Ann Klefstad Lynn Geesaman’s photographs always draw one in. And after that, you stand around in the image, thinking, Now what am I doing here? I came here to get something; what was it? The fuzzy, melting landscapes have the memory-dissolving qualities of a late spring day—and, quite honestly, who knows whether that’s good or bad? But … Read more
Scrap yards and paper recycling form Michael Kareken’s usual subjects (though he has other, more conventional ones as well—figures, usually); many of the works in this show depict the Rock-Tenn recycling yard near his studio. Tough-love limnings of crushed heaps evoke the huge stone Aphrodite that stood at the old Getty Museum on the Malibu … Read more
Creativity is a double-edged sword. This was something I first realized after reading a detailed account of the torture regimen used by the Sforzas, a Renaissance-era Milanese family whose fortune had been made in arms sales. They called it “Lent”: forty days of inventive and excruciating pain-inducing practices almost guaranteed to leave the victim alive … Read more
Immigration to the United States is at its highest level since its historic peak in the 1920s; there really are a lot of people roaming the world, either forced by war or economics or driven by curiosity or circumstance. And many of them, artists included, end up here. (Read some of their stories in the … Read more
Fantastical, magical creations are very popular as of late—lots of dragons and magicians and cyber-wonders fill pages and screens—and the art world is stepping into that terrain as well. Does it mean dreams will become reality, or does it mean dreams will keep reality at bay? That’s for the viewer to decide. But these artists’ … Read more
Taken up by fans, feminists, malcontents, ideologists, and ax-grinders, Frida Kahlo has become much more than an artist over the last couple of decades. Yet somehow she is also often presented as less than an artist. In conjunction with Walker Art Center’s Kahlo exhibition, Grupo Soap, an alliance of artists who share a Hispanic heritage … Read more
This major exhibition of Native artists includes Rick Bartow’s paintings, Preston Singletary’s glass sculpture, and Sonny Assu’s weaving, among work from more than a hundred others. The curators of this traveling show, Ellen Napiura Taubman, former head of the Department of Native American Art at Sotheby’s, and David Revere McFadden of New York’s Museum of … Read more
Eagerly anticipated by sculptors across the state, this overview of the medium promises to be quirky and eye-opening. Jennifer Jankauskas, associate curator at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, chose just twenty-seven sculptors from 147 submissions. Some, such as Pete Driessen and Ruben Nusz, are better known as painters than sculptors; others, … Read more
Despite limited hours, Art of This is becoming an important place to visit; these two very different installations show the range of the gallery. Jade Townsendis an Iowan who passed through Minneapolis at one point and now worksin New York, where his crisp and often funny-though-harrowing buildinginstallations have gotten good reviews. Razor wire, all-whiteinteriors, holes … Read more
Colleen Sheehy, curator at the Weisman, put together a nature-themedshow with this Bob Dylan epigraph: “The sky cracked its poems in nakedwonder.” She chose Mark Dion’s candid deer portraits, Eleanor McGough’spaintings of natural subjects subsumed into lushly decorative patterns,and Christine Baeumler’s paintings from her recent trip to theGalapagos and the Great Barrier Reef. Sheehy chose … Read more