rakemag The Hunky Dory resort sits atop a small knoll overlooking Lake Clare, in Balsam Lake, Wisconsin. It’s changed little since 1902, when it first operated as a working farm called the Hunky Dory Farm Resort. Brochures advertising the place look exactly the same as they did in the 60s. Nor have the kooky cabin names … Read more
You have to appreciate the forthrightness of a sculptor like the Belgrade-born Mojsilov, who joked with a reporter a few years ago that his art is mainly about “turning rocks into expensive rocks.” To be sure, this show, which includes works from recent years along with maquettes and photos of large-scale public commissions, demonstrates that … Read more
Cooper has been the plucky executive director of the Minnesota Fringe Festival for the past five years, bringing the beloved assemblage of offbeat theater back from the brink of financial despair and growing it into the largest non-juried performing arts festival in the country. (There are now fourteen of them nationwide, and about fifty-three Fringe … Read more
While school’s out, young trapezists around the Cities can finally get about the business of putting on a proper circus. Showcasing the acrobatic prowess of Circus Juventas’ most advanced performers, Pazzanni, a production based on the famed carnivales of sixteenth-century Venice, promises to be a locally grown Cirque du Soleil-style spectacle—one whose tickets are far … Read more
There’s no telling what might be on the table at this tête-à-tête hosted by the splashy new Central Library, but a lively, rambling conversation is all but guaranteed. University of Minnesota Professor Charles Baxter has written a batch of widely acclaimed books of poetry as well as prose (including The Feast of Love, a National … Read more
Cathy Madison’s “We went crazy for a decade” [July] was a truly pleasurable trip down memory lane—a guilty pleasure, at that, recalling for me the days of fashionable poverty and gallery internships. I spent my student loan money on trips to Chicago and New York, bounced back and forth between the U’s fine arts department … Read more
I was glad to see Cathy Madison’s “look back at a gritty underappreciated decade” of the Minneapolis art scene in the 80s. I’m pleased that she acknowledged that the “first-gallery bragging rights went to the Women’s Art Registry of Minnesota,” WARM Gallery, as it was then known. I was disappointed that the rest of the … Read more
Thanks for the great revisit of the art scene in 1980s. At first I thought it was just another nostalgic article, but it got better as I read through it. Then I remembered that someone (Churchill?) once said something about studying history. If we don’t know our history, we are destined to repeat it. (That’s … Read more
Having lived through and worked through the era, I appreciated Cathy Madison’s “We went crazy for a decade” and would have liked to have seen specific reference made to Butler Square. As a designer I officed there during the late 1970s into the early 1980s and the place uniquely reflected an aesthetic hybrid bridging the … Read more
Rake columnist Clinton Collins states that I failed to answer a young law student that queried me about legacy admissions at elite universities [Free the Jackson Five, July]. In all fairness to Collins, there was quite a bit of cross talking during the discussion he recounted, so it is possible that he did not hear … Read more