Month: February 2008

As part of its celebration of National Poetry Month, Open Book will host The Face of Poetry, an exhibit of Margaretta Mitchell’s photographs of celebrated practitioners of the art, not one of which is recognizable to the average American (March 7–April 30) … One such luminary, Edward Hirsch—an excellent poet and a truly great writer about poetry—has a new collection just in time for NPM: Special Orders (available March 11) … Go ahead and try to name five living American short story writers better than Tobias Wolff. His Our Story Begins: New and Selected Stories (available March 25) is long overdue … I suppose we should hear this woman out before we commence our howling. At the moment all we can say about Mikita Brottman’s The Solitary Vice: Against Reading (available February 28) is that the early press suggests irresistible provocation, and a bit of Trojan Horse subversion … There was a time—believe it or not, children—when you couldn’t consider yourself a serious reader if you hadn’t at least dipped into the work of Leslie Fiedler. We spent a couple hours browsing through The Devil Gets His Due: The Uncollected Essays (available March 28) and were pleased to discover that the old fellow really was a sharp and entertaining critic.

St. Paul filmmaker Ali Selim’s Sweet Land, a Minnesota-made indie labor of love that garnered critical acclaim and spawned a minor cult, was adapted from Bemidji writer Will Weaver’s 1989 short story “A Gravestone Made of Wheat.” The Rake’s Cristina Córdova will moderate the latest installment of The Talk of the Stacks series, as the auteur and the author discuss the long journey Weaver’s story took from the page to the screen. Both Selim and Weaver have interesting back stories (Selim has had a high-profile career as a director of television commercials, and in recent years Weaver has been working on a series of successful young adult novels and teaching at Bemidji State), so there should be no shortage of topics for discussion.

Minneapolis Central Library, 300 Nicollet Mall, Minneapolis; 612-630-6174.

Bronx born and bred, Richard Price is arguably the country’s grittiest version of a zeitgeist Renaissance man. Following his first two novels The New York Times Book Review dubbed him “The Fonzi of Literature,” which may or may not have been intended as a compliment. But if early Price seemed like a flyweight greaseball with a Mean Streets obsession that verged on the romantic, his 1992 crack masterpiece Clockers established him as a writer without peer when it came to breathing life into a subject that hadn’t yet become an abstract hip-hop cartoon to millions of white kids. These days Price may be better known as a screenwriter than a novelist, but his work on HBO’s The Wire has been offered as conclusive evidence that television can possess all the power of great literature. In Lush Life, his first novel in five years, Price returns to his hometown and finds the streets as mean as ever.

William Mitchell College of Law, 875 Summit Ave., St. Paul; 651-225-8989. Magers & Quinn, 3038 Hennepin Ave. S., Minneapolis; 612-822-4611.

Some of the more recent products of painter Tiit Raid’s obsession, or “inspirational visual relationship,” with the pond outside his Wisconsin home can be seen this month at Thomas Barry Fine Arts (March 1–April 5) … A similar devotion is evident in photographer John Ratzloff’s work with the Anishinabe at the White Earth reservation (Bockley Gallery, through March 8) … The notes at Midway Contemporary Art’s front desk will only unravel part of the mystery of German artist David Lieske’s impressively crafted cabinet-like sculptures and neon word signs, but it’s worth asking to get filled in on the rest of the story (through April 5) … Last year, staffers from the Highpoint Center for Printmaking combed through hundreds of portfolios to put together the invitational Printers’ Picks exhibit (through March 5) … In River to Infinity-The Vanishing Points, Andrea Stanislav comments on Manifest Destiny, among other topics, via video images of mirrored obelisks in Utah’s Great Salt Flats (Minneapolis Institute of Arts, through March 16) … And the TAWU (The Art Within Us) organization embraces the cold with Soul on Ice, featuring work by some hundred African-American and immigrant artists on view at the Soap Factory—which is, mind you, unheated (through March 23).

Last year MCP inaugurated this annual exhibition “exploring linked portfolios of work” by a few selected photographers. We’re not sure how that makes it different from a small group show—the four photographers in this year’s ICY show share an affinity for psychology—but it may have something to do with the presentation of the work, which is geared toward exploiting the nature of the medium. British-born Minneapolitan Barbara Cummard, for instance, has created a twenty-foot mural, while the Toronto-based Frank Rodick and Londoner EJ Major arrange their images into what Rodick calls “polyptychs” or grid patterns; and New York-based Bastienne Schmidt strews images from “ShadowHome,” her series on her native Germany, across two walls.

Minnesota Center For Photography,165 13th Ave. N.E., Minneapolis; 612-824-5500.

When Estonia fell under Soviet rule in 1940, art became heavily censored. That was the case with “major” art forms like painting and writing, at least, but the apparatchiks largely ignored printmaking. In retrospect this seems ironic, given how the medium is suited to mass production and has a history as a tool of dissent. That’s exactly the point of this exhibition; culled from a collection at Rutgers University, its forty-one works from 1922–91 range from the surreal folk art of Jüri Arrak to the geometrical abstractions of Leonhard Lapin and Raul Meel—clear evidence of how artists in this medium persisted and even thrived under the radar of state-sanctioned Socialist Realism. The exhibit’s highlight and its clearest critique of force-fed Russian culture are Vello Vinn’s scathing, Ernst-like photomontages. The show runs simultaneously with (and is fittingly located a floor beneath ) an exhibit of Russian Impressionism.

Museum of Russian Art, 5500 Stevens Ave. S., Minneapolis; 612-821-9045.

Printmaking has a history as a medium that renowned painters and sculptors turn to when they want to experiment; locally, our own Highpoint Center for Printmaking and the erstwhile Vermillion Editions have hosted artists from around the world as they explored etching, monotyping, and lithography. This show is curated by Leslie Wayne, a New York painter whose work is currently on exhibit at the Jack Shainman Gallery in New York; she brings together a motley assortment of noteworthy figures whose work in printmaking we’re excited to see, in particular Polly Apfelbaum, Louise Bourgeois, Nicola López (who just had a show locally at Franklin Art Works), Thomas Nozkowski, Martin Puryear, and James Siena. Fans of the medium will want to attend a roundtable discussion on opening night at 6 p.m., just before the reception.

College of Visual Arts Gallery, 173 Western Ave., St. Paul; 651-290-9379.