The Rake Magazine

Tag: art

  • Fashionable Ideals

    On the surface, Armi Ratia and Lilly Pulitzer have a lot in common.
    Both women got their start in the 1950s and became famous for producing
    fabrics printed with bright colors and bold graphics. Both had a
    spirited, playful appeal—Pulitzer had her kitschy duck and turtle
    patterns, and Ratia named her company Marimekko, which translates from
    the Finnish as “little Mary dress.” And Jackie Kennedy brought a jolt
    of publicity to both labels when she turned up in magazine features
    wearing their dresses.

    But in deeper ways, Ratia was the thinking woman’s Pulitzer. The latter
    was an eccentric New York socialite who got into the apparel business
    in the late fifties, after friends became smitten with the uniforms she
    made for workers at her juice shop in Palm Beach. Ratia, however, was
    ambitious from the start, a charismatic art director whose business
    sense was as sharp as her eye for talent. In 1951, when Finland was
    still emerging from the shadow of World War II, she was looking to make
    her mark in the male-dominated design world—and did so in large part by
    banking on inexperienced women fresh out of design school. She was also
    looking back to modernist “gesamkunstwerk” ideals like Germany’s
    Bauhaus movement, where designers of all kinds came together to apply
    their individual talents to a larger, progressive, even utopian vision.
    (Nevertheless, as with so many designer objects touted for their
    accessibility, Marimekko was and is relatively exclusive—Old Navy it
    ain’t.) 

    These days, with companies like Target bringing “good design” to the
    masses, it’s difficult to imagine how radical Marimekko was at its
    inception. During a time when staid florals dominated Finnish textiles,
    Maija Isola, one of the company’s first and most famous designers,
    began turning out idiosyncratic figurative patterns and large-scale
    abstractions of stones, birds, and leaves. Like her compatriot, the
    architect Alvaar Aalto, she borrowed from Finnish folkloric traditions
    while simultaneously blazing modernist trails. Then there was the cut
    of Marimekko clothing. Even as Christian Dior’s wasp-waisted postwar
    “New Look” was spreading internationally, Marimekko became possibly the
    first label to put forth an “anti-fashion” message with the designs of
    Vuokko Nurmesniemi. Aiming to create clothing to accentuate the
    wearer’s personality rather than her figure, Nurmesniemi’s voluminous
    shapes and simple lines were also well suited to Marimekko’s
    large-scale patterns.

    Marimekko: Fabrics, Fashion, Architecture, which is on view at the
    Rochester Art Center (through August 20, 507-282-8629), traces the
    evolution of Marimekko through the sixties, seventies, and on up to its
    present-day revival. Interestingly, among all the suspended fabric
    swaths and lovely, covetable dresses, it’s the video montage of
    publicity and industrial footage that speaks most clearly about
    Marimekko’s fresh, fun, and decidedly quirky sensibility. One
    especially piquant segment shows a gaggle of rosy-cheeked,
    Marimekko-clad youths cavorting on a rocky Finnish seashore. They
    gather in a circle and, laughing all the while, pass around a massive
    goblet of orange juice as a toast to clean living and tasteful
    clothing.—Julie Caniglia

  • Nature Lover

    Minnesota boasts no defining fine artist, no painter of universal renown. Alexis Fournier, Seth Eastman, Nicholas Brewer, Wanda Gag, Dewey Albinson, George Morrison—any of these names may ring a distant bell. But Minnesotans have no Albert Bierstadt or Winslow Homer, no Grant Wood, Georgia O’Keefe or Frederic Remington to lionize. The central Minnesota town of Aitkin, however, has made a bid to raise the profile of its most famous son, Francis Lee Jaques. In 1996, twenty-seven years after his death, it opened the Jaques Art Center; recently a new gallery was inaugurated with a major display of his work, including much of the collection from the University of Minnesota’s Bell Museum of Natural History. (Francis Lee Jaques: Master Artist of the North Country is on view through June.)

    As a wildlife artist, Francis Lee Jaques (pronounced “jay-queez”) wrung the last of the nineteenth century from the genre. A realist with a keen eye for avian, arboreal, and topographical form, he traveled all over the world, but his best work was inspired by the cliffs, moraines, and prairies of Minnesota and the creatures that inhabited them. In addition to the canvases that brought him national notoriety, Jaques was for decades one of the preeminent book illustrators in the world. And his ability to bend perspective into the curved walls of museum dioramas—the grand institutional illusions of their time—has never been surpassed.

    Though Jaques is still celebrated in the highest halls of ornithology and natural history, it’s possible that his broader renown has waned because of the genre in which he worked. Wildlife art is the bachelor uncle of culture, and sometimes you suspect he has been spending a little too much time alone. Modernity eclipsed the need for those skilled at vivid natural depiction; such talent seems quaint in a digital world. But few artists have ever rivaled Jaques and his level-headed mastery of the real, which was steeped in the boggy heart of Minnesota.

    Aitkin’s roots reach to the late nineteenth century, at the confluence of the Mississippi and the Mud River. This far upstream, the Mississippi shows little promise of its vastness below the Twin Cities. Old Man River is but a confused, pimply teen. Still, there was enough water at Aitkin to foster a bustling mill town and riverboat trade, ingesting the wealth of the pinelands upstream. That vitality drew Ephraim and Emma Jane Jaques and their four children in 1904, after failed endeavors in Illinois and Kansas.

    The Jaques family was a twentieth-century anachronism, traveling by wagon across a dozen westward-bound railroads. Their son Lee, an observant teenager, walked the entire distance with his father, following the oxcart over every prairie hill and marsh. If ever a journey ran perpendicular to progress, this would be the one. But the family trajectory predicted Lee’s temperament: never going against the grain, but never quite flowing with it, either. He began his artistic career relatively late in life, in his mid-thirties, and so his ability to capture the grace of a bird’s flight or the sway of a tree in the wind was rooted in experience. His childhood was full of the hard work of homesteading: squaring tree trunks, splitting cordwood, hunting fowl for the family table, bringing in hay; he cultivated his talent early in life via calloused hands handling feathers, bones, bark, and tools.

    The Jaques family carved a meager farmstead, which they called Seven Oaks, out of low country acreage seven miles north of Aitkin. The meandering Mississippi leaves oxbows (small curly ponds of abandoned riverbed that the locals call “logans”) on either side of its path through Aitkin County. Situated between one of these oxbows and the river itself, Seven Oaks beckoned ducks, coots, mergansers, and myriad other bird species. Jaques found time to ponder and sketch, and some of his early drawings were published in Field and Stream with stories written by his father.

    In his early twenties, Jaques took over the local taxidermy business from his employer in exchange for back wages. Years elapsed, but he eventually chafed at the bit of small-town isolation. One day, watching an idling locomotive pointed toward Duluth, he decided to leave town and find his place in the world. He found work on the Duluth and Iron Range Railroad, feeding ravenous coal-fired locomotives with a rapid shovel. When work permitted, he made time, at the end of the tracks beyond Ely, to dip a canoe in the boundary lakes. He produced portage maps of the region for the like-minded—those who would rather bring themselves to a lake than have it brought to them.

    Then World War I intervened. Jaques was drafted and sent to train at the Presidio in San Francisco. There he first beheld the wonders of a natural history museum, and his life’s ambition crystallized. His company eventually made it to France, but the war exhausted itself before Jaques saw action. He returned to Duluth, worked as an electrician, and served as a delegate for Eugene Debs during the election when the socialist labor activist ran for president from prison. All the while he cultivated the skills that could free him from drudgery. He worked in commercial art and created several covers for a Duluth magazine called The Zenith. Jaques also drew heavily upon the knowledge of a mentor, a transplanted artist from the East Coast named Clarence Rosenkranz, who taught him how to paint with oils. The war experience had broadened his horizons, and he sought a life suited to his skills.

    In 1924, Jaques sent several paintings to Dr. Frank Chapman, the curator of birds at the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) in New York City. The museum, a vast compound overlooking Central Park in Manhattan, was and remains a colossal trove of taxonomy and a globally renowned institution. Jaques, the modest bachelor from Northern Minnesota, was hired into this elite community without an interview, for Chapman recognized in his work an eye for avian form. Specifically, Jaques properly portrayed the reverse coverts of an American black duck, a detail of plumage gathered only from patient observation, and Chapman took a chance based on this undeniable display of skill. Several years later, he would refer to Jaques as an heir to the mantle of John James Audubon and Louis Agassiz Fuertes, the demigods of American ornithological painting.

    “The museum employed an amazing team of artists and scientists at that time,” says Steve Quinn, who currently manages the art staff at the AMNH. “Yet Chapman detected an aesthetic and scientific skill in that Jaques painting. He also searched for artists capable of rendering a sense of place. Jaques always dealt with environment, and had an uncanny ability to portray birds in flight.”

    Jaques had achieved an incredible, improbable leap to the big leagues. As his train approached New York, it passed boxcar after boxcar of fresh produce on the sidings. “Must be quite a city that could eat a trainload of watermelons,” he noted in a journal entry. Jaques thrived in the disciplined, scholarly environment of the AMNH. The museum nurtured his artistic talents, and he rewarded it by becoming proficient in the creation of diorama backgrounds, the curved canvases that, together with stuffed fauna and lacquer-immortalized flora, create the illusion of a natural environment. Offering deceptively true depictions of faraway landscapes, dioramas were the IMAX and Discovery Channel of their time.

    “The Jaques dioramas stand the test of time,” says Quinn, who is writing a book on dioramas and recently supervised the AMNH’s restoration of a Jaques diorama depicting a Bahamas coral reef. A Bering Sea diorama, which portrays a shelf of beach on Little Diomede Island, is one of the best of the Jaques works in New York, according to Quinn, and is still a relevant and popular exhibit seventy years after its creation.

    Even though Jaques was now living in New York, he still painted from life. The AMNH often dispatched its artists to the sites that they would eventually depict for the museum. Jaques visited the Alaskan coast in 1928 aboard the vessel Morrissey, and spent time in Panama and the Bahamas sketching scenes that would end up on museum walls in New York. In 1934, he accompanied an expedition aboard the yacht Zaca through the South Pacific. They visited Pitcairn Island, and in his spare time Jaques, ever the tireless sketcher, drew a map of the island that was more faithful than any previously published. The Zaca also spent weeks at the Galapagos, the naturalist’s mecca. Jaques was granted several days ashore, sketching iguanas, penguins, tortoises, and the sere island landscape. This was the last stop on a long voyage, and he was eager to leave the Zaca and the strictures imposed by the expedition leader. But he was even more impatient to return to New York and rendezvous with the former Florence Page, the woman who had completed his transformation from northwoods bachelor to career artist.

    Lee and Florence had married in 1927, when both approached forty. She had returned to New York from Illinois to study poetry at Columbia University, and Lee had rented the apartment she had occupied in a duplex overlooking the Hudson during a previous sojourn. The landlords found other accommodations for Florence, but fostered a courtship between them. Marriage suited Lee: “This was the great turning point for me; life from here on was infinitely better,” he wrote in his memoirs. Not in the least because he and Florence launched a fertile and entertaining literary collaboration, in which Florence would recount their travels to remote North American destinations, with Lee’s drawings featured on every third or fourth page.

    One of the seven books the couple produced, Canoe Country, recounts their honeymoon, a three-week late-summer trip in the Boundary Waters out of Fall Lake to the cliffs of Lac La Croix and beyond to the Quetico. Lee had a deep fondness for the region, but on the eve of the trip, Florence became skeptical that she had the mettle for wilderness travel. “I’ve never been so cold in my life,” she wrote in Canoe Country. “I wear my fur coat all the time. If this is what Duluth is like in August what must it be in January? ‘Of course,’ people tell me cheerily, ‘you’ll be much colder camping out.’” But she turned out to be game, when not positively giddy, with the love of her life in the stern of the canoe. Lee, capable and patient, showed her the watery country he knew so well from canoe trips during his bachelor years. And if push came to shove with an early cold front, he could have resurrected his taxidermy skills and clothed her in endemic peltry.

    The early portages of that trip must have been brutal, as Lee and Florence packed a larder that included more than twelve pounds of meat. This was not a bannock-and-beans expedition: ten pounds of flour, five of brown sugar, and three cans of Crisco rounded out the major supplies. But their weather was the best of that season, the mosquito-free ides of September. “We climbed into the branches of a pine which hung far out over the water, and dangled our feet and read Millay to our hearts’ content. Then we swam in the ebony pool—so different from our usual sunny beaches—and tried picking water lilies under water.”

    One of Lee’s favorite spots was the pictographs beneath the granite cliffs on Crooked Lake, depicted in one of his few historical works and probably his most famous, Picture Rock at Crooked Lake, also known as Return of the Voyagers. Jaques’s scene painting is at its best; the non-animal elements are transcendent. The border-country bedrock looms geometrically at the picture’s center, and white pine—the species he must have loved best for their sinuous beauty in his rendering—crest the hillside above a mossy swale. Everything is awash in the blue of the sky and still water. A typical Jaques thunderhead towers to the south, a billowing echo of his pines, and a host of voyageurs pass below. Swarthy paddlers labor in each canoe, with one exception. Sitting rigid and luminous—and also paddle-less—is the company man, the bourgeois, wearing a red jacket, a flash of white plume jutting from his hat. Jaques was always the working man, from woodcutter to fireman to commercial etcher to museum artist, and it cannot be that he admires the idle captain of this endeavor.

    While it is true that Lee’s paintings are masterful, his scratchboard drawings are the key to understanding his genius. He did so much with the simple choice of black and white—the soft textures of a distant hill, the muscular movement of a moose—and one sees through his drawings that his mastery of form is what sustains the playful use of color in his paintings. In one scratchboard from Canoe Country, Jaques depicts the newlyweds in an open-water paddle, and Florence is idle, but in a much different manner than the bourgeois. She has her paddle at the ready as they roll down the lake with a heady wind at their backs before waves that could easily founder a canoe. Lee sits behind his wife, leaning into his J-stroke, keeping the canoe upright, and it looks like they are going the right way. Lee Jaques had himself a traveling companion.

    Roger Tory Peterson, the man whose name is synonymous with a field guide and whose drawings have undoubtedly verified millions of finch, wrote in Natural History magazine in 1983 that it was time for the art world to get over itself and accept that bird art was, indeed, art. While tradition had almost always required the inclusion of humans (or some detritus of human activity) for a work to be considered art, Peterson maintained that certain wildlife artists deserved a seat at the academy. He lauded Audubon and Fuertes as the Abraham and Moses of this march to the promised land. But he also singled out Jaques: “I can think of only one top-level bird artist of my acquaintance who was not influenced in the slightest by either Audubon or Fuertes—Francis Lee Jaques.”

    New York exposed Jaques to a wide world of artistic technique and proficiency. At the AMNH, he would bite his tongue while a crusty pedagogue measured the neck of a Jaques swan and pronounced it too short. The teacher, trapped in Audubon’s dimensions, failed to reconcile his textbook accuracy with the way in which Jaques’s birds did not simply move across your field of view—they came at you, or fled. He successfully crossed a threshold, converting the useful into something beautiful, like a scythe bent to the line of a haymower’s back.

    Aside from his collaborations with Florence, Lee’s most memorable illustrations feature in several collections of essays by Sigurd Olson, the legendary wilderness advocate. Olson and Jaques became friends, and the former trusted Lee’s ability to vitalize his ideas. In The Singing Wilderness, Olson emphasized a fundamental element of wild places—their potential for silence. Storms may noisily lash the pines, volleys of geese may trumpet upon the remotest bay, and sometimes the rush of distant rapids draws the ear. But wild places eventually fall back to a static aural imperceptibility. A difficult task for the artist, to depict silence. But Jaques was once praised by a friend for his ability to paint the wind, and Florence once exclaimed that a particular painting of her husband’s was the coldest she had ever seen. The drawing for Olson’s essay in which he recounts a last trip along the border from Lac la Croix to Saganaga (just before that lake was conceded forever to the two-stroke drone of Evinrude armadas) seems to radiate silence, with only the slow lake current for movement.

    In 1942, when Lee was fifty-five, he and Florence returned to Minnesota for good. They built a modest house between two ponds on James J. Hill’s subdivided farm, which eventually became the suburb of North Oaks. This would be the most productive period of his life. He drew and painted constantly, almost wearying from the talent that coursed through him; he was a river at flood, full of purpose, spilling over the banks. “I fondly recall an older couple who simply revered nature,” says John Fitzpatrick, recalling Lee and Florence. He grew up near them in North Oaks, and now directs the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, the country’s premiere institution of bird research and conservation. He freely credits Lee Jaques as a mentor; a 1968 painting by him hangs outside his office.

    Retired from the AMNH, Jaques painted the best of his dioramas under contract to the Bell Museum of Natural History at the University of Minnesota, creating nearly a dozen of the museum’s largest installations. The ornithological displays are stunning. In one, a platoon of sandhill cranes descends from the flyway, thick as dandelion seeds, and the ancient birds are remarkably individual for their sameness of plumage. Jaques always favored larger birds as subjects, once stating that “the difference between warblers and no warblers is very slight.” The sandhill crane diorama is a favorite place for docents to pause with a group of eight-year-olds and encourage their avian mimicry, for the cranes are just their size.

    For the Bell’s wolf diorama, Jaques created a brooding portrait of Shovel Point, at what is now Tettegouche State Park, as the North Shore backdrop. A tower of mist rises from the lake, as it will during January, and the icy waves roll up on a snow-rimmed cobble beach. It’s easy to linger on this display any time of the year, but it wears best on a steamy summer day.

    Officials at the Bell Museum recently announced plans to build a larger facility on the university’s St. Paul campus. As inert as the Jaques dioramas may seem to the casual visitor, they are vital to the Bell’s identity and will make the short journey east. According to Don Luce, the museum’s curator of exhibits and resident Jaques expert, entire walls will be moved to relocate these paintings.

    “Audubon had a great sense of design, and Fuertes was a master at making birds realistic,” Fitzpatrick says. “But Jaques was not simply a great bird painter. Because of his constant observation and sketching, he mastered the placement of his subjects into the landscape. This made him one of the great artists of the twentieth century.”

    Lee and Florence occasionally visited Aitkin during their Minnesota years. He would drop in at the local barbershop for a trim, and they would call on his elderly parents. His siblings, too, had remained in Aitkin for life, and raised a crop of salutatorians, according to Cherie Holm, a board member at the Jaques Art Center and an Aitkin native whose family’s farm was directly across the Mississippi from Seven Oaks. “Lee was always seen in Aitkin as loosely put together, sort of Ichabod Cranish,” Holm says. “When he returned later in life, he was never honored despite all of his success. We’d like to help correct that. The art center, if Lee were growing up here now, is where he would find his people.” Indeed, it’s not hard to imagine that he would have sought haven there, the lonely taxidermist who once couldn’t seem to find his way out of town.

    An influx of retirees to the upper Mississippi lake country over the past decade has created a demand for amenities, and Aitkin has cleverly sought to plant deep the Jaques legacy. The Friends of Jaques, a local group to which Holm and her husband belong, began to curate shows of his work in a local bank in the 1980s. When the group purchased the former Carnegie Library from the city for a dollar, it rescued a significant local building from oblivion; half of the libraries built by the Carnegie foundation in Minnesota have been demolished. Now restored as the Jaques Art Center, the building hosts various arts workshops, in addition to a rotating display of its namesake’s art.

    “There are plenty of Jaques paintings in private hands that we don’t know about,” says Holm, “and we would love an opportunity to share them with the world.” She recently learned of a home in the region that is filled with never-cataloged Jaques paintings.

    Lee died in 1969 at age eighty-one, a few months after a heart attack had slowed him down. Florence was devastated, yet endeavored to finish his biography. She had set out to edit his memoirs and ended up retelling his life story. Francis Lee Jaques: Artist of the Wilderness World gave him the due his diffident prose denied, and included dozens of color plates, excerpts from their other books, and passages from Lee’s journals. Lee had been concerned for years that it took too large a toll on her, but this project, in addition to securing the future home of so many of Lee’s works, was crucial to Florence.

    She told her confidantes that when the book was finished, she wanted her life to end. She died on New Year’s Eve in 1971. Her body was found in bed, clutching a red rose, according to Jaques biographer Patricia Condon Johnston. She had left several notes to her closest friends and relatives, stating that she could no longer endure without Lee.

    One of Lee’s most unique paintings—he may have thought it had only personal appeal, and Florence didn’t include in the biography—is an elegant 1940s portrayal of their global travels, both together and alone. His lines were blue, hers red, and purple traced their partnered journeys.

  • The Russian Renovation

    “It was like two philosophical trains running past each other on parallel tracks,” said Brad Shinkle, describing Russian and American art during the twentieth century. “Each had little or no awareness of the other—what it consisted of, or its rationale.” Shinkle is president and director of the Museum of Russian Art, the only institution in the U.S. dedicated to Russian art. For fifty-plus years during the Cold War, he pointed out, the Russians weren’t worried just about American nukes. They were also worried about a more insidious type of damage that could come from our “decadent” and “degenerate” art seeping into their country. At the same time, Russian art was virtually quarantined inside the Soviet Union; the few works Westerners did see were disdained as “propagandistic” or “intellectually corrupt.”

    Understandably, then, most Americans have trouble conjuring any image at all of twentieth-century Russian art beyond, say, Wassily Kandinsky, or the propaganda posters and Social Realist paintings from the Stalin years. But the collection at the Museum of Russian Art—which will go on view May 9 in a new home in South Minneapolis—is meant to change all that. Many of its works invoke quietude and simplicity with brush strokes inspired by Late Impressionism. There are also glowing forests and reverently rendered birches. Frank, round faces of children stare out from the canvases. A stunning portrait of a composer in front of his grand piano might elicit comparisons to Alice Neel or even Alex Katz, except that it’s hard to believe the Russian artist ever saw their work. Nikolai Baskakov’s Milkmaids, Novella is especially arresting—these casual, laughing women are not the somber, chiseled Russian workers we’re used to seeing.

    These works and others from the museum’s collection, together with paintings from Moscow’s State Tretyakov Gallery, make up In the Russian Tradition, an exhibition that was recently on display at the Smithsonian Institution. Its opening this month in Minneapolis will inaugurate the Museum of Russian Art’s new facility, a former church built in the Spanish revival style.

    Shinkle recently led a visitor through the building as its $4.5 million renovation was heading into the home stretch. A mezzanine level had just been completed, halfway up to the building’s exposed rafters; an empty shaft awaited an elevator. “People have been here working elbow to elbow to get this place ready,” he said, pointing out the well that would soon hold a circular staircase.

    If the dazzling new Walker Art Center was considered a modest building project compared with other products of our national museum-building boom, then this church renovation might seem quite minor as art facilities go. Nevertheless, the collection of twentieth-century paintings that will be housed at the new Museum of Russian Art is the envy of the top-drawer galleries in Russia.

    Shinkle says that people are drawn to these works the first time they see them. “For fifty years, [Soviet] artists were told to paint so that common people can understand,” he says. “So there’s a comfort factor with these paintings.” Yet they are, he is quick to add, “the technical equal of other twentieth-century works.”

    With more than ten thousand works, the museum’s collection began as the private passion of Ray Johnson, a Minnesota businessman with a soft sweep of white hair and a near-constant twinkle in his eye. When perestroika began to open doors in the Soviet Union, Johnson was already a seasoned collector. Suspecting that there might be some artistic surprises hidden behind the Iron Curtain, he sent a proxy to live in the Soviet Union for a year and learn about the art market there.

    Johnson himself poked around in attics, sheds, and dachas, all the while building relationships with artists. Many of them were wary of showing their work to outsiders. Since 1945, the government, the only legal market for art, had exclusively purchased paintings that supported its official view of life in a communist state. So two or three generations of painters had amassed whole bodies of work that didn’t fit this mold.

    Myths about Soviet art persist today because, frankly, few people have cared enough to dispel them. Recently, fourteen exhibitions of works from Russian museums were simultaneously on view in the United States—but none of them included Russian art. Even in St. Petersburg, tourists line up at the Hermitage to see French Impressionists, but few venture down the street to the State Russian Museum. Unlikely as it seems, that is the reason Johnson decided to build a public home for his collection in Minneapolis. He still sees barriers that need to be brought down and bridges that need to be built.

    “These artists, as much as anything,” he says, “want Americans to understand that even if they couldn’t make a working toilet or a good car, they could make a beautiful painting. It’s like they’re saying to us, ‘We didn’t just make bombs.’ I’ve taken that very seriously because I’ve met some wonderful, talented old men who knew full well that Americans thought they only did poster art. They changed me from being just a collector to feeling that I have a real responsibility.”

  • Scraptastic!

    “Can I pick those up tomorrow?” Frank Stone stands at the bottom of a thirty-foot mountain of stainless steel scrap metal and points to its peak—a bouquet of four-foot-long, auger-like spirals, salvaged from crop sprayers, flailing in the chilly wind. Employees at the American Iron scrapyard in North Minneapolis are well acquainted with Stone, who is perpetually on the hunt for metal that he can weld, bend, and hammer into furniture and decorative artworks, such as the fence surrounding the Surdyk’s parking lot in Northeast Minneapolis. After fifteen years of scavenging for scrap, he has accumulated enough brass and copper to fuel a small militia. (“My wife has more copper plant stands than any woman should be allowed to have,” he says.) These days, though, his taste for stainless steel frequently leads him to American Iron, which has a “nice nonferrous department.”

    The American Iron warehouse is a surprisingly spic-and-span place, where Stone’s musings about ancient gears and punch-press skeletons echo across rows of bins of neatly organized alloy. “I’m workin’ on a table and I need some feet,” Stone tells Mark Christensen, American Iron’s manager. The two men wander among four-foot bins of bullet casings and fishing lure remnants. They scoop up handfuls of nispan (the curled remnants from drilling holes in stainless steel, if you didn’t know) and let it slip through their fingers like raw wheat or soybeans.

    “This is probably from a cruise missile,” says Christensen, plucking an aluminum helix from his stash.

    “It’d be better as a coffee table,” replies Stone.

    He doesn’t find feet for his table on this trip, but Stone arranges to pick up the spirals later. Then it’s time to motor a few blocks north to Kirschbaum-Krupp. Whereas American Iron’s five-hundred-pound minimum limits it to corporate giants like Rosemount Aerospace and General Electric, Kirschbaum-Krupp is a more, shall we say, populist yard—a magnet, so to speak, for citizen scrappers with shopping carts filled with aluminum cans and other metals.

    At Kirschbaum-Krupp, where the staff is blasting “American Woman” and tossing footballs, Stone scales heaps of discarded lampposts and dodges forklifts loaded with electrical cords or bales of crushed cans in the warehouse’s littered corridors. He gets excited when he spots a two-foot-diameter gear buried deep in a pile of junk. “I love round things, ’cause you can cut ’em in half.” But after climbing into the pile to investigate, Stone discovers that it’s missing a tooth. Rats! Wading out, he stumbles upon a consolation prize, a copper Washington, D.C., ashtray.

    “Over the years, I’ve learned about shapes,” says Stone, whose playfully functional forms are easily recognized by collectors and copycats alike (he’s not the only artist/scrapyard scrounger). But those who admire his work might be surprised to learn that his artistic roots lie in stained-glass mosaics. “I started off making metal brackets to hold my stained glass,” he says.

    “Then I started having more fun with metal than I was having with glass.”—Christy DeSmith

  • Brand of Sky Blue Waters

    Growing up on the East Side of St. Paul in the sixties, I always took Hamm’s beer for granted. The giant brewery was simply part of the neighborhood scenery, little more than a dependable source of jobs—at least until the seventies, when it was sold and started succumbing to fickle consumer tastes and corporate mismanagement, entering what turned out to be a drawn-out death spiral.

    But to be honest, even though most of us Harding and Johnson High kids personally disliked the beer—it was watery and your friend’s dad drank it (not very cool)—we adored the Hamm’s Bear. This was, mind you, decades before Joe Camel was pilloried for his appeal to kids. We also reveled in the goodwill Hamm’s produced for our home state with its glorification of “the Land of Sky Blue Waters.”

    Until I visited John and Paula Parker, however, I didn’t realize just how much of a hold the bear, in his heyday, had on much of the rest of the country’s imagination. The Parker’s split-level home, located on Medicine Lake along a tree-lined suburban lane, doubles as a personal Hamm’s merchandise museum. When you walk in the front door, nothing much seems out of the ordinary. The Parkers, North Dakota natives whose children have left the nest, look like a hard-working, successful couple. They exude Midwestern levelheadedness. But then they lead you down to their family room, which is filled to the rafters with blinking, buzzing, twinkling, glowing Hamm’s Beer bar signs, no two alike, of the kind that decorated nearly every tavern in Minnesota from Roseau to Rochester in the postwar years. Display cases are crammed with collectibles: steins, mugs, bottle openers, pens, pencils, beer bottles, lighters, ceramic bear sculptures, all with the Hamm’s imprint.

    The Parkers have collected some four thousand Hamm’s items. They are among the most prominent collectors of Hamm’s artifacts in the world. They have at their fingertips Hamm’s magazine ads and bar signs from the West Coast featuring Latina bathing beauties; from the East Coast picturing black folks refreshing themselves with the St. Paul brew; and from Chicago, where the bear is forever associated with Jack Brickhouse, WGN-TV, and the Cubs-White Sox rivalry.

    It came as a bit of a shock to a Minnesota-centric hick like me to realize that Hamm’s wasn’t all about us. In fact, by 1960, the Hamm’s Bear ad campaign was in full swing in about thirty markets nationwide. The Parkers say it’s probably not too much of an exaggeration to say that the lovable bear and his animal buddies did more to cement Minnesota’s image nationally than all the dollars spent by state tourism agencies ever since.

    “The only cartoon animals that were bigger than the Hamm’s Bear were the Disney characters,” said John Parker. “Actually, the bear almost comes across as a Disney critter. When you look at people like us who collect Hamm’s memorabilia, it’s not because we like Hamm’s beer, or even like beer at all. It’s because we love the bear and what he represents to us. He’s like a member of the family. You never actually see a beer in his paw in any of the ads.”

    Paula Parker said her husband’s obsession, and by extension hers, comes from the same part of his mind that led him to study accounting in college. “The desires to complete a checklist, to methodically sort items and arrange them in a proper order, and the competitive urge to stay on top of an ever-changing set of circumstances—they are all related to collecting. John is a born collector, but I was the original Hamm’s fan,” she said. “I sort of steered him into that area.”

    The Parkers began their collection in 1992. They hesitate to put a dollar value on it, though John Parker said that promotional items made of cardboard and plastic are among the most sought-after types of Hamm’s collectibles. For instance, molded plastic liquor-store wall displays from the late fifties can go for one thousand dollars apiece. So can cardboard cutouts of the bear and his friends used as in-store displays, which are rare because most were thrown away. The most popular items are the “scene-a-ramas,” the scrolling or shimmering bar signs that even many non-collectors are familiar with. Even though they’re not rare, they also go for a thousand apiece because there’s so much demand.

    The Parkers have been so successful in tracking down items from the classic Hamm’s Bear campaigns of the fifties and sixties that they have lately started to specialize in items from the prewar and pre-Prohibition eras, well before the bear took his first animated tumble off the log and into the lake. “Probably my prize possession right now is a big lithograph of the Hamm’s factory, the kind they used to hang on the walls of taverns that were owned by the brewery,” John Parker said. “Once you reach a certain level in collecting Hamm’s stuff, it becomes more challenging to go after the pre-bear pieces.”

    The desire to reach further back into Hamm’s history is understandable for the high-level fanatics like the Parkers, but for the rest of us, fond memories are directly linked to the bear, who made his first TV appearance in 1953. Hamm’s television ads were true groundbreakers, and showed what a truly high-powered marketing machine the brewery had in Campbell-Mithun, the local agency that rode the bear into wildly successful national prominence. Campbell-Mithun and Hamm’s had just settled on “From the Land of Sky Blue Waters” as the theme of their campaign to introduce the rest of the country to Minnesota’s favorite beer (although Grain Belt fans will argue the point). It was a bold effort to bust Hamm’s out of the regional brewing ranks to join what were then just a few truly national brands, among them Budweiser, Pabst, Schlitz, Ballantine, and Falstaff.

    According to beer historian Carl H. Miller, author of Breweries of Cleveland, the Hamm’s campaign was so successful because it came at a time when consumers thought all beers were made the same and tasted pretty much the same. It worked, he maintains, because it drove home the concept that Hamm’s was brewed in a place where the water was fresher and cleaner, the Northwoods. The Hamm’s ads were also the first to use an animated “spokesperson” for a beer. Up until then, the only beer-ad icon was Mabel, a blonde bartender who rarely spoke while she pushed Carling’s Black Label. At about the same time as the Hamm’s Bear, the comedy team of Bob and Ray were doing the voices of Bert and Harry, the spokes-characters for New York’s Piel’s Beer—a campaign that got critical praise but had little effect on sales. Budweiser’s famous Clydesdale horses and Miller Lite’s “Tastes Great/Less Filling” campaign were still at least a decade down the road.

    By the late fifties, it was apparent the campaign was a success. Hamm’s entered the Chicago market just as a brewery strike in Milwaukee made Wisconsin beers unavailable; it also displayed great timing by picking up the sponsorship of the Cubs and White Sox broadcasts on WGN. The brewery went on to become one of the first companies to create a national pro- and college-sports branding campaign, and by 1964 claimed to be the biggest TV and radio sports beer sponsor in the country, according to Moira F. Harris’ The Paws of Refreshment: The Story of Hamm’s Beer Advertising. Hamm’s ran its bear ads in support not only of the Twins, the Vikings, and the Chicago teams, but also the Kansas City A’s, San Francisco Giants and 49ers, Los Angeles Rams, Houston Oilers, Baltimore Orioles, Green Bay Packers, and Dallas Cowboys.

    That year, with the sale of 3.8 million barrels of beer, Hamm’s had risen to become the nation’s eighth largest brewery, with expansion breweries in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Houston, and Baltimore. Sales would peak in 1968 at 4.3 million barrels. The ad campaigns made liberal use of images of pristine Northern Minnesota lakes and streams (powerfully putting across the idea of clean, crisp water), sandwiched between animated bear storylines. The spots became so popular they actually vied with some legitimate TV programs; in the mid-1960s, for instance, Twin Cities newspapers ran schedules showing when the ads would air.

    The commercials were clever and had real entertainment value. Each was a miniature story that began with twenty seconds of animation. In one spot, the Bear is a hockey goalie on a frozen woodland pond. Other cartoon critters are taking slapshots at him, and he’s making great saves. Then comes the hard sell: twenty seconds of filmed shots of the beer, with a voice-over extolling the many virtues of Hamm’s. Finally, the payoff: The last twenty seconds go back to the animation. The Bear gets overconfident, takes a puck in the mouth, and tumbles backward into the net for a goal.

    Along with the first-rate animation and charming storylines came the unforgettable “tom-tom” musical theme. While adults bought the beer, their kids dug the tune, said Dick Wilson, a former Campbell-Mithun staffer who produced the music for the classic bear commercials. “I had little kids at that time, and when the Hamm’s Bear came on, they’d all stop whatever they were doing and look at the TV,” he said. “It was those drums that really bore into your mind. I don’t think people realized how much of a part they played. It was like the beat of your heart.”

    According to The Paws of Refreshment, Ray Mithun had the idea to add the tom-toms to the jingle’s still-developing musical mix after being impressed by voodoo music he heard while visiting Haiti. In other words, the Hamm’s music was tapping into a similar vein as early rock ’n’ roll—a dangerous, African beat filtered through a safe white medium (the bear always scored off the charts on the ad industry’s “likeability” measure) that hooked young baby boomers. Even though they were silly, the commercials were well written. They were smarter and funnier than most “real” cartoons at the time.

    “The animation was always cute,” Wilson says, crediting the work of artist Pete Bastiensen. “He was like a child himself and knew instinctively what would work. There weren’t any commercials like that back then. When I would give lectures about ads, I’d talk about how important it was to have uniqueness, and Hamm’s had that in spades.”

    The nostalgia that spurs Hamm’s memorabilia collectors like the Parkers is the same thing that leads other people to agitate for an outdoor stadium for the Minnesota Twins. Hamm’s ads were so much a part of the baseball experience at old Metropolitan Stadium that they are forever linked to the Twins of Harmon Killebrew and Bob Allison, said Kirk Schnitker, a Minneapolis attorney who heads the local Hamm’s Club, the beer’s official fan organization.

    “Seeing the Hamm’s Bear never fails to make you think back to the old days when we kids had those great moments at the Twins games,” he said. “It also makes you remember another great Minnesota tradition: going up north. When we went up to the cabin we’d see those ‘Land of Sky Blue Waters’ signs at the taverns and at the resorts. They were everywhere. Their marketing effort was so huge.”

    Despite all the talk of the how the bear was so lovable and universally adored, there remained the fact that he was selling beer. In that respect, some present-day critics regard him as a predecessor to the loathsome Joe Camel—a merchant of death hooking children via animation and cartoons. This critique has created obstacles for Schnitker and the Hamm’s Club, who are trying to get a granite monument to the Hamm’s Bear erected in downtown St. Paul; Schnitker chalks up their battle to “political correctness.” Last year, their effort to put the bear statue in Como Park was shot down by the St. Paul City Council, with Council Member Jay Benanav comparing the Hamm’s Bear to the Marlboro Man and colleague Chris Coleman labeling the character “schmaltz art.”

    That charge rings hollow to Schnitker, who sees a city littered with fiberglass depictions of Charlie Brown and Snoopy, characters that, while undeniably a pop phenomenon, were created by someone who left St. Paul at an early age. They have never meant as much to the city’s history and development as did Hamm’s, an institution that literally helped build the East Side. Schnitker says he’s made headway this past year in convincing the city to reconsider, and now counts St. Paul Parks and Recreation Director Bob Bierscheid among his key allies.

    “We’re close to getting the OK for the statue to be erected on the Seventh Street Mall, just outside the Hamm Building on Cedar Street,” he said. “What the politically correct people need to realize is the huge impact Hamm’s had on the city and on a generation. It provided jobs, and the Hamm family is still active in giving back to the community through their charitable foundation.”

    “I’m admittedly part of that generation, and the Hamm’s Bear did have an impact on me. I always liked him, but as a kid I never really stopped to wonder why. Looking back, what I most closely associate with him is the memory of my late grandparents, and of spending lazy summer days at their lake cabin in Isanti County with Twins games—and Hamm’s commercials—playing in the background on their little black-and-white television set. That’s pretty darn Minnesota. But it was having the same effect elsewhere, too, according to Bonnie Drewniany, a journalism professor at the University of South Carolina and an expert on the history of American advertising icons. She says there’s a strong connection between the Hamm’s Bear and family.

    “I think the Hamm’s Bear is a wonderful example of how an advertising trade character can become like an old friend or a beloved relative,” Drewniany said. “I have a collection of advertising trade characters in my office, and one of them is a Hamm’s decanter from 1973 sitting proudly on my top shelf. While most of my students don’t recognize the bear, I occasionally have a colleague or parent who beams with excitement when they see him on my shelf. The fact that the Hamm’s Bear continues to bring joy to people speaks volumes about his importance as an advertising icon.”

  • Scooper & Scooped: Poached Edition

    We were surprised to open up Monday’s Minneapolis Star-Tribune to see Jon Tevlin’s article on religion in the workplace. Surprised, because it was very similar to a feature story that was on the cover of The New York Times Magazine about a month ago. We’d noticed Russell Shorto’s feature, not only because it was a compelling cover story, but because its main subject was a small bank in outstate Minnesota. Also because the photographs, taken by white-hot Minneapolis photographer Alec Soth, were wonderful.

    We’ve already commented recently on the phenomenon of follow-on news stories: The New York Times or the Washington Post do the heavy-lifting on a story, get all the glory for the scoop, and when the parade has passed, all the local papers shuffle along shoveling up the remainders, maybe a little ashamed that someone in Manhattan managed to break a local story under the noses of a whole newsroom full of local reporters.

    Tevlin does acknowledge the source of his interest in Riverview Bank, after a fashion. Near the end of his piece, he notes that Riverview Bank, on its website, claims to have converted Times "freelancer" Shorto during an "interview for a newspaper article." (Shorto denies this.) When we emailed Tevlin about his follow-on article, he told us there were lots of other interesting loose ends to tie up in the Riverview Bank story, and he was onto them the day after the Times article appeared. The St. Paul Pioneer-Press, in the person of business reporter Dave Beal, was also on the story. They published their own follow-on November 11.

    There is nothing wrong with this practice per se. While we don’t want to inflame professional jealousies, it would be nice if writers acknowledged where they get their story ideas, particularly if it’s from other writers. It is merely vanity that prevents someone from writing "as first reported in the New York Times." But this sort of story poaching goes on all the time; local daily newspapers are especially bad about doing it to nationals, weeklies, and monthlies. They have done it to us here at The Rake. (We’ve already given up hope of ever working elsewhere in this town. Funny how if you write about media in New York, you’re guaranteed a job practically for the rest of your life. If you write about media in the Twin Cities, you’d better keep Monster.com bookmarked.) For our own part, we admit to being allergic to a story if it has appeared anywhere else our esteemed readers may have been exposed to it. This falls under the principle of giving your readers a little credit. And, as we love to point out, a newspaper article and a magazine story are two very different animals. Tevlin’s story was different from Shorto’s, though it was clearly provoked by it.

    Still, we were surprised that the Star-Tribune photographs were so similar to Alec Soth’s. One Strib image depicted the exact scene as the shot on the New York Times Magazine’s cover: An office wall with a handsome painting that shows one modern businessman introducing another businessman to the robed and haloed Jesus Christ, as if to say,"I’d like you to meet my boss, the Son of God."

    The striking similarity in the photographs seemed a breach. Were we being naive? We can see how you might make the argument that, just as Riverview Bank is sitting out there in the public domain for anyone to write about, their office interiors and personnel are not themselves copyrighted. And given that Tevlin’s lead specifically refers to this painting, it falls under the definition of pure documentary photography, right?

    We don’t know. It doesn’t seem possible that Stormi Greener, an excellent photographer in her own right, was unaware of Soth’s photos when she shot hers for the Star-Tribune. To our eye, it seems obvious that someone asked her to take precisely the same pictures Soth had taken for the Times magazine— photos that are undoubtedly under license and embargo, and not therefore available to the Star Tribune or anyone else. You look and see what you think: Here is Soth’s photo for the Times, and here is Greener’s.

    We got ahold of Alec Soth in Paris, and he was a little surprised. "Wow, that is quite similar," he said. But he was willing to believe that it was a coincidence—and that probably an editor at the Star-Tribune should fall on the sword for this. (We know from experience: It is ALWAYS an editor’s fault!) Jon Tevlin told us he thought you could send dozens of photographers to Riverview Bank and they’d have taken the exact same photo. The Jesus-in-the-executive-suite artwork is a "no brainer," he said. Times magazine editor Gerald Marzorarti politely declined to comment, and Greener has not answered a call and an email.

    This photographic facet of the follow-on story undoubtedly falls into a grey area, and maybe it illustrates the difference between fine art photography and photojournalism. Soth’s photo is striking in part because it is so artful, whereas Greener’s has a solid if unremarkable gravity as photojournalism—and it’s almost the same picture!

    But it’s the art within the art. When we first saw the cover of the Times Magazine, we were convinced that a Times art director had pulled off an amazing illustration. Indeed, the point of both the Soth and the Greener photos was actually to reproduce the astonishing piece of framed, evangelical art, in situ. Perhaps the real injured party here is Nathan Greene. He is the formerly anonymous born-again capitalist who was responsible for painting "The Senior Partner." He’ll undoubtedly get his reward—and maybe his copyright—in the next world.

  • The Art of War

    The administrative areas at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts can be rather labyrinthine, and are also closed off to the general public, so Corine Wegener, the diminutive assistant curator for the Department of Architecture, Design, Decorative Arts, Craft, and Sculpture, agrees to meet me outside the gift shop. After we pass through the security doors behind the shop, the lighting grows dimmer and the corridors narrow. “I don’t notice the darkness anymore,” says Wegener with a laugh. Suddenly, she takes a hard right into the copier closet that has been repurposed as her office.

    She nods at a framed poster of a suit of armor. “That was sitting in here when I got back.” She offers me a chair, settles into her own, and surveys a space smaller than a jail cell. Behind her hangs another poster, one promoting a show of the MIA’s modernist design collection. Stacked with volumes on guns, armor, Judaica, American decorative arts, and Nazi-era provenance, two bookshelves loom over her small desk. A yellow lanyard with “Go Army Reserve” printed across its length hangs from the doorknob.

    “I’m not sure where I should start.” Wegener unpacks a laptop from her black Lands’ End backpack. She wears a pink cardigan that wards off the museum’s ever-present chill and that, together with her smooth skin, hazel eyes, and short blonde hair, makes her seem much younger than her forty years. Opening a computer folder cluttered with images, she clicks rapidly through dozens of dusty desert scenes, and stops at a snapshot of a U.S. Army general smiling beside a rosy-cheeked soldier. Both wear helmets, desert fatigues, and body armor. “General Kern had this taken on my first day to prove that I was there,” she explains. “That’s the museum in the background.”

    That day was May 16, 2003. One month earlier, the international press had begun reporting that the Iraq National Museum in Baghdad, which houses the best and most comprehensive collection of ancient Mesopotamian artifacts in the world, had been looted in the aftermath of the American invasion. “A couple of days into the looting I received a phone call from Jennifer [Carlquist, curatorial assistant at the MIA],” Wegener recalls. “She said, ‘Cori, the Army’s looking for you.’” Five minutes later, Wegener was on the phone with officers at Fort Bragg, who asked if she could leave within twenty-four hours. “I said, ‘Is that an order?’ And they said, ‘No, but it could be.’” Wegener got two weeks to deploy. Her authorization was signed by a two-star general from the Army’s Civil Affairs and Psychological Operations Command, and a three-star general from its Special Operations Command.

    An Army Reservist for two decades, Major Corine Wegener is likely the only museum curator serving in the United States military. In that capacity, she is a part of a service tradition whose finest moments came during and after World War II. Wegener takes a thick volume down from her shelves and pages through photos of service members who helped locate, preserve, and conserve art treasures throughout Europe. First Lieutenant Frederick Hartt, for example, personally sandbagged Da Vinci’s Last Supper in advance of American bombs, and is thus rightly credited for saving it. He was also one of four managers of monuments, fine arts, and archives among Allied forces assigned to Florence during the invasion of Italy. “I work in that tradition,” Wegener says. “It’s an actual slot in the Army’s Civil Affairs Division.” The name of the position has changed, but not the role: Major Wegener was the U.S. Army’s arts, monuments, and archives manager in Iraq. “Until recently, there hasn’t been much call for it,” she says. “But I knew that the need would come up again.”

    Though some may doubt the wisdom or necessity of preserving art and culture in wartime, the simple fact is that the United States is bound by treaty to do so—and also to protect and reliably administer, during an occupation, buildings related to art, science, and religion. If those obligations are to be taken seriously, then the experiences and recommendations of Major Wegener are to be taken seriously. After ten months in Iraq coordinating the most intense U.S. military effort to conserve cultural resources since World War II, Wegener returned home determined to improve what she could not control or improve on the ground in Iraq.

    What actually happened at the Iraq National Museum in the aftermath of the U.S. invasion of Baghdad was misrepresented in the press from the very beginning. A page-one story in the New York Times, filed on April 12, 2003, by Pulitzer Prize-winning correspondent John Burns, claimed “beyond contest … that the twenty-eight galleries of the museum and vaults with huge steel doors guarding storage chambers … had been completely ransacked.” Burns also suggested that “at least” 170,000 objects had been stolen, and other reports quickly upped the ante, claiming that as many as half a million objects were lost in the fray. It was a cultural disaster that some compared to the burning of the ancient library of Alexandria.

    “You can see that the galleries weren’t totally looted,” Wegener says, opening an image on her computer that shows an almost empty gallery at the museum. In the forefront, a single glass display case is smashed and broken, but the cases surrounding it are all intact. “You sort of wonder why nobody in the media noticed that most of the cases were just left alone,” she sighs. “One broken case and a lot of empty, unbroken cases probably mean that most of the cases were empty to begin with.” Which, in fact, they were. In the months leading up to the American invasion, a group of five Iraqi cultural officials carefully “de-installed” most of the collections from the galleries and moved them to a secret site to prevent the expected looting of the collection. A pact was established not to reveal the location to anyone, and even today the location is still known only to the group and a select few additional figures, including Major Wegener. Reportedly, the site will be revealed only after Iraq’s new political system stabilizes and U.S. troops leave the country.

    In the wake of the reported looting, the U.S. military was widely criticized for not protecting the Iraq National Museum during its invasion. Yet, in a very important sense, it did protect it: In fulfilling its treaty obligations, the U.S. placed the museum on a list of structures that were not to be bombed in the event of hostilities. It was a policy followed in the first Gulf War, too, and the Iraqi military knew enough to take advantage of it by stationing troops and setting up military facilities in and around cultural properties, including key archaeological sites and the Iraq National Museum. (This, of course, was in blatant disregard of Iraq’s treaty obligations.) Wegener clicks on several images showing bullet holes in the museum building, from U.S. troops firing at Iraqi snipers. She shows another displaying the entry and exit point of a tank shell in a museum tower, from which Iraqi soldiers were firing rocket-propelled grenades. Certainly, U.S. troops could have stormed the museum to extract the enemy, but “the decision was made not to get anyone out of there because too much damage would’ve been done,” says Wegener. How or why the Iraqi troops eventually left the museum is unknown.

    What happened immediately after the invasion is more problematic. International treaties require an occupying force to protect cultural property from pillage. In practice, that can be difficult. In Iraq, for example, the United States military was simply unprepared to secure thousands of archaeological sites, which were subsequently looted. But could it have secured the Iraq National Museum, located in central Baghdad? Wegener is conflicted. “I was pretty unhappy about it at the time,” she says with a tight smile. “But I’m not going to second-guess the commanding general.”

    For three days, April 10 to 12, 2003, looters roamed the museum, grabbing anything that could be removed and vandalizing whatever could not. Statues were smashed to pieces. Stone friezes were hacked. The museum’s offices were looted of their furniture and equipment. Nevertheless, for all of the damage, reports that 170,000 objects had been stolen are verifiably incorrect. “The reality is that the museum had 170,000 objects catalogued,” explains Wegener. “It has about 500,000 total.” In its rush to proclaim the total destruction of the museum, the media reported the catalogued numbers. And directly after the numbers shot up, the downward revisions began. On April 16, the New York Times printed a story that asserted the loss of “perhaps fifty thousand” objects. Then, on May 1, 2003, another Times story asserted that only twenty-nine objects had been confirmed stolen from the museum. Something was clearly getting lost in translation.

    In fact, a total of twenty-eight display cases (not galleries) were looted. From those cases, forty-four objects were stolen. In addition, a major museum storage magazine was looted of objects that amount to thousands. Unfortunately, because many of those objects had not yet been catalogued, pinning down an actual number is difficult. “Right now we are roughly estimating that fourteen thousand objects were looted,” Wegener says. “And that will probably go up.” Despite the fact that the number of lost objects is smaller than initially reported, Wegener is adamant that the loss is no less heartbreaking. “Imagine if fourteen thousand objects were stolen from the Louvre, including the Mona Lisa. That’s what it’s like.”

    Wegener spent her first several weeks in Iraq simply trying to get a handle on the situation. “There was a lot of pressure to get a precise inventory,” she recalls, “because Central Command was getting pounded in the press.” She shakes her head. “If you showed up here at the MIA and asked for a precise accounting of objects—now—I couldn’t do that. But that’s hard to explain to a colonel who doesn’t have museum experience.” In recounting her experience, Wegener skirts criticism and instead focuses upon what can and needs to be improved. It quickly becomes apparent that this isn’t so much a diplomatic maneuver as an approach born out of Wegener’s own sense of integrity, her respect for the military that she’s served for two decades—and her modesty in downplaying her own considerable skills while praising others.

    Prior to her deployment, Wegener saw her role at the Iraq Museum as twofold: “I would assist the museum staff with their relationship with the military, and I would try to coordinate an international relief conservation effort.” Wegener opens an image of a smashed marble statue in one of the museum’s galleries, taken shortly after her arrival in Baghdad. It shows the pieces still scattered on the floor—and that’s where she wanted them to remain until a conservator could arrive. The military and political command had a different view, however. “They’d ask, ‘Why doesn’t the staff sweep up the statues?” Wegener tried to delay them, but as the weeks passed there was more and more pressure to make things tidy. “And so one day I arrived and the statues had been swept up,” she recalls with a sigh. “Not a good clean-up method.”

    It was a frustrating situation made worse by the fact that the Iraq Museum had only one trained conservator—who worked solely with brass objects. “Every day I was writing memos begging, ‘I need help!’” says Wegener. Despite those pleas, and the availability of conservators from a number of countries willing to go to Iraq, help was often withheld for a variety of reasons. At times, the situation bordered on the comic: The British Museum could not obtain visas for its conservators, who ended up tagging along with a BBC team filming a documentary. The staff were only able to work at the Iraq Museum for a few days. Likewise, the U.S. Department of State sent an assessment team, including a conservator, but only for two weeks. Meanwhile, the Dutch, who actually maintain art conservators in their military, deemed the situation too dangerous to send them.

    One American civilian who did make it to Iraq, and whose help was invaluable to Wegener, was John Russell, a professor of art history and archaeology at the Massachusetts College of Art. “John came at personal risk,” says Wegener. “He was really important.” Russell, a trained Assyriologist, provided a valuable archaeologist’s perspective both to the museum and several key archaeological sites in Iraq.

    Italy provided the most help. Early on, they sent Ambassador Pietro Cordone as an advisor, and he was able to provide the museum with “cultural carbanieri”—essentially, police specially trained in protecting “cultural patrimony.” The Italians also provided funding and staff to re-establish a conservation laboratory in the museum. Nevertheless, Wegener was constantly faced with the fact that there was never—and probably never would be—enough help. “I was disappointed,” she admits. “I wish I could have done more.”

    “People in the Army always say how weird it is that I’m in the Army,” Wegener says. “And in the museum world they always say how weird it is that I work in museums.” Following a learn-by-doing ethic, Wegener has mastered all of her primary curatorial responsibilities—American decorative arts, arms, armor, and Judaica—during her somewhat impromptu eight years at the MIA. Though not trained in architecture, one of her first projects at the MIA was to assist in cataloging its Prairie School collection, one of the top three in the U.S. “Have degree, will work on projects,” is how she sums up her early career as an art historian, but it’s clear that her spirited, up-for-anything approach still holds.

    Sitting on a stairway in her South Minneapolis home, wearing an MIA T-shirt and sweats, she looks very much the urban liberal. Which she is, mostly. “Maybe I have a different opinion about guns.” Indeed. She curated last year’s controversial antique gun show at the MIA. “Christopher [Monkhouse, the MIA’s curatorial chair, and head of Wegener’s department] said, ‘You’ve fired a gun, so you’re one step ahead of everyone else in the department. You do it.’” The show opened while Major Wegener was in Iraq.

    Born outside of Kansas City, Missouri, in 1963, Wegener recalls visiting museums as a child with her father, a musician, and watching World War II films with her grandfather, who served in that war as a truck mechanic. Joining the Army Reserve was primarily a way to earn money for college (she majored in political science at the University of Nebraska-Omaha), and also, she says, “maybe to rebel against my parents.” It was a decision that she has never regretted. “I found I liked the structure and challenge of military life.” The military brought Wegener other benefits, too, such as her husband, Paul, whom she met in ROTC and married in 1986.

    After college, Wegener spent a year in law school before serving as a quartermaster officer in Germany during the first Gulf War. When she returned to the U.S., she began a masters degree in political science, with a concentration in international relations, at the University of Kansas. But as graduation approached, she decided that her goal of working in international affairs was unrealistic. “Those jobs don’t grow on trees,” she says. “So I asked myself, ‘What is my ideal job?’ And the answer was easy: I’d work in an art museum.”

    Never mind that those jobs don’t grow on trees, either, especially when the applicant is an Army Reservist without an art background. Wegener was not deterred. She completed a masters in art history at the University of Kansas in 1996 and moved to Minneapolis, following her husband (who also continues to serve in the Reserve, recently as a logistics expert in Afghanistan). She quickly found an unpaid internship in the MIA’s decorative arts department.

    Over the next four years Wegener assisted the MIA’s curators—while also taking time off to serve in Bosnia and Guam with the Army Reserve. After a short appointment as a curator at the Scott County Historical Society, the MIA called her back in 2001 to assist on its Prairie School catalog; last year, she was named an assistant curator.

    Though she is probably the military’s only museum curator, Wegener has come into contact with other military personnel interested in saving art from the ravages of war. Two years ago, at a civil affairs conference, she had a discussion about the importance of maintaining arts, monuments, and archives managers as a component of the Army’s Civil Affairs Division, at a time when there was talk of eliminating them. Then, while preparing for her deployment to Iraq at Fort Bragg, Wegener met Roxanne Merritt, the civilian curator of the John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Museum. The pair discussed the fact that the Army, and particularly its soldiers, needed more training in wartime arts conservation. And so, in the aftermath of Wegener’s work in Iraq, Merritt and Wegener are collaborating on a cultural-property guide for U.S. Army personnel, aimed at training them in emergency conservation procedures—work that the pair is doing on a volunteer basis. For Wegener, it is a deeply personal project, shaped by her experiences at the Iraq National Museum.
    “I thought I would get there and this group of combat conservators would parachute in. Instead it just seemed like there was this endless parade of people and organizations coming to take pictures, but nobody was staying to help.” Wegener’s chagrin becomes more apparent as she clicks through the images on her laptop of damaged artworks and artifacts. “I could cordon the shattered statue, sure, but I couldn’t put it back together. I needed someone who could put things back together.” Wegener was in constant contact with conservators in the United States and elsewhere, many of whom wanted to come to Iraq. “But I couldn’t get them in!”

    One afternoon, not long after arriving in Baghdad, Wegener was in her office at the Ministry of Culture when she was tapped on the shoulder by Kristen Silverberg, a political advisor on loan from Vice President Dick Cheney’s office to Ambassador Paul Bremer, administrator of the Coalition Provisional Authority. She was accompanied by Dr. Harold Rhode, a Near Eastern expert working for the Department of Defense. “We heard there’s a museum curator here,” Silverberg said. “Can we speak to you in the hallway?”

    Silverberg and Rhode described how they had fished dozens of important antique Jewish manuscripts—including portions of a Bible dating from 1568, and extensive Jewish communal records from the early 20th century—from the flooded basement of the Iraqi secret police headquarters. Silverberg took a personal interest in the manuscripts and had, through her role in Bremer’s office, arranged for Rhode to visit Baghdad to assess the materials. Unfortunately, Rhode was a Near Eastern expert, but no conservator. Thus, after recovering the manuscripts (which had been submerged for more than a month), he and Silverberg made the unfortunate decision to dry them in the sunshine before placing them in tin cases, which were left to cook in a small concrete outbuilding behind Ahmad Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress compound. By the time they went looking for Wegener, the manuscripts were moldering.

    Wegener recounts this scenario while sitting cross-legged on her living room sofa. On the coffee table, her laptop displays an image of a rotting Hebrew manuscript, its pages black with mold and decay. “I was like, ‘Duh! You should’ve frozen them!’” Of course, Silverberg and Rhode can rightly be excused for not knowing the correct emergency conservation techniques. Less excusable, perhaps, is the fact that Wegener was the only individual in Iraq with even minimal training or knowledge on conservation matters. “I remember sitting there and thinking, ‘I can’t believe I’m it. I can’t believe I’m the only one.’” Though she received some training, Wegener is no conservator. “I could only help them stabilize the situation.” After consulting by satellite phone with MIA staff and with Helen Alten, a conservator in St. Paul, she requested a refrigeration truck. Silverberg, perhaps drawing on her connections in Cheney’s office, obtained one from the KBR division of Halliburton; she also got two “very brave” conservators flown in from the National Archives to assess the situation. With Wegener, they agreed that the manuscripts would have to leave Iraq if they were to be saved.

    “It’s against international law to remove [objects related to a country’s] cultural heritage if you’re an occupying force,” Wegener says, her brow rising. “But my concern was these manuscripts. They were rotting before our eyes.” Freezing them was only a temporary step in their preservation. Further actions would need to be taken—including a month-long freeze-drying process—before actual conservation could begin. “Yeah, I want to follow international law,” Wegener says. “But if we didn’t get the manuscripts out, they wouldn’t be a problem for anybody.” The National Archives in Washington, D.C., agreed to accept and conserve the manuscripts for a period of two years, at which time they would be returned to Iraq. In August 2003, Wegener accompanied the collection to Fort Worth, Texas, on a dedicated cargo plane. After freeze-drying, the documents were moved to Washington, D.C., but due to a lack of funding, no further conservation efforts have taken place.

    For all its disappointments, Wegener’s tour of duty in Iraq was not without its successes. Wegener fondly recalls receiving a phone call from one of her “guys,” a Military Police officer who informed her: “I think we got that Head of Warka thing.” That Head of Warka thing was one of the most famous artifacts stolen from the Iraq National Museum—its Mona Lisa—and its recovery was celebrated by the international press, a rare high point in the aftermath of the war. Likewise, after a general amnesty was announced for the return of objects, three men drove up to the Museum to unload the shattered pieces of the Sacred Vase of Warka from the trunk of their car. Wegener regrets not witnessing the event.

    Nevertheless, she had the privilege of being present for the so-called recovery of the Treasure of Nimrud. Only discovered in the late 1980s, this indescribably valuable trove of jewels, crowns, and other gold and precious stone artifacts was feared lost during the invasion, and had been reported as such by several media outlets. In fact, since the first Gulf War, the artifacts had been stored in a vault beneath the Iraq Central Bank. The location was not altogether secret: After the invasion, three corpses and the remnants of an exploded rocket-propelled grenade were reportedly found near the vault. To prevent additional and perhaps more intelligent attempts to steal the treasure, the bank manager flooded the basement with sewage.

    “It smelled just awful,” Wegener says, groaning at the memory. “And it was so hot.” She took pictures of military personnel and museum staff showing everybody soaked in sweat, mingling outside the vault prior to its opening. “And we’re all standing around, waiting for the guy with the key! It seems like that’s how I spent half of my life in Iraq—waiting for the guy with the key.” When the vault was opened, the museum staff found the treasures intact, packed in wooden and tin cases that resembled old toolboxes from a musty basement. In Wegener’s photos, both tears and laughter are evident as museum staff handle crowns, jewels, and solid gold chains with somewhat unprofessional abandon. “But I kept my mouth shut,” she says. “It wasn’t my stuff.”

    Wegener left Iraq on March 2, ten months after her arrival, and half a year after her scheduled departure. “Leaving the people and the museum was hard,” she says. “Leaving Iraq was not.” She shrugs and closes her laptop. “In regard to the museum, I’m not optimistic. But I am hopeful.” She cites the collection and the staff as her primary reasons for hope. “But it’s all about stability and their ability to reopen the museum to the public.”

    As Wegener was leaving, a team of conservators arrived from Italy. “I’m just embarrassed that we didn’t send any,” she admits ruefully. It is not merely a matter of national pride or ego: Wegener’s inability to marshal conservators through the U.S. military and government means that many objects and resources were needlessly damaged or lost. “And that’s why it’s my cause now.”

    Wegener’s work to create the Army’s emergency conservation manual is only one way she is pursuing the cause. Even more ambitiously, she wants to establish an international organization of combat conservators. “You know, these are people who would get a call and say, ‘I have to go to Iraq now,’” Wegener says with enthusiasm. “They come in a flak vest and helmet, I meet them at the airport, take them to work at the museum, and then replace them a few weeks later.” Though it may sound fanciful, precedents for such an organization already exist. “There are conservators who want to do it,” she says earnestly. “We just need to organize.” As she sees it, the organization would operate similarly to Doctors Without Borders, the international group of medical professionals who parachute into troubled regions and offer medical care, regardless of the political or military situation.

    Meanwhile, Wegener remains in contact with her colleagues and friends at the museum in Baghdad. She takes a special interest in the conservation of a collection of historic photographs there, and is actively seeking supplies for their preservation. Still, she is reluctant to return herself. “I’d entertain the idea under certain circumstances. But I wouldn’t want to do it for the military again, to leave my own career for a year.” She shakes her head. “It’d be wonderful to go back to a politically stable Iraq and see my friends in that environment. I hope it works out, but I’m not very good at predictions.”

  • A River Runs Through Us

    If you follow pop culture’s magic rule of three, then the Mississippi River counts as a bona-fide trend this summer. There’s the promotional extravaganza called the Grand Excursion, and the Minneapolis Institute of Art’s ambitious exhibition, Art & Life Along The Mississippi River, 1850-1861 (which covers the time of the original 1854 Grand Excursion), plus all of their attendant hoopla. On the heels of those events is the July 9 opening of Sleeping by the Mississippi, a series of photographs at the Weinstein Gallery by Alec Soth. This exhibition might not have the grandness of the Excursion or the breadth of Art & Life, but it’s one ripple created by the splash that Soth made in the past year.

    The Minneapolis photographer was one of the standout artists at the 2004 Whitney Biennial this spring; a concurrent show at Yossi Milo, Soth’s New York gallery, satisfied the demand to see (and, of course, purchase) more work from the Mississippi series. There has since been another gallery show in San Francisco, and a book will be published this September.

    What is it about this body of work—forty-five images of people, landscapes, and interiors shot in and around small towns along the river—that struck such a chord with the art world? It’s not just the cognoscenti, it’s thousands of museumgoers eager to see what the Biennial branded as the latest and greatest American art; it’s art directors at major glossy magazines calling to commission a Soth photo shoot. It’s Gerhard Steidl, the legendary German publisher of art and photo books, taking on a relative unknown.

    At the Biennial in particular, which displays the wares of more than a hundred artists, it’s a feat for any work to truly captivate. These ritualistic surveys, regardless of the thematic declarations of their curators, inevitably end up more like a bazaar than an art exhibit, and are just as exhausting to take in. After dozens of galleries filled with sprawling wall paintings, arid conceptual sculptures, videos demanding ten minutes (or more!) of your time, and room-sized installations of psychedelia, Soth’s “straight” photography served as a welcome and earthy respite. The stark, large-format images invited, even demanded scrutiny: a jumpsuited man standing on a roof, holding two model airplanes; the garish green walls and tapestry armchair in an Iowa brothel; a rusting bed frame nearly swallowed by foliage in a swampy backwater. At the Biennial, these were like the wallflowers at a school dance that the guys suddenly found compelling for their freshness and honesty.

    Soth himself has a simple explanation for his work’s reception at that exhibition. He told me, “I think it was popular because it’s accessible.” Fair enough. But it’s possible that viewers also somehow intuited what this series meant to its creator. Finally acting on a long-standing dream, Soth set out to travel south along the Mississippi, with no objective in mind other than to satisfy his own boyish wanderlust. He was also, however, quite consciously following in the tradition of American road photography embodied by Walker Evans and other WPA photographers in the thirties, Robert Frank in the fifties, and William Eggleston, Joel Sternfeld, Robert Adams, and Steven Shore in the sixties and seventies.

    Unlike those artists, however, Soth seeks a kinship with the bohemian figures and eccentrics that he both admires and photographs. “One of the things I love about the river is how, as you follow it from north down south, these different types of personalities emerge,” he says. He admits to being particularly drawn to personalities that reinforce the national narrative about the Big River—the slow decline of this once-glorious economic engine, so essential to the nation’s growth; the shores, small towns, and people that now embody a lost America full of picturesque oddities; a dreamy obsolescence. Certainly Soth didn’t choose to photograph the million-dollar lofts along the Mississippi in Minneapolis and elsewhere. Nor did he take in the riverboat casinos or factories or suburbs or golf courses—all of which his teacher, Joel Sternfeld, with whom he’s often compared, might have photographed had he undertaken a Mississippi River series. While Sternfeld tends to train his lens on the socio-economic landscape, Soth’s sensibility is shamelessly romantic: the artsy, weathered domicile in “Peter’s houseboat, Winona, Minnesota”; the fluorescent glow of a gas station that falls on gravestones in “Cemetery, Fountain City, Wisconsin”; the battered furniture in “Luxora, Arkansas” gathered to create an outdoor living room for vagrants.

    In the forthcoming book, images are edited so that they move from the frigid north in early spring to the blossoming of New Orleans during Lent and Easter. Throughout, beds are among the most overt of themes, with their intimate allusions to dreaming, loving, sex, illness, death, religion, and rebirth.

    Particularly dreamy instances of amateur art, and the art of self-transformation, are another compelling thread: a cartoonish rendering of a headless muscleman’s body drawn on a vivid blue wall; a black-haired figure painted on a sliding glass door. A Mississippi matron poses proudly with her own “photograph of an angel” (as seen in a cloud formation), while a Louisiana prisoner has written “Preacher + Man” on his T-shirt collar. And toward the end of the book, a strapping, bewigged cross-dresser in Easter finery sits primly on a Disney princess bedspread.

    These images all play with a familiar Mississippi River narrative, but they also touch on Midwestern exoticism and the Southern Gothic, and reveal the river itself as the common thread between the two. Ever since Lewis and Clark, and even before, civilized folk on the East Coast have periodically looked westward to renew their surprise and delight at what curious things are to be found in the hinterland: Convicts, preachermen, hookers, wrestlers, all-around oddballs.

    Soth’s romanticism leads him constantly to strike at the tyranny of literalism that plagues photography as a point-and-shoot medium. This body of work is intricately composed, using a cumbersome 8×10 format camera—the old-fashioned type set on a tripod, which requires the photographer to throw a cloth over his head and shoulders. In this regard, Soth is not so much a photographer but a picture-maker, scrupulously manipulating colors, angles, poses, props.
    This is shown to advantage in a work like “Mother and daughter, Davenport, Iowa,” with its amazing contrasts in focus—the clarity of the daughter’s fingernails and cigarette, or the mother’s toes—and the slight blur on legs, feet, fabric. You begin analyzing the poses of arms and legs, and thinking about the conversation that transpired during the long set-up of the camera and the scene it would record.

    Elsewhere, Soth’s eye can become a bit too fastidious, even obsessive. In “New Orleans, Louisiana,” the position of a chair seems so intentional that you want to find the blocking marks taped on the floor. This begins to impugn the rest of the composition: Did the photographer sweep that small pile of detritus into one corner of the image in order to counterbalance the light bulb in the opposite? Similarly, there’s a whiff of heavy-handed staging in “Immaculate Conception Church, Kaskaskia, Illinois”—in the way an old armchair is situated in a brick-walled corner beneath a picture of priest, draped with a gold vestment, with a large, cheap mountain landscape leaning on its side in a doorway. Soth cheerfully admits that the aura of one image would be “ruined” if the viewer knew its “true story.” (He wouldn’t reveal the story, and I won’t reveal the image—and I’m not sure it makes a difference anyway.)

    Soth is probably the last person who could have predicted his good fortune. A few years ago, he was “mister conservative,” a workaday guy tied to his job and hi
    s home, where he helped his wife care for her mother, who lived with them and recently succumbed to cancer. “I was always painfully shy, even in college,” he says, noting that his classmates must be shocked to find that he ended up photographing people.

    Instead of waxing poetic about his vision or his determination, Soth credits his success to good timing and good luck. He received the Minnesota trifecta of artist grants (the Jerome, the McKnight, the state arts board) in relatively quick succession, which brought him attention from Walker Art Center, which in turn led to the Whitney Biennial and the 2003 Santa Fe Prize for Photography. Now that he’s got a post-Biennial bandwagon (something that doesn’t happen to all hundred-plus artists in that show), he’s taking it as far as it will go. “My philosophy is to take advantage of as many opportunities as I can,” he says. “I’m a pragmatic Midwestern boy!”

    There’s a savvy edge to that pragmatism, too. Sleeping by the Mississippi has deep roots in the tradition of American road photography, but Soth is leery of being branded “the Mississippi River guy,” or even the “8×10 format guy.” He notes wryly that in turning in his work for an editorial assignment, the art director was disappointed to see digital images instead of negatives shot with his 8×10 camera: “I was shooting while riding a bike,” he says, laughing. “I was shooting moving vehicles.”

    He’s also chosen to ignore the advice of an art-world “goofball” who urged him to move to New York. “First, that’s cynical,” he says. “Second, I absolutely disagree that as a photographer, you have to live in New York to be successful. Where would photography be if everyone lived there? Look at what that does to other art forms.” But perhaps most important, Soth is well aware that his status as the “exotic Midwesterner” carries a certain amount of mileage with Eastern art and media figures. Why relocate there? Here is where he can be pragmatic and romantic at the same time.

  • Public Icon, Private Property

    Imagine: It’s springtime, there’s a sense of optimism in the air. Best Buy is about to open its new corporate headquarters in Richfield. Everyone’s talking about it. Some say it will usher the Twin Cities into a new era; others argue about whether or not that’s a good thing. Wanting to include the community in the historic event, Best Buy paints one of the thousands of steel construction beams white and leaves it on the sidewalk for several days. Ordinary citizens are invited to sign their names to it before it’s used for the “topping off” ceremony at the apex of the new building. The turnout is huge; when the mayor comes by, accompanied by reporters from every local news outlet, he can barely find space for his own autograph.

    OK, so this isn’t what happened last year, when Best Buy unveiled its shiny, nondescript corporate headquarters, a vaguely cruise-ship-shaped building plying the suburban seas just off I-35 and I-494. But that’s precisely what occurred thirty years ago when the IDS Center was built in downtown Minneapolis.

    That was a true community event. From the placement of the first beam to the final opening gala, the local papers monitored every detail—how many tons of steel were being used, how many panes of glass, how many light bulbs. They covered the seventeen helicopter trips required to haul the mechanical window-washing equipment to the top of the tower. And they related humorous anecdotes, such as the family of bats that had made a nest within the structure while it was under construction, only to come out of hibernation and fly into the Crystal Court, swooping above the heads of terrified Woolworth’s patrons. It was like celebrity gossip, with the building itself as the celebrity.

    Today, of course, it’s hard to pick out the IDS as the tallest amid Minneapolis’ brace of skyscrapers. But back in the 1960s, the tallest building was Foshay Tower, and its exceptional stature was obvious to the eye. Foshay was the Minneapolis skyline, and had been since 1929.

    “I still remember coming in on the train at the Milwaukee Road depot,” says Charlie Nelson, an architect with the Minnesota Historical Society. “And coming round the bend and this older man next to me growing very excited and pointing out the window and saying, ‘Look, it’s the Foshay Tower! That means we’re home!’”

    The IDS was built to tower over Foshay. It was built to bring focus to downtown, to connect the skyway system at a central point, to push Minneapolis into the modern age. As its website proclaims, the IDS was “a building so impressive, they built a city around it.”

    “It was a bold statement,” says Chuck Liddy, who was part of the Minneapolis Historic Preservation Commission from 1979 to 1984. “There’s been kind of a gentleman’s agreement not to build anything taller, because it was such an icon when it was built.” The Wells Fargo Center is a foot shorter than the IDS; 225 South Sixth (formerly US Bank Place or First Bank Place), a foot shorter still. The IDS remains the tallest building in the city, even if you can’t tell by looking.

    If things had gone as initially planned, the headquarters of Investors Diversified Services, Inc. would be a simple twelve-story building sited on one corner of the block. It was not intended to top Foshay or to bring Minneapolis into a new era. However, Baker Properties, Inc. had determined there was a great need for more office space in downtown Minneapolis and, in close partnership with IDS, it set out to provide some. This was 1963. The new plan was to take up half of the block and include a twenty-five-story office tower, skyway links, an apartment complex, and parking ramp. Soon afterward the proposed tower grew to thirty-six stories, and again to fifty stories in 1967. Then a 1968 study prompted another round of considerations to expand still further.

    The Fantus Company, commissioned by the Greater Minneapolis Chamber of Commerce to assess the potential of Minneapolis and Hennepin County as a location for corporate headquarters, had found the area “excellent” but the availability of space only “fair.” So Investors Diversified Services, Inc., realizing that its development could have an effect on downtown Minneapolis as a whole, devised yet another plan: a four-building complex covering the entire block and linked by skyways. Its anchor would be a central glass-roofed indoor plaza; its highlight, a fifty-seven-story, 775-foot tower—the tallest between Chicago and San Francisco, and one that would outstretch the Foshay Tower by an awe-inspiring 225 feet.

    The design commission went to Philip Johnson, an architect of international stature who had collaborated with Mies van der Rohe on Manhattan’s iconic Seagram’s Building, and his partner John Burgee. Their innovative zig-zagging windows allowed for up to thirty-two corner offices on every floor; the building as a whole, once completed, was proclaimed “one of the finest skyscrapers built in any American city” by no less an authority than the New York Times. Fortune magazine said it made Minneapolis “a leader in architectural innovation.” The words of IDS CEO Stuart Silloway, who in 1969 had described the project as “a demonstration of towering confidence in the future of Minneapolis,” rang true.

    Meanwhile, a similar phenomenon was occurring in New York with the World Trade Center, whose two main towers were erected between 1966 and 1972. Like the IDS, it began as a rather modest proposal and grew to gargantuan proportions. Its planners hoped the World Trade Center would revitalize lower Manhattan, create a new office district to rival Midtown, and bring renewed pride and confidence to the entire city. Critics in the Big Apple complained that the WTC was too big, that it didn’t fit in, that it would rob New York of its character and disrupt the legendary skyline, spiked by the Chrysler and Empire State buildings.

    Minneapple critics posed the same arguments: the IDS Center was like a giant looming over downtown, threatening to squash it. Its architecture appeared alien, completely out of context with its surroundings. In a local cartoon, a Minneapolitan showed a tourist the new skyline, saying: “There’s Foshay Tower, and there’s the box it came in.”

    There was also some resentment of the fact that designers Johnson and Burgee were New Yorkers. “Up until that time, all the great buildings here had been designed by Minnesotans,” explains the historical society’s Nelson.

    But others were eager to welcome the postwar skyscraper to Minneapolis, eager to see a city that outsiders could associate with something other than cows. And for them, the IDS was a gem. “Modern architecture tends to get dumped on as being blah, not very humane—hard to love, if you will,” says Nelson. “But the IDS is vibrant. It changes with the light; it changes with the movement of clouds.”

    1972 saw one grand opening after another at the IDS Center. On June 17, the Crystal Court had its debut with a fifty-dollar-a-ticket formal symphony ball. After a Minnesota Orchestra performance, a dance band from Palm Beach, Florida, took over. Andy Warhol was in attendance. Four months later, regular folks were welcomed to the Crystal Court, and in November, the short-lived movie theater on the lower level opened with The Darwin Adventure. Finally, the fiftieth-floor Skylook Observation Gallery went into business, open until midnight every day of the year.

    The glamour and novelty dissipated with the recession of 1973 and 1974. Investors Diversified Services, Inc. was broke. The culminating grand opening for the entire complex was canceled. In 1975, IDS sought to decrease its tax burden by reducing the official valuation of its building from $92 million to $76.6 million. The lesser valuation was granted. The building had cost $125 million.

    While the IDS was not a stunning financial success, its cultural success was immediate. The building won awards from the American Institute of Architects; it was talked about in more cosmopolitan cities like New York; it was immortalized as the location of the TV station on The Mary Tyler Moore Show. The IDS Center, for all its financial troubles, quickly became an icon.

    The Crystal Court was the crown jewel of the building—and, it could be said, even downtown as a whole. Practical in the Minnesota climate, beautiful in its construction, and ideal in its location, the indoor plaza was a perfect place to escape the hectic pace of downtown. Trees in planters provided a park-like feel, and seating cubes were strewn across the court. There was even an informal sidewalk café. The court also pulled the budding skyway system together and gave downtown a central focus, like the central square in a medieval European town. Locals loved it. Architects from all over called it the best people place in the country. Philip Johnson, the architect, talked about its importance on WCCO: “Every city has to have a place where it’s natural to be together,” he said. “I hope there will be lots of little Grecian fountains, and little kiosks with flowers for buttonholes… And guitars.”

    The love affair was short-lived. The Crystal Court’s sparkle gradually dimmed, and in 1979 Bernard Jacob, then editor of Architecture Minnesota, wrote an editorial criticizing changes that had taken place since the court’s debut. The indoor greenery had become sparse, and the seating had been dispatched to the margins to make way for an upscale restaurant on a raised, carpeted platform, which had replaced the self-service café. With the main space now open only to those with the time and money for full-service dining, the Crystal Court was no longer a truly public space.

    But the real trouble began with the first of a series of ownership transfers. In the early eighties, Investment Diversified Services sold its namesake building to Oxford Development, a company that was not only controlled by Canadians who would likely value their bottom line over the social and culture welfare of downtown Minneapolis—but also the very same company that had constructed City Center, widely considered downtown’s ugliest building. The public was wary from the outset.

    Oxford did little to dispel their fears. In 1983, the company decided the observation gallery space was too valuable and gave its managers two choices: pay double the rent, or vacate the premises. The managers opted to bail. The gallery had been drawing around a thousand guests per Saturday, but on December 31, nearly seven thousand people showed up for one last visit.

    Next, Oxford announced its plans to renovate the Crystal Court. The space was bringing people in, but not the kind who were inclined to spend wads of cash at the nearby shops. Oxford planned to move one of the escalators to the south side of the court and to cut a hole in the floor to bring light to the lower level, which to this day has yet to prove itself a viable commercial space (it currently functions as an employee cafeteria). Finally, the company was going to allow the Center’s retailers to modify the facade of their shops.

    The Minneapolis Heritage Preservation Committee would have none of it. They quickly voted to designate the Crystal Court a historically significant structure, which would mean that any changes would require city approval. The Oxford managers were stridently opposed. The preservation committee was attempting to impose government control over private property, they complained; if the designation was made, the building’s value would plummet.

    “People seem to think the city owns the IDS, like it owns a park,” City Council member Barbara Carlson told R.T. Rybak (then a cub reporter with the Minneapolis Star and Tribune) in defending Oxford. “As much as I would like that, it isn’t the case.” In 1984, the Minneapolis City Council held the final decision on whether to designate the Crystal Court as a significant structure. Both Oxford and the Heritage Preservation Committee lobbied hard, and Rybak reported that a shouting match broke out in the council chambers after a March public hearing. In the end, however, the parties managed a compromise. Oxford scaled back on its planned renovations, and the City Council agreed to withhold its “historically significant” designation.

    Less than a decade later, the Chicago-based Heitman Advisory Corporation, the new owners of the IDS Center, bought out the remainder of Woolworth’s sixty-year-lease. The beloved five-and-dime, which had been on the block since before the IDS Center was built, was replaced by the Gap, Gap Kids, and the Gap-owned Banana Republic. Windows on Minnesota, the restaurant on the fiftieth floor, was closed to the public. But by far the most upsetting change was the bleak state of the Crystal Court, which Heitman’s management swept clean, removing all the seating and creating a granite wasteland. People still passed through, but there was no reason to stay. Editorial writers once again began making snide comments about the court. Heitman promised changes, but for years, apart from the occasional art exhibit, the court stood empty.

    “The management would always say ‘well, we’re working on it but we want to do it right,’ and people didn’t believe them,” says Linda Mack, who covers architecture for the Star Tribune.

    Yet to everyone’s surprise, Heitman stayed true to its promise. At long last, in 1998, seating returned to the Crystal Court. Black olive trees were shipped in from Florida. The designers examined Philip Johnson’s original plans and discovered a fountain that had never been built in 1972 because of the recession. Upon further investigation, they discovered the needed structural supports for the fountain were already in place beneath the floor. There were even water pipes in the ceiling, and extra light fixtures trained on the spot where the fountain was to stand.
    The original 1972 concept was for a fountain in brass, one that was quickly deemed too small (at fifty-some feet)—and too phallic. But the 105-foot rainfall that was eventually installed met more or less unanimous approval. Minneapolis had reclaimed its public city center.

    Its panoramic view of the city, however, may be lost for good. Technically, one can see thirty-five miles from the top floor of the IDS Center—a distance that is significantly decreased by cloud cover and pollution, but is still a lot better than what most of us will see today. The observation gallery has never been reopned since its 1984 closure.

    For awhile, there was still a restaurant people could go to, and the rumor was they wouldn’t kick you out if you just wanted to enjoy the view and not buy anything. Now that restaurant, still called Windows on Minnesota, is a private rental space run by the Marquette Hotel, and visitors can’t get there without an access key. Renting the ballroom for a wedding or bar mitzvah will run you $6,000. According to Nigel Pustam, a manager for the Marquette, opening the restaurant to the public would be “a bad business plan.” There are dozens of restaurants on Nicollet Mall, he explains; it’s the view that gives Windows on Minnesota the “uniqueness” which enables them to make thousands of dollars off the space. Guests at the $300-a-night hotel can ask for an escorted tour, but the average tourist off the street is not allowed. No exceptions.

    “I get a lot of people from other countries and out of town who want to go to the top of the building,” says Carrie Stowers, the “customer service ambassador” for the IDS Center. “It’s really sad to see the looks on their faces,” she adds with a tone of tragic perkiness.

    Gone, too, is the stream of gossip and anecdotes coming from people like Stowers. RREEF, the building’s current management, has a website with a few simple facts, which is where they direct nosy reporters. Anything beyond that is a “security concern.” Jim Durda, IDS general manager, wouldn’t even say how large the cleaning staff was. “There’s an adequate team to clean the building,” he assured us. And what equipment do they use? “The methods are proven, and they work, and they’re efficient.” Pressed for more details, he politely apologized. “Because of the heightened security, there’s a lot of questions that we just don’t answer.”

    But it’s not just the heightened security. This is the modern age. The corporate age. The impersonal, privatized, “what’s-it-to-you?” age. The IDS was constructed in a small city where the pride of a community swelled as each floor was added, but that was a different time. Any maybe that is the point: That’s what the IDS Center used to represent. It was Minneapolis’ symbolic entry into the world. It was the Minneapple’s rite of passage from a small town to a cosmopolitan city. If the building that set off that change has become impersonal, inaccessible, and all too corporate, maybe that’s only appropriate.

  • A Picture is Worth 5,000 Years

    “A photo is all I have left of her,” Chris Lang, the boyfriend of murdered college student Dru Sjodin, told a Judiciary Policy and Finance Committee at the Minnesota House of Representatives. His testimony culminated with a heated statement about Level Three sex offenders: “They’re not like normal people. I think they’re wired wrong. They’re like animals. They need to be treated like animals, and animals are kept in cages.” The committee, including freshman legislator Cy Thao, remained impassive. Lang stepped down, and discussion moved on to child abuse, crystal-meth addiction, and other problems.

    “We don’t have time to do all the emotional stuff,” said Thao later that day, by way of explaining how legislators can seem inured to the personal horrors their legislation is meant to address. Capitol business is often conducted at a safe remove from emotional issues at hand, but that doesn’t mean Thao, who was elected to office in 2002, sometimes finds the impersonal nature of policy and politics hard to take. A thirty-one-year-old Hmong-American whose round face is accentuated by a close-cropped haircut, Thao came to politics by an unusual route, as a painter and former arts organizer in St. Paul’s Frogtown district. “Artists have to be passionate and emotional,” he believes. “When I’m painting, I put my emotions into it. That’s what drives me. But as a legislator, you’ve got to contain your emotion and turn it into strategies. You just have to focus on the policy.”

    When I met Thao several years ago, he attributed his political views to his college internship experience at the state Capitol: “I saw a lot of people who would only pay attention to people with wealth and people who knew the system. They just didn’t pay attention to the little guy.” Thao’s frustration with the system led him to add an art double major to his political science major while at the University of Minnesota, Morris in the early nineties, and he’s swung between the two ever since—much to his advantage. His stint some years ago as an organizer at the Center for Hmong Arts and Talent, an arts center on University Avenue, gave him skills crucial for politics: raising money, maintaining a grassroots organization, and conducting community outreach, as well as publicly addressing social issues through the Center’s theatrical productions and mural projects.

    Meanwhile, Thao confronts issues through his art that are anything but small, addressing such horrors that would move even the most impassive of observers. Fifty of his paintings will be on display at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts beginning May 21 in The Hmong Migration, an exhibit that is part of the Minnesota Artists Exhibition Program. In this series, Thao creates a compressed visual record of the troubled history of his people and his family.

    Using a technique that is simple, raw, and unpolished, with quickly applied daubs of paint indicating simplified figures and forms, Thao draws from both Hmong folk-art quilting traditions and an interest in the work of Jacob Lawrence. Each work in the series depicts an episode in the history of the Hmong, starting with their creation myth and ancient history and continuing through the culture’s dispersion and its struggles against China in the late 1800s, the French in the mid-1900s, and Communists during the American war against Vietnam and Laos. Thao focuses heavily on the aftermath of that war in works featuring long lines of families fleeing through mountains, across fields and rivers, and corpses left behind on paths or floating in water. In one particularly gruesome image, a Communist leader directs his soldiers to open fire on Hmong approaching a bridge, the passage to freedom in Thailand. Other images poignantly depict life in Thai resettlement camps, conjured from Thao’s memories of the four years he lived in one; and still later the series conveys the difficult move and adjustment to Minnesota, where Thao arrived twenty years ago.

    Thao had proposed exhibiting The Hmong Migration at the MIA before he was elected to the Minnesota legislature; it was a time when he had not yet learned to consider how the public or peers might receive his work. “An artist just wants his work to be shown,” Thao says, adding that he probably wouldn’t apply for an MAEP show now because of his work’s emotionally raw nature. “I have some worries because in that art there was no holding back. I wanted to address every important issue. As a state representative, saying one word out of context or choosing one wrong word can result in different meanings and bring different outcomes. When I painted, I didn’t worry about that at all. I just painted how I wanted to… But I think I will let the art speak for itself. If it hurts me politically, then it just does.”

    At noon, Thao abruptly leaves the committee room. Though the discussion on amendments to the Sex Offender Judiciary/Finance Omnibus Bill is not finished, Thao is unconcerned. “The decision on the bill was made back in February when the chair met with the governor,” he says, and indeed, voting on the amendments had been running on strictly party lines. Thao makes his way to the steps of the Capitol, where Ann Bancroft, the polar explorer, is stirring up a crowd of several thousand at a rally protesting the amendment to ban gay marriage. “Laws that discriminate are just plain wrong,” she shouts. “One thousand benefits received by married couples are not available to me and my partner, Pam. This includes education, health care reform… a home, for God’s sake.” The crowd cheers at her rising pitch, and Thao leans toward me. “She’s got it right,” he says.

    Thao has his own early experience with discrimination and prejudice; among the most poignant of his paintings are those depicting the trials that his family and other Hmong faced upon arriving in Minnesota in the seventies and eighties. Parents visit the welfare office with kids in tow; an assembly line in a large colorless warehouse is manned entirely by Hmong immigrants, with the only hint of the outside world coming through a single small door; teenaged Hmong gang members fight in the streets. One painting depicts the projects in north Minneapolis as a zoo-like maze. Barred windows are the most prominent feature on the plain brick buildings, and on a wall someone has scrawled: “Chink go home.”

    Leaving the rally, Thao passes a tall, young legislator just arriving. Thao asks if he is going to make a speech. The lawmaker gives a gruff “no,” without breaking stride. Thao laughs, and explains, “He’s one of the most conservative members of the House.” He is nothing if not feisty, having earned a reputation for passionately expressing his side of an issue—despite how futile it may seem in the current legislative atmosphere. Thao got into politics during the brief antiestablishment frenzy of the Jesse Ventura era. He had been peripherally involved in Ventura’s 1998 campaign, and so was tapped by the governor to appeal to the Hmong community for the 2000 election. “I figured this would be the only chance that a governor would help out our community,” recalls Thao, “and since no one else wanted to do it, I did it.” He gained national attention for a TV commercial, filmed by two artist buddies, in which he chased prostitutes and criminals from Frogtown with a broom. He also tapped artist friends to run the campaign—going door to door, painting a van, silk-screening posters by hand. Though Thao lost that election (by a surprisingly small margin), the strategies he developed worked for him in 2002.

    After an almost two-year hiatus taken as he learned the ropes at his new day job, Thao hopes to return to painting later this year. After his MIA exhibit, and after the current legislative session, he plans to begin a new series about America. “I think it will be interesting to see the history of this country from the point of view of an immigrant who was a product of American policy.”

    Thao had expressed concerns about a negative reaction to his exhibit, but I asked if his paintings might actually help his political cause. “It could work both ways,” he says after a pause. “Especially during this time when the country is at war and has invaded another country and is imposing its will on people who have no clue about us. My paintings speak to that. Their imagery is critical of misguided policies, regardless of which president the policy comes from. We have a bad foreign policy in this country… But I’m an optimist. If we don’t win this year, we always have next year.”