Month: January 2008

  • Spearthrower

    We piled off the bus—field trip!— my teacher saying, suggestive and disinterested, “Just look.” The Minneapolis Institute of Arts free and full of kids, Chinese jades, gods and goddesses from everywhere, room after room of very old faces looking back at us. And here this one naked manso tall and alone in his own room,…

  • Zoom In: Susan Hensel

    I’m greeted at Susan Hensel Design Gallery by the gallery’s namesake, a small, ebullient woman who is a nationally recognized book artist and recent Minnesota transplant. “I’ve had friends here for years, my son was away at college—it was time,” she explains. As for her gallery, “I wanted the opportunity, not only to show my…

  • Noises Underground

    It must be something in the water. One hundred years after Saint Paul experimental composer Arthur Farwell dissected Native Indian melodies and piled up unrelated tonalities, a core of dedicated underground Minnesota sound explorers is still sampling, mashing-up, and otherwise taking musical liberties. Although largely unsung in this state of above-ground musical champions, there is…

  • The (Indie) Play’s the Thing

    While a handful of large companies give our city its national reputation, small, independent theater remains the life-blood of the local scene. Audiences are built by smaller theaters with more affordable ticket prices. Great actors have the opportunity to stretch and grow in smaller venues, without the pressures that they may experience later, in larger…

  • The Renegade

    Billy X. Curmano, performance artist and provocateur, doesn’t care much for the conventional wisdom that says artists must live in a large city. He may have grown up in Milwaukee and spent time in the East Village and other urban centers of art, but ultimately he decided to make his base of operations a picturesque…

  • Zoom In: Usry Alleyne

    As we talk in his loft above the Midtown Global Exchange in South Minneapolis, Usry Alleyne mentions that he was caught a bit off-guard by mnartists.org’s request for an interview. That’s likely because he is better known as a teacher or a photographer of arts events than as an artist. “Most of the time, I…