The Rake Magazine

Month: July 2006

  • Too Many Men in This Picture

    Thanks for the great revisit of the art scene in 1980s. At first I thought it was just another nostalgic article, but it got better as I read through it. Then I remembered that someone (Churchill?) once said something about studying history. If we don’t know our history, we are destined to repeat it. (That’s what I remember of the quote.) So that got me to thinking a bit more.

    A couple of things popped into my head. First, what happened to the women artists from WARM gallery? Several male artists were mentioned by name in that article. So, did the women die? Are they still around here? Who are they? Second, are we learning from history? Does anyone realize why it is important to have artists? What specific things about an artist’s lifetime of work makes her art important? Does anyone have a larger answer beyond obtaining grants and selling to General Mills? I do appreciate that you once again covered the 1980s. There are so many twentysomethings who don’t know how hard the artists from that era worked to get attention for the arts.

    Loretta Bebeau, Minneapolis

  • Let Me Hear the Ladies

    I was glad to see Cathy Madison’s “look back at a gritty underappreciated decade” of the Minneapolis art scene in the 80s. I’m pleased that she acknowledged that the “first-gallery bragging rights went to the Women’s Art Registry of Minnesota,” WARM Gallery, as it was then known. I was disappointed that the rest of the article didn’t mention any of the women artists who were very visible and active during that time. I would like to invite Cathy Madison to see what was happening at WARM in that lively decade by going to see the current exhibition at the Weisman Art Museum—WARM: 12 Artists of the Women’s Art Registry of Minnesota. [Editor’s note: the exhibition runs through September 17.]

    Harriet Bart, Minneapolis

  • Who Profits to Nonprofit Art?

    Cathy Madison’s “We went crazy for a decade” [July] was a truly pleasurable trip down memory lane—a guilty pleasure, at that, recalling for me the days of fashionable poverty and gallery internships. I spent my student loan money on trips to Chicago and New York, bounced back and forth between the U’s fine arts department and MCAD, and generally frittered away my time surfing the already-waning synergy of the late-80s and early-90s art scene.

    Probably to conserve length, Madison blurs the distinctions between what was and is the commercial gallery sector versus the huge number of non-profits: a spectrum shift seen over the past twenty years that has real bearing on the future of the Twin Cities art scene. A respected and established framer and exhibition designer in the Northrup King complex recently made his feelings plain: Non-profit galleries don’t exist to make a living for their artists, and they’re ruining the art market. They sponge up grant funds while cultivating “presence,” making stars primarily of their founders, and keeping local prices artificially low. I’ve worked for WARM, for No Name Gallery in its day, and for more contemporary “art centers” as well as having been a for-profit dealer. Commercial galleries still struggle to survive in a pinched urban market, competing with art centers while the cash is increasingly concentrated in the Republican suburbs (a desert of flat-screen TVs, fund raisers and NIMBYism). Local and national foundations have bounced back since September 11th, and the urban non-profit art centers vie hungrily for their attentions, with curatorial efforts increasingly built around “fundable projects.”

    At the same time, a top-down ethical hollowness that mirrors the corporate culture of our times results in margin over mission: non-profit organizations that are opposite to the “of, by, and for” alternative art spaces we used to enjoy. The Soap Factory is the lone exception. Artists, bottom line, are still very much on their own in this town. While Madison ends her tour on a hopeful note, I tend to side with Scott Seekins (minus his fondness for fishing): Between the anti-intellectual penury of the suburbs and a city saturated with non-profit art sponges, this town cannot nurture a viable market for most visual artists.

    Jennifer A. Schultz, Minneapolis

  • Charles Baxter and George Rabasa

    There’s no telling what might be on the table at this tête-à-tête hosted by the splashy new Central Library, but a lively, rambling conversation is all but guaranteed. University of Minnesota Professor Charles Baxter has written a batch of widely acclaimed books of poetry as well as prose (including The Feast of Love, a National Book Award finalist), while George Rabasa, a recipient of the Writer’s Capricorn Award for Excellence in Fiction and a two-time Minnesota Book Award winner, has recently published a new novel, The Cleansing (The Permanent Press). Through readings and discussion of their work (and presumably that of other writers), Baxter and Rabasa will discuss the dynamics of action and conflict in fiction. 300 Nicollet Mall, Minneapolis; 612-630-6000; www.friendsofmpl.org

  • Pazzanni

    While school’s out, young trapezists around the Cities can finally get about the business of putting on a proper circus. Showcasing the acrobatic prowess of Circus Juventas’ most advanced performers, Pazzanni, a production based on the famed carnivales of sixteenth-century Venice, promises to be a locally grown Cirque du Soleil-style spectacle—one whose tickets are far more affordable than what the famed French-Canadians charge. And even though Circus Juventas is a troupe of K-12 aerialists, this production is more than kids’ stuff: A pair of master Venetian mask-makers have come to town for the occasion—the very ones responsible for the masks in the movie Eyes Wide Shut. 1270 Montreal Ave., St. Paul; 651-209-6799; www.uptowntix.com

  • Leah Cooper

    Cooper has been the plucky executive director of the Minnesota Fringe Festival for the past five years, bringing the beloved assemblage of offbeat theater back from the brink of financial despair and growing it into the largest non-juried performing arts festival in the country. (There are now fourteen of them nationwide, and about fifty-three Fringe Festivals in the entire world.) But this is to be her last season overseeing this sometimes chaotic undertaking—she submitted her resignation earlier this year. When we caught up with Cooper recently, she was entrenched in the process of hiring her replacement, as well as, of course, preparing for the onslaught of camp, confessionals, and kung fu that commences on August 3.

    So what the heck would make you leave the Fringe?

    It’s just really that I’ve been here for a very long time. The previous two executive directors stayed for just four years each, so I’m already past the track record for burnout. But it’s not really burnout. It’s just that I’ve accomplished everything I set out to. I sort of saw coming in to rescue the Fringe as a way to help the community, as a way to give something back. And I feel like I’ve done that now. The job has been so demanding, but I’m an artist myself and it hasn’t left a lot of room for my own creations.
    Also, my husband and I love to travel.

    So, how did you go about rescuing the Fringe?

    Well, the first thing was digging the festival out of a deficit. Prior to my coming on, in 2001, the festival had grown so rapidly on the outside, in terms of number of shows, numbers of audience members, and press coverage. But the institution hadn’t at all grown. Dean Seal [the Fringe’s previous executive director] had taken it over on his own with hardly any pay and it had just reached a point where it was too big for its infrastructure. So we’ve added the systems to support it all. We’ve hired staff. We’ve grown our funding base. We’ve incorporated promotions and publicity. Also, my life before the Fringe was in software—I was a database engineer. So we’ve also improved the accounting system and things like that.

    About this husband you speak of. We understand you recently tied the knot with local playwright Alan Berks.

    Yes. We were married in April.

    How’d you meet him?

    Through the Fringe Festival. He was here [in Minneapolis] on a Jerome fellowship through the Playwrights Center. And the fellows had invited various members of the theater community to come out with them, to help them get a sense of the theater scene. It was Alan’s job to get together with me. He and I had coffee and three hours later I was like, ‘Huh, I kind of like him.’

    What’s next for you two?

    We’ve leaving October 1. We’ve sold our house and everything in it and we’re planning an extended backpacking trip through South America.

    Will you ever be back?

    Oh, yeah. We both consider Minneapolis home. He’s from Chicago originally. And I’m from Los Angeles. But we’re two happy transplants.

    The Minnesota Fringe Festival runs August 3 through 13. For more information, visit the beast of a website Cooper helped build: http://www.fringefestival.org.

  • Zoran Mojsilov

    You have to appreciate the forthrightness of a sculptor like the Belgrade-born Mojsilov, who joked with a reporter a few years ago that his art is mainly about “turning rocks into expensive rocks.” To be sure, this show, which includes works from recent years along with maquettes and photos of large-scale public commissions, demonstrates that there’s a bit more going on—often involving thick steel rods that thread through or impale forms carved from granite or limestone, or, as in Basin, “sew” together two massive slabs of rock. In all, Mojsilov’s work is brash and muscular, but also imbued with striking sensuousness and grace. 3012 Lyndale Ave. S., Minneapolis; 612-344-1700; www.flanders-art.com

  • Diamond in the Bluffs

    Wabasha is a mighty fine place to see an eagle. The city is a ninety-minute drive south of Minneapolis on U.S. Highway 61—yes, Dylan’s Highway 61—one of several old settlements wedged between the five-hundred-foot bluffs and the Mississippi River, built in deference to the commanding geography. Originally established as a fur-trading post in the 1820s, Wabasha was platted as a town in 1854, four years before Minnesota was incorporated, and named after Wapashaw, a Dakota Indian chief. The same scenery that drew early settlers—the montage of backwaters, the tall prairie grass and diverse wildlife, the steamboats docking along the river, and, of course, the eagle’s nests—is what keeps tourism and consequently the city’s economic base stable today.

    Not surprisingly, perhaps, the national bird also became Wabasha’s mascot, and it’s hard to imagine it featured more prominently around town. Eagles are painted on park benches, on storefront windows and shelves; they glower from the bumpers of trucks and are carved into tree trunks set by the river. The city’s annual festival is named Eagle Days. The local java hut is called Eagle’s Nest Coffee House.

    If you aren’t fortunate enough to spot live eagles against nature’s backdrop, three of them reside at the National Eagle Center downtown, which is staffed by tour guides who teem with facts and trivia related to the birds. On a recent Saturday afternoon, as a tattooed Eagle Center guide led a small group through the museum’s exhibits, one visitor asked about the best time to view eagles.

    “Winter is good,” replied the guide, standing next to a wall-sized photograph of nearly fifty eagles perched in a single area, among a few trees. “But you know, it seems like they’re always around.”

    Still, there’s more to Wabasha than eagles, as the locals like to say. At a kimono shop called Wind Whisper West, one can peruse more than two thousand kimonos for sale and tour a private collection of wedding kimonos. There’s Book Cliffs, a used bookstore with an extensive selection of local histories as well as an amiable live-in mutt named Greta, who relishes her role as browsing companion. There’s the Arrowhead Bluffs Museum, with thousands of relics on display from the period when the Dakota Indians lived on the land, cultivating wild rice and hunting buffalo.

    Food options include the upscale Nosh, with Mediterranean and French-influenced cuisine; a greasy spoon called the River Town Café; Chinese from the Fresh Wok; or sandwiches from the Little Jo Flour Mill and Bakery, which has back-porch seating on the river. If you’re planning an overnight visit, you can reserve one of five cats (Ginger and Arnold are popular choices) with your room at the Historic Anderson House, the oldest continually running hotel in the state. Or try the swanky, extended-stay lofts downtown—named, of course, Eagles on the River.

  • Walking the Line

    After winning the DFL endorsement at the Fifth Congressional District Convention in May, Keith Ellison has come closer than any black person (or Native American, Latino, Hmong, or Somali, for that matter), to representing Minnesota in Congress. If he wins the September 12 primary in the overwhelmingly Democratic Minneapolis, about the only thing that could keep him from taking Martin Sabo’s seat come January 2007 would be, in the words of the old saw, getting caught in bed with a live boy or a dead girl. The primary is his to lose—and opponents Mike Erlandson (current Congressman Martin Sabo’s chief of staff), former State Senator Ember Reichgott Junge, and Minneapolis City Councilmember Paul Ostrow all know that.

    And yet, that is not such a far-fetched possibility. His past ties to Louis Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam, the unpaid parking tickets, and the public hand slaps for failing to follow campaign financial-disclosure rules have certainly given his detractors something to work with.

    Ellison was born in Detroit in 1963. The middle child in a family of five boys, he was raised in what he calls a “very Catholic family” by parents who expected their sons to achieve. Ellison’s mother, Clida Cora Martinez Ellison, who was born and raised in Jim Crow Louisiana, was a social worker who encouraged her boys to also be politically active. After graduating from Wayne State University, where he converted to Islam, Ellison went to the University of Minnesota Law School. He candidly admits he took pleasure there in “shaking people out of their zone of comfort” and sometimes said and did things for their “shock value,” such as writing what some considered racially inflammatory columns for the Minnesota Daily under the pseudonym of “Keith Hakim.”

    Ellison has a number of things going for him, starting with the most obvious—he is the endorsed candidate in a primary election. He sits very comfortably at the same spot on the political spectrum as most of the DFL party faithful who are most likely to turn out and vote in a primary. And, by virtually all accounts, he was a conscientious state legislator. Beyond that, he is the only non-white candidate facing three other Democrats who are political and demographic clones of one another. In essence, they are fighting over the same pool of chardonnay-and-Brie white liberals. This is a state that loves “firsts” and “onlys”—therefore, the chance to send Minnesota’s first African-American to Congress, where he will be the only Muslim, is something to die for in this recognition-starved state. Face it—since Paul Wellstone’s death, has any Minnesota politician really made a national splash for anything other than bad-mouthing Kofi Annan or shutting down his office in reaction to an anthrax scare?

    And yet, if I were Ellison, I would be a tad concerned about the underwhelming response from the African-American political community. I spoke with a number of well-connected black politicians who said that Ellison has to do some fence mending “right quick” to ensure a strong black turnout. Former Fifth Ward City Council Member Natalie Johnson-Lee had this to say about Ellison. “Keith is a smart, driven, very ambitious, bordering-on-arrogant kind of guy. Many in the African-American community who actually turn up to vote will likely vote for him. But—and this is key—how hard those same individuals are willing to campaign for him and how deep they are willing to dig into their pockets to support him financially … that’s another question. I wish him the best.”

    Between now and primary day, Ellison must do these three things: convince the Lake of the Isles-Lake Calhoun-Linden Hills crowd that he is a person of integrity who does not see himself above the law; re-energize black people about his candidacy; and make sure that the delegates who showed him the love in May do not get a case of buyer’s remorse in September. If he does, he should win by a comfortable margin. However, those three factors will not mean squat if there are any more credible allegations about Ellison. Should any more bad news about Ellison surface—particularly if it comes from anybody but Ellison himself—then stick a fork in him, because he will be done, and rightfully so.

    Clinton Collins, Jr. is a Minneapolis lawyer and ABC Radio commentator. You can reach him at ccollins at collinslawfirm dot com.

  • The Upside of Knocked Up

    My husband and I recently went over our wills. This was pretty easy for me, since I don’t actually own anything of value. In fact, the only thing I am leaving my husband is a postmortem “honey do” list.

    The first thing on that list is to throw away all of my notebooks and journals. These are the things I worry most about falling into the wrong hands. I’d hate to be remembered for grocery lists interspersed with late-night rum-fueled “comedy” inspirations. Sample page, New Year’s Eve 1998: paper towels; Windex; lime LaCroix; (then suddenly, in capital letters) DON’T FORGET COLLEEN—CAT POOP DOG OMELETTE—FUNNY!!!!; (then the Target shopping list resumes) spray starch; tweezers. Apparently my pen ran out of ink at the last, so the word “tweezers” is scratched deeply into the paper. As if it were actually written with a pair of tweezers.

    I’d like to spare my kids from handling actual documentation of the nuts-and-bolts machinery of their Mama’s particular brand of goofy.

    “Maybe I should’ve thought about that before I had kids,” you say? How many parents out there have ever been on the receiving end of that one? What I love most is when the mighty “should-a” sword is wielded by Those Who Are Childless. Particularly those who are Childless By Choice. Because, when a CBC nails you with a “should-a,” the implicit suggestion is that not only should you feel extra crispy crappy about whatever current conundrum that you’re in—but furthermore, you should also pat the CBC on the back for having the presence of mind not to get knocked up.

    This has been on my mind lately because my daughter is now roughly the same age that I was when I was pregnant with her. She’s also got a pal who is pregnant and facing some tough decisions. This isn’t the first pal of hers to become a young mother. I thought my heart would stop a few years ago when Amanda came home from a slumber party with the news that one of the young party guests was expecting. I’d met the girl in passing. She was easy to remember because she was so pretty and outgoing. She was also fourteen. I’ll admit that my first instinct was to tug the reins hard and never let my daughter see this girl again. Like it or not, our peer groups help define our belief systems and our societal dance steps. This is true whether you’re forty or fourteen. This stance was more than a bit hypocritical on my part, because I remember all too well the isolation of what it was like to be young and pregnant.

    In the hot summer of ’88, I was ready to drop. I’d moved back in with my parents so I could be close to help when the time came. I ran into an old classmate and her mother at the corner convenience store. My old pal talked to me animatedly about what was going on in her life, and didn’t really ask about mine. That was pretty weird, right? I mean, talk about the elephant in the room. We said our goodbyes and I walked next door to the Video Update. I was obscured by one of those giant cardboard cutouts so when my pal and her mother walked in—talking animatedly about running into me—they didn’t realize I could hear them. What stands out for me to this day is the breezy statement: “Well, she’s ruined her life, and now she’s probably going to ruin that poor kid’s life, too.” So good to know those stand-up folks are out there, ready to exercise their index finger muscles and point.

    I’ve got a friend, Terry, who once told me that she thought all people should have to obtain a license to procreate. I asked her whether she thought this license should be a four-year kind of a deal that expires on your birthday, or could you apply for and secure a seasonal pass?

    Under Terry’s rules, my kids wouldn’t exist—at least, not as they are now. And that would be a damn shame, because they are terrific. There’s no fill-in-the-blank space for this in my will, but, if there were, it would be: My greatest earthly treasure is that my kids love me. May you all be so rich.

    Writer, performer, and femme fatale Colleen Kruse can be reached at colleen at rakemag dot com.