, this year the event has expanded to include other St. Paul nooks, including spaces along Grand Ave., Selby, the former Arts Off Raymond area (near University and 280), and even Harriet Island.

Originally popular for being a playground for bombastically patriotic superheroes of anatomical impossibility, the inhabitants of today’s graphic novels have branched out, from autobiographical tales of philosophical battles fought amidst a mundane landscape, to fantastical characters whose adventures force them to grapple with issues of morality, comics have moved beyond simple definition into an expansive and varied art form.

It was a sad day when Minnesota Center for Photography closed its doors late last month. Now you can take a piece of it home this weekend at their liquidation sale.

Are you into international canned beer? How about gnomes? Swords? What about all three of these things together as an artistic statement? Well, have I got the gallery opening party for you!

The state of Minnesota isn’t the only one celebrating its sesquicentennial, aka 150 years of existence. While early Minnesotans were penning their state constitution and electing their first representatives, English author Lewis Carroll was penning Alice in Wonderland, a novel that would delight children and inspire acid trippers and opiate fans for many years.

It may sound like an impossible task, but it will indeed happen: This week, along Nicollet Avenue in the Kingfield neighborhood, ten murals will be painted on the outside of various buildings in three days. Mark Hinds, Executive Director of the Lyndale Neighborhood Association has spent the past 18 months helping to coordinate the event.

Back in June, I posted about the strange, tacky, and weird things voters can buy to support their candidate (or some guy who trying to profit off of politics). Among the gems I found were a McCain golf kit, a Bill and Hilary Clinton teddy bears, and something called Obama's chocolate balls. Now local artists Aldo Moroni and Konstantine Berkovski are bringing politics to the the dinner table with Obama and McCain salt and pepper shakers. It's useful, but it's still presidential crap.

How about an art show followed by the Red, White, and Boom fireworks?

The Walker Art Center is celebrating the 20th anniversary of its Sculpture Garden with a summerlong series of outdoor events (including "A Moving Spectacle" on Saturday, featuring free family art-making activities and performances from the Trisha Brown Dance Company).

The Sculpture Garden's best-known work, of course, is Spoonbridge and Cherry, the giant aluminum and stainless steel sculpture by Claes Oldenburg and his wife and collaborator Coosje van Bruggen, which has become one of the Twin Cities' most iconic images. Yet most of us are so familiar with Spoonbridge that we rarely discuss it as art.

So in connection with the garden's anniversary, we recruited Walker curator Peter Eleey to help us take a fresh look at the sculpture, by posing this question: If we were showing Spoonbridge to out-of-town guests who didn't know anything about art, how could we explain it to them in artistic terms? His answer:

"First of all, I would say that not everything should need to be explained in artistic terms for people to take pleasure in it. I think one of the last things museums want to create is the sense that somehow you have to know everything there is to know about a piece of work to enjoy it. You can accept all art wholly and completely on the level on which you experience it. And you should be able to take pleasure in doing so. Of course none of that is to say that greater pleasure wouldn't be gained by knowing more.

"Nevertheless, I think Spoonbridge and Cherry is pretty much exactly what it looks like. There isn't anything that anyone's missing when they're looking at it, except potentially by way of context.

"This is a case where actually going inside the museum helps, because we have a great Oldenburg piece in the permanent collection galleries right now [Shoestring Potatoes Spilling From a Bag, 1966]. It's a bag of French fries hanging upside down, sewn out of cloth, and the French fries are kind of falling out of the bag. And right nearby is a group of Andy Warhol boxes of various commercial products from the '60s--Brillo boxes, things like that.

"Those two works establish a kind of background for what the Spoonbridge and Cherry is doing out in the garden. They date from a period in American art when artists were doing what we call pop art, which used everyday materials as the sources for the art they were making. Throughout the 20th century, artists have been interested in trying to bridge the gap between art and life. What I think is particularly great about pop art from this period is how easy it is to find pleasure in it without necessarily knowing more, because its sources are so vernacular and recognizable.

"In that way, this is really about re-enchantment. You can look at the history of modern art more or less since Marcel Duchamp as one of trying to re-enchant the everyday world we live in. And whether its by things that sometimes look silly, like taking a bottle rack and putting it on a pedestal and calling it art [as Duchamp did in 1914], or whether its taking an average, simple thing like a Brillo box and making a sculpture version of it that looks just like the original, or taking a large spoon and imagining a cherry from a sundae, blown up to a monumental scale and put in a public sculpture garden, these are all things that operate on that level of re-enchantment--in the sense that we recognize what we're seeing, but something's changed. Its context is changed, its scale has changed, or something else has happened that allows us to see it in a different light, and in turn to see everything else around us in a different and refreshed light."

As a side note, Eleey mentioned one other tidbit about the famous sculpture. Oldenburg has said that his original plan was simply to create a giant spoon. It was his wife's idea to add the cherry.

Artists, behold your new canvas: the utility box. Sure, it's not as blank as paper, as moldable as clay, or as obviously public as a large–scale wall mural, but sometimes utility boxes need to be fancy too.

London-based artist Richard Galpin's second U.S. solo show, Tetratopia, showing Galpin's innovative 'peeled photograph' works is currently at Franklin Art Works. The peeled photo technique he created starts as a photo he took, he then uses a scalpel to remove large swaths of the top layer, exposing the white paper beneath. Galpin usually begins with a photo of buildings or street scenes, but by the time he's removed much of the top layer, often all that's left is colored shapes and lines. Check out some of Galpin's works and a video below of him at work in his studio.

Paintings, like Cher, often need face lifts as they age. The Minneapolis Institute of Arts recently got one of its most valuable pieces, Hendrick Ter Brugghen's 1623 painting The Gamblers back from the Getty Conservation Institute in Los Angeles where it was cleaned and put on display.

(Ludwig Beethoven by Christi Furnas) We’ve all seen art exhibits celebrating groups of people whose contributions might have previously been overlooked, but what about artists, entertainers, and authors who have struggled with mental illness?

According to this New York Times article, it wasn’t technology or business that rejuvenated the Minneapolis Warehouse District. It was books.

Times writer Lisa Chamberlain details the decline of the "thriving flour mill district along the Mississippi River," that "later became seedy bars and flophouses," in her April 30 piece.

When a plan for a technology corridor went defunct, a collaboration between three nonprofit organizations paved the way to the area's new found development with the Open Book Literary Arts Center, the largest literary and books art hub in the U.S., Chamberlain writes.

It is not uncommon for the arts to revitalize a neighborhood, but it is certainly unusual for old-fashioned literature and books to lead the way.

Things heated up at the U of M's Regis Center for Art on Friday -- all the way up to 2,443 degrees Fahrenheit, to be exact.

A U of M metal casting class teamed up with students from other local universities in the 39th annual Iron Pour to liquidize iron and fill their homemade ceramic bowls with the scalding substance. Video and photos after the jump.

In 1999, it all came together for Marc Bamuthi Joseph. It sounds cliché to say his art started with a dream, but it's nevertheless true.