Julie Caniglia Top photo: Fifi Chachnil; bottom photo: Cristina. It was one thing for Alec Soth, at a relatively early point in his career, to be admitted to the Magnum Photos cooperative. Then the legendary agency followed with another invitation, asking the St. Paul-based photographer to produce its third annual fashion magazine. Soth, whose energy seems as … Read more
Walker Art Center director Kathy Halbreich might be the most admired museum director in America,” wrote Tyler Green last year on his influential Modern Art Notes blog. He quoted some of Halbreich’s museum-director colleagues, one of whom said “I watch her from afar, kind of like a guru,” and another who said “Kathy is the … Read more
“We’re going to get booted out of there pretty quickly,” one of the bunch predicted. With that, the full implications of our parking squat—the Twin Cities’ first, as far as we knew—became clear. Inspired by similar actions in New York, San Francisco, and even a city in Sicily, we were going to lay claim to … Read more
People sell all kinds of oddities on Craigslist, but if you’re looking for really weird stuff you might want to sign up for an email list generated by the University of Minnesota. That’s how Ben Awes, Bob Ganser, and Christian Dean, who together make up the architecture firm Citydeskstudio, found their skyway. “We signed up … Read more
Back in the seventies, one of my sisters spent a summer clopping around in Dr. Scholl’s with white cotton socks. Supposedly it was doctor’s orders—he said she had an allergy to the rubber in sneakers—but what kind of doctor would prescribe Dr. Scholl’s for an eight-year-old tomboy? Probably she badgered our mother for them. Naturally … Read more
On a blustery Saturday night in January, one of the year’s most anticipated gallery shows opened in New York City. As winds off the Hudson River barreled eastward down the charmless streets of Chelsea, the haute monde of Manhattan and the wider world streamed in from the west, down to Gagosian, at the very end … Read more
A lot of people think they should envy Nancy Gross. Her job is to make sure that the shop at Walker Art Center is arrayed with ultra-gorgeous and ingeniously designed things—things that, above all, you’re unlikely to find elsewhere. “When you say you’re a buyer, people think it’s glamorous, like you just run around and … Read more
It’s hardly surprising that many of the works in Walker Art Center’s newest show, Andy Warhol/ Supernova: Stars, Deaths, and Disasters, 1962-1964, are the artist’s best-known. His repeating runs of Elvises, Lizzes, Marilyns, and Jackies, along with paintings of car crashes and electric chairs, show the extent to which a fascination with tragedy and death … Read more
If, in the past few weeks, you’ve encountered a super-strange message in your fortune cookie at a local Chinese restaurant (like A skyscraper can fall just by looking at it. Yet ‘War is over if you want It.’ or Think of something you understand until you no longer understand it. Or, simply, Wait.), then you … Read more
In recent years, young women have begun to reclaim labor-intensive, old-fashioned “women’s work” like knitting and quilting, which their grandmothers perfected and their mothers likely shunned. Some of these women, such as Jessica Rankin, a thirty-four-year-old trained as a painter, aren’t just reclaiming these crafts; they’re elevating them to high-art status. A few years ago, … Read more