Having won the Pulitzer Prize by focusing on the miniscule in his phenomenal book The Ants, Wilson turns to the macro with The Creation. Long interested in the intersection of humans and nature, Wilson made a name for himself in 1975 with Sociobiology, a foundational text on evolutionary psychology that got him branded by some … Read more
Who better to host a holiday show than a man who looks like Santa? The bearded and barrel-chested Bill Holm explores holiday phenomena with MPR’s Heather McElhatton and a collection of other guests, including musician Charlie Parr and writer R. D. Zimmerman. From the small town of Minneota, Minnesota, Holm is all homegrown wholesomeness, except … Read more
“I see nothing in space as promising as the view from a ferris wheel,” the incomparable E. B. White once wrote. This was the man who gave us the little girl named Fern, Wilbur the pig, Templeton the rat, and Charlotte, a spider who happens to be one of the most wondrous creations in all … Read more
You’d think the power of Dickens’ holiday workhorse would have been diluted by the ceaseless adaptations, knock-offs, and rip-offs it has inspired over the 163 years since it was published. Yet the irony of the Christmas Carol cottage industry is that despite so many crass, overblown, exploitative (or just plain lazy) versions that risk sabotaging … Read more
Globalsecurity.org lists forty conflicts—uprisings and insurgencies, civil wars, and occupations—currently playing out around the world. Lori Grinker has spent the past fifteen years portraying their human costs, traveling among some thirty countries to document both the physical carnage and the psychological damage. The result is a kind of perverse twist on the legendary Family of … Read more
Two-person shows are too often arbitrarily conceived, but Huie’s photographs and Bielak’s monotypes play well off each other. In his newest series, Huie remains in familiar geographic territory (the streets of South Minneapolis) but homes in on the titular theme with images that are full of nuance. A homeless woman in one image is positioned … Read more
Which is hotter—fashion or architecture? It’s probably a toss-up. Celebrities jam the front rows as designers reveal their new collections; cities clamor to enlist globe-trotting starchitects to devise their spectacular new landmarks. (For that matter, so do fashion labels, Prada’s commissions for Rem Koolhaas being but one example.) Organized by British curator Bradley Quinn and … Read more
If the Highpoint Center for Printmaking is one of best-kept secrets in the Twin Cities art world, then its predecessor, Vermillion Editions, is—or was, until this exhibition—all but lost in the mists of time. Printer Steven M. Andersen set up shop in the Minneapolis warehouse district in 1977, and over the following fifteen years, Vermillion … Read more
Alternative jazz trio Medeski Martin and Wood improvises with such stamina, endurance, and brilliance that adding a fourth member to the band might seem to put at risk the geniality that marks its live shows. But guitarist John Scofield—who worked with Miles Davis in the eighties and whose work MMW interpreted on A Go Go, … Read more
Just eight months after selling out the Varsity, the electro-pop ingénue returns—her sights on First Avenue’s big room this time. The quirky Brit can largely credit her increased draw to the soundtracks she has abetted—notably, solo for The O.C. and for Garden State as Frou Frou (her collaboration with Madonna producer Guy Sigsworth). On her … Read more