Category: Article

GrovelandGallery.com; 25 Groveland Terrace, Minneapolis; 612-377-7800

Stella Ebner’s One Day, in the main gallery of this Kenwood institution, features lovely, quiet woodcuts with domestic themes—a pile of bills, a tumble of opened envelopes, a sink full of dishes. These simple prints echo the matter of everyday existence, the true flowers and landscape of our lived urban hours. And in The Annex, behind the main building, one finds a counterpoint to these human artifacts: Larry Hofmann’s smooth, dreamy, and mossy green paintings with transfigured trees and slightly Martian landscapes. He invites you to step out of the paper-and-telephone world and imagine that you have different eyes.

“Eveningwear made comfortable”: Those are the operative words this season for Katherine Gerdes, the twenty-five-year-old designer best known for her appearance on Project Runway. The artist has successfully parlayed that exposure into businesses offering custom fashion and ready-to-wear, both of which bear the signature of Gerdes’ casual aesthetic. The avid snowboarder requires a loose fit from her own wardrobe, and has always designed for comfort as well as form. Last year at DIVA, she unveiled wrinkle-resistant gowns that could be packed into overnight bags. Now, a rainbow’s worth of jersey fabrics are stacked in Gerdes’ new downtown Minneapolis studio, destined to be made into a line of elegant but relaxed-looking dresses. Those gowns will premiere at the upscale DIVA gala, then reappear next month at Voltage, the fashion show geared to urban looks and streetwear. “These dresses will work well for both,” she pointed out.

Saks, Marshall Field’s, and the Minneapolis-based clothier Kuhlman have all produced menswear designed by Jason Hammerberg. But these days the thirty-three-year-old veteran has gone global as an independent apparel designer. Right now, for instance, he’s working with a manufacturer based in Istanbul, putting pen to paper for an “iPod-friendly” line for young men. But Hammerberg doesn’t do any of the stitching in his Golden Valley home/studio—instead, he sends sketches and representative images from magazines to the manufacturer, which then creates a pattern at the factory in Turkey. The versatile Hammerberg also meets with local clients desiring custom menswear—usually tailored jackets, pants, and suits akin to the dandy ensembles he’s dreaming up for the DIVA runway. And in his spare time, he designs baby onesies printed with punchy graphics and slogans, sold locally under the Brand New Baby Wear label. Why dabble in infant fashions? His twelve nieces and nephews are an inspiration. “I became an uncle when I was twelve,” he explained. “I love kids, been around them my whole life.”

“I liked the really cool things I was seeing in GQ and other magazines, like Versace,” said Russell Bourrienne, recalling his adolescence in the 1980s. “But most fourteen-year-olds can’t get their hands on that stuff”—especially if they are growing up outside St. Cloud. So he taught himself to sew, and now central Minnesota’s most fashionable teen has grown into an honest-to-goodness couturier, working out of a compact studio in Minneapolis’ Lyn-Lake area. One side is a showroom; the other is packed with fabrics, sketch books, a worktable, and no fewer than ten sewing machines, some state of the art, some vintage, one still in its box. “I’m very into the ’70s,” said Bourrienne, by way of characterizing his elaborate creations. That translates more specifically as menswear with exaggerated, often elongated silhouettes, done up in bold geometric patterns. For DIVA, his “English-Asian confusion” looks are inspired by the 1937 flick Lost Horizon, in which a plane full of Brits crashes into Shangri-la.

The DIVA MN benefit unfolds on March 3 at International Market Square, 275 Market St. in Minneapolis. Tickets at 651-209-6799 or divamn.org.

The St. Paul Cultural Garden, an installation of seven poetry-inscribed sculptures, isn’t easy to find. There is no signage or parking, and it’s on the way to virtually nowhere. The tiny plot of anonymous green space, perched one hundred feet above the Mississippi River atop a municipal parking ramp, is hemmed off from the rest of downtown by a forbidding promontory, the red-brick fortress-like Ramsey County Government Center, the concrete arches of the Robert Street Bridge, and the intimidating-to-pedestrians traffic corridor of Kellogg Boulevard. Given this discreet locale, it’s no wonder most people haven’t heard of this public art treasure.
Sculptor Cliff Garten and a team of poets (Sandra Benitez, Soyini Guyton, John Minczeski, David Mura, Xeng Sue Yang, and Roberta Hill-Whiteman) unveiled the project in 1996 as a way to honor the various communities that have contributed to St. Paul’s culture and commemorate the 150th anniversary of the city’s naming. (Christened by Father Galtier in 1841 to coincide with the opening of a church of the same name, St. Paul replaced Pig’s Eye, the moniker adopted by early settlers that referred to a blind-in-one-eye distiller whose moonshine shack was the area’s first business establishment.)
Although tricky to access, the garden is appropriately located near the sites of the metropolis’ founding structures: above the hillside where St. Paul’s Church once stood and the old Fountain Cave where Pig’s Eye long ago built his shack. (Both cave and hill are gone now, having been blasted to make way for the railroad.)
It is also situated at the center of a bustling transportation corridor—a dramatic continental crossroads through which the Natives and migrants who built The Mighty City on the Mississippi once traveled. From the lofty vantage of a prose-engraved fence, visitors today can experience the combined chorus of almost every form of modern transportation: jets roar toward runways on the flood plain; diesel barges groan and churn in the roiling waters of The Great River; thunderous freight and Amtrak locomotives lumber along the bottoms toward Chicago and Minneapolis; semi-trucks and automobiles scream across the ribbon of I-94 between the grand white bluffs of Chief Kangi Ci-stin-na’s Kaposia village and the Dakota/Hopewell Mounds. The resulting din is a harmonious wash that inspires a sense of otherworldliness similar to what one might feel at a Japanese garden.
Strolling along the snaking granite paths and archways of Garten’s creation, the interplay of sculpture and verse dictate the pace of movement in ways no ordinary stanza break could achieve. To read Roberta Hill-Whiteman, one spirals on a stonework trail, stopping four times at carved marble chunks, alternately facing the sweeping river valley—where the poet’s Dakota ancestors once prospered—and the forbidding downtown skyline:

In my voice the wind holds
onto visions.
Sorrow grips my heart:
twelve cents an acre,
Kangi Ci-stin-na’s tears.
The old ones speak
in thunder,
in the roots of the Great Wood

This river remembers its
ancient name,
Ha-ha wa-kpa.
Where young and old
danced in harmony
before trade became more valuable
than lives.

Actors on The Young and the Restless wore them while embracing Bianca, Bailey, or Bambi, and then convincing the ladies to sneak off and make love in the janitor’s closet. Older cousins wore them to weddings, with girlfriends attached to their arms like weights at the gym. As a scrawny, suburban Ohioan pre-teen who couldn’t throw a football, I was convinced that a suit was a passport to that mythic island of manhood.
As seniors in high school, my male classmates were buying their first suits for senior pictures. Sitting behind Kevin at my desk in calculus, envying how his neck sloped like an Italian vista into wide, sweeping shoulders (I mean, I liked his jacket), I became convinced that wearing a suit would change everything. I would barely notice that my sideburns wouldn’t grow like lush grass the way Eric’s and Jason’s did. If I were in a suit, I’d no longer be bothered by the way my classmates’ pecs pushed through their shirts, whereas mine wouldn’t push through my skin. In a suit, a wind would pick up, fill my sails, and blow me away to the island of manhood, where Eric and Jason wrestled Kevin, and the three competed to see whose pee could put out the campfire. In a suit, I would cheer them on.
As my mom drove me to Kaufmann’s department store to try on suits, my passport to Manhood, I envisioned stepping out of the boat, pulling it safely to shore, and lugging it onto the sand. But when we got there, the salesman, not much older than myself, took one look at me and chortled, “A suit? You’re going to have to start lifting weights, dude, if you want to fit into one of those.”
Three years later, I was twenty years old, a junior in college studying abroad in Hamburg, Germany. Walking through Die Esplanade, a popular shopping district, I spotted a cluster of suit jackets hanging in the middle of H&M like forbidden fruit. It was better, I thought, just to stay away. Somehow I convinced myself that if I stopped to admire the suits, other shoppers would point and laugh at me, the pint-sized American dwarfed by my L.L. Bean backpack, as if I were a monkey, a silly creature about to do something preposterous. So, passing the rack, I pretended not to notice the jackets—just like I did with those half-naked men on the Hanes underwear packets at the Kaufmann’s back home.
But I was in a new country, gosh darn it. No one wore deodorant. Shampoo smelled weird. Cars were smaller than American closets. I looked the jackets over. They hung heavy there, like ripe berries.
Just then, a wind picked up; my sails began to billow. I drifted toward the jackets. They came in various shades of gray and sported four buttons up the front, creating a long, lean look. I lifted a dark one off the rack and double-checked that it was the smallest available size. I pulled it off the hanger. I slid one arm through a sleeve. Then the other. The jacket rolled down my back, carpet smoothing against a floor. Would the carpet warp—too big for the room? I panicked and looked around the store, convinced I had heard monkey noises. But after shifting my sleeve this way and my collar that, the carpet fell into place.
I darted for the mirror. Who was that guy standing in front of me? I hesitated. Had I landed? Had my boat finally struck solid ground? I jumped out, my feet sloshing in the water along the shore. I turned in the mirror, studied my profile, lifted sand from the beach. I looked handsome. And I hadn’t even worked out. Standing in Hamburg’s H&M, with the suit’s price tag scratching my neck, I felt, for the first time in my life, that I actually might be a man.
The jacket still hangs in my closet to this very day, along with all of the boxes of letters and postcards that mark my year abroad. But I rarely, if ever, take these things out. When I’m at the Mall of America, however, I can’t help but cast an admiring glance over at H&M, as if it were a three-dimensional postcard waiting to be read anew. Although the store’s style no longer jibes with mine, I still quietly pay my respects to the place that offered me that very first suit in my size. —

I live in Minneapolis, the fiftieth state in the union, known far and wide as the “Moon Crater State” and “Green Grocer to the World.” There are more than one thousand lakes in Minneapolis, and herds of bearded reindeer in the North Country.
I’m sorry—Minnesota is the fiftieth state in the union, etc. Minneapolis is the capital of Minnesota. It is also the city of big shoulders and brotherly something-or-other. Some say it is a toddling town—the toddling town, allegedly, the most toddling of all the toddling contenders. It is the windy city. It never sleeps, and is also famous for being the cradle of jazz and the home of the seldom-visited Pro Football Hall of Fame.
The city was discovered by Hernando DeSoto in the nineteenth century when he was discovering things in the New World, and the name means “Place of Many Rats” in some other language. Great battles have been fought here; our schoolchildren learn early on of a time when “the streets ran with rivers of blood.”
There is a giant statue of Edmund Muskie alongside his blue ox outside City Hall. History has happened here, in other words. We used to have a Living History museum, in fact, until it fell over. Today the city is a desolate place, constantly under siege and still wracked by the cholera epidemic. There remain, though, plenty of tanning spas, video stores, and places to get a burrito. There are not, however, any famous people here other than a swimsuit model who works in a shopping center.
Once upon a time, famous people did occasionally visit Minneapolis to marvel at its many attractions and eat in its legendary Shakey’s Pizza Parlors, where old men with handlebar mustaches and candy-striped plastic aprons played the banjo. A woman by the name of Ann Landers was one such person, and she was once presented with the key to the city. I now have that key in my possession, having traded a wheelbarrow for it back when there was so much rubble and wheelbarrows were in great demand.
I am currently living in a yurt near the airport with my wife and seven children. I lost my job servicing vending machines when the airport fell to the marauders.
To say anything more at this point, I’m afraid, wouldn’t be prudent.
We like it here, though. We’re proud of our city.

Once upon a time, say fifteen years ago, portraits of chief executive officers had much in common with oil paintings of George Washington or Robert E. Lee. There was a man (they were pretty much all men), shot from a slightly low angle so as to amplify his stateliness and power, with his hand on a chair or maybe a globe. Sometimes he smiled, but not too broadly. After all, running a company was a grave matter.
These days, however, it’s not unusual to open a business magazine or an annual report and find a CEO reclining on a patch of grass with a football, or wading waist-deep in a lake. They are posed nuzzling cows or other barnyard animals or buried up to their necks in breakfast cereal. New to these photos are shiny open grins, expressions that seem to say: “You can trust me with a suitcase nuke—but I also might put a whoopee cushion on your chair.”
This more playful and quirky style of portraiture is partly a result of the overall loosening of corporate culture as baby boomers have moved into the top ranks. Perhaps having difficulty reconciling past protests against The Man with their current status as The Man, these business titans wear jeans to work and pal around with their underlings, sometimes with David Brent-like results. Self-effacement in a CEO is now a highly valued quality. Sara Jorde, a Minneapolis photographer who has been shooting CEOs for twenty years, has witnessed the shift to this new mindset. “One thing I’ve noticed is that CEOs are often eating in the lunchrooms with their employees,” she said. “Maybe not at the same tables, but in the same lunchrooms, as opposed to being out having their bourbon and steak. I’ve seen CEOs of really big companies in the break room with their Tupperware. They know everyone’s names. It’s the Nike generation moving into positions of power.”
Yet there also are more complex forces at work behind modern corporate photography, as anyone familiar with the work of Leni Riefenstahl, who managed to make Hitler appear statuesque, might suspect. Eric Guthey and Brad Jackson, professors at the Copenhagen Business School, are some of the rare academics studying CEO imagery. In a recent article titled, “CEO Portraits and the Authenticity Paradox,” they noted how, as companies become more diffuse, it becomes more difficult to portray them visually. “This poses a problem,” they wrote, “ … because visible presence has functioned as a traditionally accepted prerequisite for authenticity … This quest for corporate presence, visibility and authenticity helps explain the proliferation of photographs of top management figures, who often come to represent their organizations not just in a managerial sense, but also in an iconic one.” In other words, the CEO serves as the face of an otherwise faceless entity; at his best, he is a warm and likeable personality set out in front of a sprawling, impersonal, and, if you believe the most ardent critics, psychopathic corporation.
In that regard, CEOs have had a tough time of it lately, as companies like Enron and Halliburton have become synonymous with corruption. Back in the 1990s, during the tech boom, the American public was largely pro-corporate and looking to privatize everything from the postal service to public schools. Now, we watch the rise and fall of companies and their superstar CEOs—players like Ken Lay, Carly Fiorina, and Martha Stewart—almost as a spectator sport. It hasn’t helped public opinion that the average CEO’s salary is approximately four hundred times that of the average blue-collar worker. Not surprisingly, a 2002 CBS News poll found that only one in four Americans believes most corporate executives to be honest.
It’s easy to surmise, then, that as esteem for big business has declined, big business has become more determined to put on a friendly face. A lot goes into creating these dynamic images: What should the executive wear? Should she put on goggles and hold a welder? Which company products should appear in the background? “I think people want to portray more personality and let people see a little bit more of who they are,” said Jorde of her clients, “but still maintain a level of dignity and professionalism about their image. They want to be seen as confident but not cocky, and also approachable.” A corporate photographer in Britain put it more bluntly on his website: “Do you look slick, shifty, or vacant? Or a mix of all three? It’s time to move on … Your corporate portrait should say: Look at me—I’m OK.”
Guthey and Jackson argue that CEOs suffer from identity issues just as their corporations do, thanks to “downsizing, outsourcing, the stripping away of productive functions, and the governance of corporate activity through increasingly fluid networks.” Thus “authenticity” is a notion currently making its way through the corporate world, the same as “teambuilding” and “thinking outside the box” once did. It’s become a movement, a way to quantify the existential crises that are bound to occur among those at the helm of unwieldy enterprises. Gurus of the ideology describe authentic leadership as continuing to do “real work” with one’s life, “telling it like it is,” and “treating people, especially the disadvantaged, with love and dignity.” The concern that one may not be authentic seems like a distinctly modern problem, one that likely never occurred to Washington or Grant, or even Cyrus West Field, founder of the Atlantic Telegraph Company who was, in fact, photographed in 1858 looking stately and powerful with his hand on a globe.
One of Jorde’s most illustrative photos portrays three men, the top executives of local Tiro Industries (formerly Lamaur, manufacturers of such once-famous hair products as Apple Pectin shampoo and Style hairspray). The trio sits in old-fashioned salon chairs, black plastic ponchos over their white shirts, with globe hairdryers on their heads and goofy grins. To get such unusual shots, Jorde strives to make her clients feel comfortable, a decidedly simpler task these days. That may mean ditching a CEO’s personal assistant, or sharing an embarrassing life story. “If you can establish that connection, no matter how small it is, people trust you and let their guard down and they are willing to give you something.”
These more wacky CEO portraits further the perception of the executive as a creative type, as an unbridled optimist—and even as the guy or gal next door. Just as we’re encouraged to vote for the presidential candidate we’d like to have a beer with, it’s assumed that we may buy a computer or car based on our affinity for a particular CEO. Images of Steve Jobs often show the co-founder and head of Apple dressed in casual genius apparel: jeans and a T-shirt, usually black. Sometimes he’s sitting cross-legged on a floor, a pose no doubt appealing to Apple users, who consider themselves less corporate than PC loyalists. Jobs is the ultimate CEO superstar, sometimes called “Apple’s showman nonpareil” and a “master magician.” His image has served the company well. However, when he was questioned in January in relation to stock irregularities, analysts began to worry that Apple’s value could plummet, especially if Jobs should ever be shown in another, increasingly familiar CEO pose: head down and hands cuffed. Such is the risk that comes with building a corporate identity around one man, even one who “seems at times to defy gravity.”
Corporate heads are framed differently depending on the success or failure of their companies, according to Minneapolis photographer Doug Knutson, who has been shooting executives for two decades. “Things are cyclical,” he said. “In a bad year, they want to look more serious, and more focused on their job.” In such images they’ll stare directly at the camera, the idea being that they are “looking the investor in the eye, facing up to the company’s circumstances, or the challenges of the industry. Other years they want to show how dynamic they are so they aren’t looking at the camera. Maybe they’re looking off or talking to someone.”
Whatever the message, Knutson added, the CEO wants to appear sincere. “That’s why some of these places hire me,” he said. “I’ve got a style of getting people warm and comfortable with the camera.” Knutson, who is a fan of Yousuf Karsh, the man who famously photographed Winston Churchill for the cover of Life magazine, was one of the last photographers to shoot Bill McGuire, the former head of UnitedHealth Group. “Shortly after I took that picture, he started getting more attention for his income, and he got camera shy.” In the photo, McGuire is standing next to a glass door, his image reflecting back at him. He’s wearing a traditional suit-and-tie uniform, and also a slight smile. The photo is shot from above, the opposite of the traditional power angle, but Knutson said there was no message in that. “The photo was not intended to be looking down on him; it was intended to make a fascinating composition, including the geometry of the floor,” he said. “When the pictures succeed best, they are aesthetic commerce. They may not be art, but they are fulfilling a communication purpose.”