Category: Article

With its proximity to Macalester College, this new Mediterranean grill seems poised to fulfill student cravings for falafel, gyros, and kebabs. Shish’s hummus ranks as some of the best in the city, and for under seven dollars, you can get this lemony spread with a generous portion of gyros—a nice deal for wallet-watchers. The Shish burger, served on a pita with hummus, grilled tomato, and spinach, is a successful blend of cultures. The namesake kebabs may be spendy, but the bright spices make them well worth it. Just save enough money for a few post-prandial tokes on the hookah pipe. 1668 Grand Ave., St. Paul; 651-690-2212

Virtually unknown here, Morrisseau is revered in his native Canada. The influential Woodland style of painting he developed stemmed from an isolated childhood in northern Ontario, where he was inspired by petroglyphs and drawings on birchbark scrolls, but also cautioned by his elders against indulging his own visions. He eventually gave in to his artistic calling no less, meeting with instant success in southern Canada in the 60s as well as criticism and controversy from his own Ojibwe people, who believed he was selling out their legends and beliefs. But younger Native artists in northern Canada found his work inspiring, and as one writer has pointed out, better they follow one of their own tribe than go to art school in Santa Fe. This is Morrisseau’s first major gallery exhibit in the U.S.; next fall, the National Gallery of Canada’s retrospective of his work will open at the National Museum of the American Indian in New York. 2123 W. 21st Street, Minneapolis, 612-377-4669; www.bockleygallery.com”

Norsten is one of those Minneapolis painters whose many, quiet years spent with his nose to the grindstone are paying off with higher-profile recognition of late: a slot in the Whitney Biennial earlier this year and a new affiliation with a New York gallery. Some (okay, it’s those dealers in New York) associate Norsten and his cranky, caustic, and often quite funny paintings with the likes of Robert Ryman, Blinky Palermo, Richard Tuttle, and Philip Guston. We’d venture a certain affinity with Raymond Pettibon, if only because both artists have their own strange obsession with, and take on, phenomena that are distinctly American. 527 2nd Ave S.E., Minneapolis, 612-605-4504; www.midwaycontemporaryart.org”

Is there a seasonal approach to art, as there is to eating? If summer puts one in the mood for sprightly, challenging, out-there work from contemporary kids, does that make fall and winter best for cozying up to rich, impressive oils from long-dead Europeans? If so, then this traveling show hits our town at the perfect time. It’s no stingy repast, either, but rather a feast of sixty-one paintings by names that always make it into the color-plates section of any art history textbook: Caravaggio, Tiepolo, Zurbarán, Goya, van Dyck, Frans Hals, van Ruisdael, Lorrain, Boucher, and Gainsborough, among others. Perhaps you thought you’d reaped enough benefits from the new wings at our local museums, but you can thank the Wadsworth Atheneum, currently undergoing its own expansion, for the chance to see these masterpieces. 612-870-3200; www.artsmia.org”

Put those thoughts about “wearable art ”—the tie-dyed caftans and bat-winged tunics made from elaborately loomed, jewel-colored fabrics—right out of your head. With artists like Joseph Beuys, Yoko Ono, Yinka Shonibare, and The Art Guys, this exhibit is more like a bizarre, intellectualized version of Project Runway. Spanning five decades, its thirty-nine garments and other sundries deal with the social and cultural messages transmitted by clothing (e.g., Beuys’ iconic felt suit), as well as those we convey with our own choices (Patrick Killoran’s modified T-shirt and sweatpants). The 2004 reissue, in camouflage fabric, of Mimi Smith’s 1966 maternity dress, with its strategically placed, see-through plastic dome, is all too apt on many levels. We’d love to hear Heidi Klum improvise a response to that. 333 East River Rd., Minneapolis; 612-625-9494; www.weisman.umn.edu”

After a fascinating show contrasting “official” and “dissident” works of art made in the former USSR, the Museum of Russian Art gets back to its strength: Russian realism that celebrates industry, agriculture, and the people of the motherland. What’s on view here shows a diversity of scenes and styles that many will find surprising. In some works, villagers are rendered in vivid colors and invisible brushstrokes, while in others, erratic and heavy streaks of paint almost completely obscure actual objects like, say, a furnace. And besides all the requisite woodsmen and robust milkmaids and strapping factory workers, there’s an image of a grim author and another of a tree bursting with flowers. As always, the museum has adeptly installed this show, displaying the works in association and counterpoint and leading visitors not just along the walls but across the room and to other floors. 5500 Stevens Ave. S., Minneapolis, 612-821-9045; www.tmora.org”

More and more, it’s looking like film buffs have to gaze across both oceans for their B-movie fix. A product of France and Georgia (not the Peach State, mind you), 13 (Tzameti) has already been gathering raves for its steely intensity and bold filmmaking. Gela Babluani’s film is the story of Sebastien, a down-on-his luck Georgian day laborer recently relocated to France. Working for a morphine addict who kicks off one afternoon, Sebastien steals the dead man’s train ticket, which he believes will lead him to a job for some real money. Instead, he finds himself a pawn in a high-stakes game of group Russian roulette with no way out. Filmed in sharp black and white, 13 (Tzameti) looks fraught with tension and will undoubtedly outpace the work of its big-budget American counterparts.

Trend alert at the Walker: Kaves R kool! Last summer, young gun Cameron Jamie set up one as part of his survey at the museum; now there’s Cavemanman, from Jamie’s illustrious elder, Thomas Hirschhorn. It’s a retreat of sorts, albeit a chaotic one, papered with pages from all sorts of philosophical treatises and lots of foil (an allusion, perhaps, to those who use the stuff to obscure the windows of their homes). As part of Heart of Darkness, Hirschhorn ’s cave is one of three installations that evoke, rather gloomily, either alternate realities, oddball utopias, or poetically individual spaces—take your pick. Ellen Gallagher and Edgar Cleijne imagine, via a film installation, magical lands peopled by dead Africans who never made it to America to become slaves; and Kai Althoff, an art-world darling who’s got some heavy German charisma going for him, constructs an elegiac “labyrinth” (call it a cousin to the cave) of loneliness. 612-375-7600; www.walkerart.org”

In the captivating Infamous, Toby Jones appears to have summoned forth the long-dead spirit of Truman Capote. He deftly portrays that storytelling dervish, delighting his high-society friends in New York and widening the peepers of the squares in Kansas with equal aplomb … and beating Alvin Dewey, the lead investigator of the Clutter killings, in arm-wrestling (he beat Bogart, too). But in his pursuit of the story that would shape his masterpiece In Cold Blood, Truman will, as we know, fall far from that place he attained in the literary firmament, and the result is devastating. Philip Seymour Hoffman and the makers of Capote should thank their lucky stars that their film was released first, since Jones’ performance, and this film itself, spins wicked little cartwheels around that lugubrious production. Simply put, Infamous is an amazement, and not to be missed.

In basing his new film on the Hong Kong thriller Infernal Affairs, Martin Scorsese brings a crew of tough-guy actors back to his own mean streets in New York. Perhaps he’s hoping for another round of Goodfellas-style success, but as his former stalwarts—from Keitel to Pesci—are apparently too old for this stuff, Marty’s left to work with the guy who nearly sank his Gangs of New York and couldn’t get The Aviator off the ground. So The Departed sees Leonardo DiCaprio as a member of an elite, undercover police squad bent on bringing down a mob-boss played by Jack Nicholson. Meanwhile, there’s a rat in the group, a seemingly squeaky-clean cop (Matt Damon) who is also on the mob’s payroll. Looks like we’ll have to settle for Nicholson’s Mephistophelian bad guy to give this one some edge.