The artist came from new york; the helicopter, from houston. The pilot arrived from new jersey and, at the artist’s direction, positioned his craft outside the two-story window wall at midway’s massive new gallery. For a couple of hours it hovered there, its searchlight trained on the crowd gathered for opening night. Some availed themselves … Read more
We first met about six years ago in a basement lab. I was a young archaeologist with a short attention span. The bison calf was in an old cardboard box, just bones now, and had been there for decades. If the calf was born alive, its very brief life was spent on the prairies of … Read more
A couple years back—this was before everyone started talking about exhibition designers—it seemed like curators were eclipsing artists as the hot thing in the art world. (That is, when architects weren’t hogging the spotlight with their museum designs, but we digress …) How did this happen? One likely factor was the rise in demand for … Read more
Growing up on the East Side of St. Paul in the sixties, I always took Hamm’s beer for granted. The giant brewery was simply part of the neighborhood scenery, little more than a dependable source of jobs—at least until the seventies, when it was sold and started succumbing to fickle consumer tastes and corporate mismanagement, … Read more
MCP’s latest exhibit is something of a tearjerker in a blue state like Minnesota. Terry Gydesen documents the glory that was the Democratic presidential campaigns, proving that black and white is just the medium to highlight crisp lines in the Johns’ expensive suits. Diana Walker, Time’s White House photographer for twenty years, captures candid moments … Read more
In State Center, Iowa, a town of barely a thousand people that, in fact, occupies the state’s center, there’s a small white house whose owners deck the halls with an extravagance that verges on the fantastic. From the beginning of October to the week after New Year’s, the home of Dwayne and Janet Pundt (they … Read more
Pondering presidents past may help some of us to blot out the current administration. The Smithsonian, that repository of weird keepsakes and relevant ephemera, has sent us this traveling exhibit of presidential history, comprising some 350 doodads and artifacts. Some are breathtaking (Jackie O.’s ball gown), some impressive (Lincoln’s inkwell, used to write the Emancipation … Read more
If you’ve got some religion in you, but find the standard holiday depictions just a tad predictable (Mary in the blue robe, Mary taking orders from angels, Mary in the bathtub), check out Chinese painter He Qi’s cubist visions. China’s most popular Christian artist has a wild and playful style that is more hedonistic than … Read more
By the time she turned sixteen, there was little that Laurie Novak had not learned about survival. The many life and death lessons that a girl needs to know growing up in South Dakota were told to her by her father. The short, clustered buildings of her medium-sized hometown offered only a little protection from … Read more
How does it happen that one of the major creative forces of the twentieth century has gone mostly unnoticed by the art world? Painter and personality Beauford Delaney inspired artists like Georgia O’Keefe, Louis Armstrong, and James Baldwin, and his own expressive and distinctive modernist works capture the blues aesthetic of his time. Though Delaney’s … Read more