Category: So Little Time

Fantastical, magical creations are very popular as of late—lots of dragons and magicians and cyber-wonders fill pages and screens—and the art world is stepping into that terrain as well. Does it mean dreams will become reality, or does it mean dreams will keep reality at bay? That’s for the viewer to decide. But these artists’ confected worlds will be interesting to contemplate regardless. Curated by Minneapolis sculptor Andréa Stanislav, Enchanted is colored by her surreal tastes: Local fabulists Chris Larson, Alexa Horochowski, and Erik Ullanderson will show alongside Hawaiian Scott Yoell and Londoner Isha Bohling, among many others. Tune out the evening news; when reality sucks, these artists create new ones.

Katherine Nash Gallery, 405 21st Ave. S., Minneapolis; 612-624-6518.

Taken up by fans, feminists, malcontents, ideologists, and ax-grinders, Frida Kahlo has become much more than an artist over the last couple of decades. Yet somehow she is also often presented as less than an artist. In conjunction with Walker Art Center’s Kahlo exhibition, Grupo Soap, an alliance of artists who share a Hispanic heritage as well as robust senses of occasion and humor, will give its take on the Frida phenomenon. Last year the group produced four-by-eight-foot woodcuts printed by steamroller for a Día de los Muertos show. A poster for a 2001 show featuring the artists as luchadores (Mexican wrestlers) still hangs on walls all over town (the show was good, too). So expect their efforts to restore Kahlo as a complex artist and Mexican citizen as well as an iconic sufferer—Our Lady of a Thousand Coffee Mugs—to be both serious and facetious.

Grupo Soap del Corazón and Art Jones Gallery, Casket Arts Building, 681 17th Ave. N.E., Minneapolis.

This major exhibition of Native artists includes Rick Bartow’s paintings, Preston Singletary’s glass sculpture, and Sonny Assu’s weaving, among work from more than a hundred others. The curators of this traveling show, Ellen Napiura Taubman, former head of the Department of Native American Art at Sotheby’s, and David Revere McFadden of New York’s Museum of Arts and Design, where the show originated, focus on presenting the work as part of the larger art world rather than as ethnological artifacts. For a long time, people referred to Indian art if they wanted to know more about, say, Indian spirituality. This show insists that Native art, like all other art, captures the world through the eyes of individuals who have unique experiences and identities—but are not necessarily defined by them.

Weisman Art Museum, 333 East River Rd., Minneapolis; 612-625-9494.

Eagerly anticipated by sculptors across the state, this overview of the medium promises to be quirky and eye-opening. Jennifer Jankauskas, associate curator at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, chose just twenty-seven sculptors from 147 submissions. Some, such as Pete Driessen and Ruben Nusz, are better known as painters than sculptors; others, like David Swanson and Anastasia Ward, predicate alternate realities that are by turns amusing and disturbing. Some are well known in the Cities; some are completely new. Expect some surprises; sculpture has been spreading out to embrace new territories. Perhaps it is the medium best able to absorb the constant shifts in contemporary culture.

Minnesota Museum of American Art, 50 Kellogg Blvd. W., St. Paul; 651-266-1030.

Despite limited hours, Art of This is becoming an important place to visit; these two very different installations show the range of the gallery. Jade Townsendis an Iowan who passed through Minneapolis at one point and now worksin New York, where his crisp and often funny-though-harrowing buildinginstallations have gotten good reviews. Razor wire, all-whiteinteriors, holes in the wall, some contradictory emotional play betweenhumor and horror: familiar stuff but interesting in person. Kristina Estell,by contrast, produces emotionally distant but evocative and sensualinstallations based on the overwhelming presence of water and rock inher current home, Duluth.

Art of This, 3506 Nicollet Ave., Minneapolis, 612-721-4105.

Colleen Sheehy, curator at the Weisman, put together a nature-themedshow with this Bob Dylan epigraph: “The sky cracked its poems in nakedwonder.” She chose Mark Dion’s candid deer portraits, Eleanor McGough’spaintings of natural subjects subsumed into lushly decorative patterns,and Christine Baeumler’s paintings from her recent trip to theGalapagos and the Great Barrier Reef. Sheehy chose “curator artists”:Dion has always been interested in what museums do to their subjects,the animals or art that end up in them; McGough seizes flowers,branches, cells, and proliferates their patterns, creating a decorativecontext that acts much like a museum in deracinating the subjects.Baeumler seems better able to stand back—in the past, her paintingsoften contained such patterns and grids, but these new ones seem tofind rather than seek.

Gallery Co., 400 First Ave. N., Suite 210, Minneapolis; 612-332-5252.

On the centenary of Frida Kahlo’s birth, a comprehensiveretrospective can go a long way to rescue this tough, rich artist from her ArtHeroine Poster Grrrl status. She deserves more. Kahlo was full ofcontradictions and had moments of heroism and weakness; she had blindness,insight, and a gift for telling a story with pictures. She also hadtalent-maybe not quite enough for her desire, but that’s true of manydeservedly beloved artists: Edward Hopper and Paul Cézanne, for instance, weregiven deeper insight into the nature of the world by their own clumsiness atlevering it into paint. Kahlo shares this divine thumbiness; it helps hercreate the new and make it accessible to her fellow mortals.

Walker Art Center, 612-375-7600.

Of the two folk-pop female vocalists who broke through to massiveappeal beginning in the late ’60s, Joni Mitchell was the hippieartiste, Judy Collins the classically trained songbird. Now, atsixty-eight, Collins has taken care of her clarion soprano, deliveringup lush, conservative material ranging from children’s and Christmasfare to interpretations of Dylan and, most recently, Lennon andMcCartney. Don’t be surprised if these supper club concerts mix goldenoldies (“Someday Soon,” “Both Sides Now,” “Suzanne,” “Send in theClowns”) with more overtly political songs, plus a poignant dollop ofpersonal revelation. Collins’s own “My Father” is a career highlight,and her book about her son’s suicide, Sanity and Grace, is an honestand elegant chronicle of a harrowing episode in her life.

Rossi’s Blue Star, 80 S. Ninth St., Minneapolis; 612-312-2828.