The southbound highway out of Baraboo, Wisconsin, passes Delaney’s Surplus and then, in rapid succession, a fifteen-foot radiator penetrated by a giant key, a twenty-foot iron heart with a ray gun protruding from it, and a giant scrap metal chicken with plumage partially constructed from brass doorknobs. A dirt road hairpins from out of this … Read more
The world is a cold, hard, lonesome place. Despite ads telling you to pull yourself together and develop buns of steel, what the hardness and the coldness make you want to do is touch things that are warm and softly upholstered, like pets, or other people. Since creatures with a pulse are not always available, … Read more
It’s hard to admit, but my real first encounter with escargot was at Bunny’s Bar and Grill in St. Louis Park, with a flock of hospitality bats. Some of my fellow bartenders thought it would be funny to order the strange appetizer—what was escargot Bourguignon doing there alongside nachos?—and someone else thought it would be … Read more
These winter mornings, the sunshine shows things as they are. I was recently in Devon, the corner of southwest England where I was brought up, which was covered with a fine coating of frost that imparts sharpness to every detail of the landscape. “Proper rimey,” said my neighbor there, a man who lives in the … Read more
Before I understood what “wild oats” were, my parents—especially my mother—warned me to stay away from white women. Both came of age in the pre-Emmett Till South, where black men got lynched for so much as flirting with white girls. For my mother and father, however, avoiding “playing in the snow” was more about racial … Read more
I live in utter fear of motivational products—those soundbites of schlocky uplift that appear on calendars and posters, accentuating images of glorious sunsets, soaring eagles, big-eyed children dressed as cute hobos, and kittens dangling precariously from tree branches by their tiny, razor-sharp claws. It’s because there lives inside me a deep-seated anxiety that everything I … Read more
Although we’ve been appalled by plenty of McMansions, we still find the greater mystery to be the look of inexpensive homes, which can be the epitome of ugly. Can’t inexpensive mean simple and attractive? The HOME House Project demonstrates that low-cost (or at least lower-cost) homes can be creative, inspiring, sustainable, innovative, and even beautiful. … Read more
Duckworth is most often celebrated for her work in porcelain, which has the opaque, milky presence of bone, gives off a sensual glow, and inspires a surprisingly emotional response. As she says, “there’s no other material that so effectively communicates both fragility and strength.” The steadily productive eighty-seven-year-old artist has been sculpting evocative forms from … Read more
The art of book illustration is particularly revered in Iraqi culture; traditionally, artists have enhanced religious, contemporary, and political texts with highly detailed, almost baroque imagery. Today they are equally likely to turn to abstract, colorful expressions that tell new stories in a new way. The three-dimensional works of seventeen Iraqi book artists are on … Read more
As portraiture exhibitions go, this one is pretty crackling: Osama bin Laden in airbrush, five-foot-square photographs of blood-soaked extreme fighters, a painstaking oil rendering of Louisa May Alcott, a Marlene Dietrich-inspired video presentation, and a sculptural self-portrait using years’ worth of garbage are just some of the faces greeting viewers here. In all, nine local … Read more