Ann Klefstad

These two artists (plus Burton Fialk, in the MCP’s Minnesota Projects Gallery) make work about seeing others—in particular, seeing them under duress. Photography lends itself to this, although it’s a use that most of us would not dare undertake. Annabel Clark has documented her mother, Lynn Redgrave, as she endures breast cancer and its treatment … Read more

The work in SAD, says curator Diane Mullin, “probes conditions of light, atmosphere, and isolation, addressing how our northern surroundings affect and define us.” Mounting this show in summer is a counterintuitively interesting idea: When the weather gets too good, go and soak up a little soggy gray despair (maybe we’ll discover we’re even SADder … Read more

A fruit so juicy that you have to lick your arm after eating it, and a technology so viral that it threatens ubiquity. Are these opposites? Or, in some sense—desire, say—are they the same? They’re things you want and don’t want; they’re too much. That is, roughly, the theme of this show, curated by Soap … Read more

Both Shinique Smith and Michael Paul Britto were in a show called “Frequency” at the Studio Museum of Harlem last year, curated by the incisively yet inclusively smart Thelma Golden. Also included was Kalup Linzy, whose hilarious and fond videos of various homefolks recently showed at Midway Contemporary Art in Northeast Minneapolis. Indeed, it seems … Read more

Paintings by Edvard Munch, Vilhelm Hammershøi, Carl Larsson, August Strindberg, Harald Sohlberg, Akseli Gallén-Kallela, Eero Järnefelt, and Fanny Churberg will shimmer on the walls of the MIA. The show explores Nordic attitudes toward nature and the past and present significance of landscape in Nordic culture and thinking. Expect a beautiful show—rampantly pretty as well as … Read more

This show features three intellectually hard-charging but often funny conceptual types from New York doing a wide variety of media (painting, sculpture, and video). This goofball name, Des Derrières, opens itself to all kinds of interpretations, from the opposite of the avant-garde (le derriere garde, the rear guard, those in fighting retreat) to pure scatology. … Read more

Jil Evans’ paintings are beautiful. She’s also a thinker who’s deeply ingrained with paint. A founding member of the long-standing Art and Philosophy reading group, Evans strives for meaning in form and color. The Venetian painter Giovanni Battista Tiepolo is a major influence; she named her dog after him. In keeping with this intense relation … Read more

Since the heyday of conceptualism in the ’70s, there have been artists doing interesting things with sound—not “music,” which is something very different, but sound as evidence of the natural or human world, combined in ways that intensify your consciousness of surroundings. This survey doesn’t cover everyone who has done this kind of work over … Read more

This show gathers some of the city’s best younger artists, across a broad spectrum of styles and media. Sean Connaughty takes a thoughtful conceptual approach to the intersection of natural form and cultural tropes, using ink, photo, sculpture, words, and whatever else comes to hand. Clea Felien searches for the essence of portrait subjects in … Read more