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
“By drawing freely from the subconscious, the painter can bestow upon the canvas images most people could only access under the influence of hypnosis or in the depths of sleep. In my métier, I find myself time and again exploring the lure of the forbidden.” “My practice is concerned with the dichotomy between the term … Read more
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
In 2004, director Amir Bar-Lev first approached the parents of young Marla Olmstead with the idea of making a documentary of her extraordinary talent. Over the course of a year, this four-year-old girl from Binghamton, New York, sold nearly $300,000 worth of abstract paintings, was covered by news outlets from around the world, and then, … Read more
Director Aaron Katz’s Quiet City is part of the ever-growing “mumblecore” movement in indie film, a genre that favors disaffected youth who struggle to pay the bills. These films defy summary and star nonprofessional actors who improvise most of their dialogue, or, well, mumbles. In Quiet City, a girl gets lost in Brooklyn and meets … Read more
Cate Blanchett reprises her role as Elizabeth I, virginal queen of England. As usual there’s all sorts of innuendo about her hunger to get shagged by this or that prince or pirate. This time, England is under threat of Spanish invasion, and who should come to the queen’s aid but Clive Owen’s lusty Sir Walter … Read more
Before Stanley Kubrick dedicated himself to creating “serious” films that viewed humanity with a cold, clinical eye, he made The Killing (1956), a tense little noir about a racetrack heist. Sterling Hayden stars as the mastermind who sets the pot to boiling, and leads a cast of some of the best character actors ever to … Read more
Its 2006-07 season was chock full of chestnuts, but now, finally, Theatre de la Jeune Lune opens its new season with an original production. The Deception is an adaptation of Pierre de Marivaux’s La Fausse Suivante, a dark eighteenth-century French comedy in which a young woman disguises herself as a man so that she can … Read more
The Old Testament’s most difficult book, the Book of Job, planted the seed of this new play. From the “unknowable nature of God” therein, which local playwright Alan Berks described as “one of the scariest things I can think of,” a new ghost story was born. Berks (who wrote the 2006 Fringe Festival hit, How … Read more
The stalwarts at Rain Taxi once again put together this full day of lit love for the seventh annual TCBF, which is now firmly entrenched as an autumn tradition and a welcome respite from the paralyzing onslaught of seasonal affective disorder. Think of the day as a sort of Renaissance Festival for bibliomaniacs. You probably … Read more