Month: February 2007

If Minnesota hockey were a religion (and many, of course, would contend it is), Steve Mars would be a hellfire-and-brimstone preacher whose sermons carry an apocalyptic message: Something must be done to save the faith, because the temple is melting. Warm winters of late have cut the outdoor-skating season nearly in half, and as outdoor…

Andy Sturdevant—bon vivant, raconteur, interlocutor, chairman-elect of the Medicine Lake Gentlemen’s Research Society—sat down one wintry Wednesday evening to talk about history. I had last seen him perched atop a handmade shack on the frozen shores of Medicine Lake, horn-rims steaming, cheeks aflame, hollering into the wind like Buddy Holly in a one-piece snowsuit, one…

I sat in a lawn chair in the middle of frozen Lake Nokomis, nibbling on chicken kabobs and sipping a tequila slushy, thinking, How serious can this pond-hockey thing be? A minute after the puck dropped in my first game, I immediately regretted my warm-up smorgasbord. This pond-hockey thing was apparently very serious. We were…

A little more than five years ago a few of us sat down around my dining room table with some legal pads, a laptop computer, and a long list of ideas. Our starting point was an executive summary of an idea for a magazine that I’d written up three years earlier. The magazine had the…

What’s going on with printmaking in the world’s largest metropolis? This modest but wide-ranging show offers a glimpse—some thirty works from nine artists—of the current scene where populist ukiyo-e prints first blossomed in the sixteenth century. On the prominent end are works by Tesuya Noda, one of Japan’s best-known printmakers, including a selection from his…

Here’s an intriguing pairing. Amer and Mutu, both widely exhibited internationally, came to New York via Cairo and Nairobi, respectively, and focus on intersections between the woman and race, sex, power, and religion. Amer’s huge canvases are embellished with chaotic embroidery that, upon close inspection, reveals images of women from porn mags. The new works…